Toggle light / dark theme

Dangerous thought.


The scientific world was set ablaze of late as discussions ramped up about the resurrection of the wholly mammoth. I know what you’re thinking: Jurassic Park. Well, not quite — but maybe not that far off, either. Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, wonders: what if we could clone the Neanderthal, or a dinosaur, based solely off their genomes?

George Church, geneticist and director of Harvard University’s Church Labs, believes that we can clone a Neanderthal in our lifetime. So much so that he thinks all we need is “one extremely adventurous human female.” While he doesn’t advocate for the project to be attempted straight away, he does encourage discussion on the matter. Church believes that with current stem cell technology and our completed sequence of the Neanderthal genome, we are equipped with the potential to clone a Neanderthal.

The Neanderthals went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, so cloning one from recovered DNA would be impressive enough of a feat — but what about something from 65 million years ago? Dr. Kaku addresses this, admitting that cloning a dinosaur won’t be as easy as cloning a Neanderthal or a mammoth (which wouldn’t very “easy” to begin with) — but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

A 3D bioprinter able to create human skin is already being used to help burns patients and carry out skin testing, Alfredo Brisac, CEO of Spanish bioengineering company BioDan, told Radio Sputnik.

Last month, scientists at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the BioDan Group presented a prototype 3D bioprinter that can create human skin suitable for transplantation to patients or for use in cosmetic, chemical or pharmaceutical testing.

One of the first living human organs to be created using bioprinting, the 3D-printed skin is created using bio-inks with living cells that are deposited onto a structure that replicates nature. The bio-ink contains the key elements of keratinocytes, fibroblasts and fibrin, which can recreate the structure of the skin.

Read more

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Three types of potatoes genetically engineered to resist the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine are safe for the environment and safe to eat, federal officials have announced.

The approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last week gives Idaho-based J.R. Simplot Company permission to plant the potatoes this spring and sell them in the fall.

The company said the potatoes contain only potato genes, and that the resistance to late blight, the disease that caused the Irish potato famine, comes from an Argentine variety of potato that naturally produced a defense.

Read more

New research describes a novel 3D printing technique for the production of smart materials that may find use in soft-robotics and advanced medicine.

In a recent academic paper the, “striking phenomena” that “can be produced by embedding magnetic particles into polymer with designed patterns,” are described in detail. These phenomena include smart materials with, “tunable elastic properties, giant deformational effects, high elasticity, anisotropic elastic and swelling properties, and quick response to magnetic fields.

As previously reported by 3D Printing Industry, investigations into smart and meta materials are increasingly using 3D printing techniques.

Read more

Scientists at Rutgers and other universities have created a new way to identify the state and fate of stem cells earlier than previously possible.

Understanding a stem cell’s fate—the type of cell it will eventually become—and how far along it is in the process of development can help scientists better manipulate for .

The beauty of the method is its simplicity and versatility, said Prabhas V. Moghe, distinguished professor of biomedical engineering and chemical and biochemical engineering at Rutgers and senior author of a study published recently in the journal Scientific Reports. “It will usher in the next wave of studies and findings,” he added.

Read more

Wiring our brains up to computers could have a host of exciting applications – from controlling robotic prosthetics with our minds to restoring sight by feeding camera feeds directly into the vision center of our brains.

Most brain-computer interface research to date has been conducted using electroencephalography (EEG) where electrodes are placed on the scalp to monitor the brain’s electrical activity. Achieving very high quality signals, however, requires a more invasive approach.

Integrating electronics with living tissue is complicated, though. Probes that are directly inserted into the gray matter have been around for decades, but while they are capable of highly accurate recording, the signals tend to degrade rapidly due to the buildup of scar tissue. Electrocorticography (ECoG), which uses electrodes placed beneath the skull but on top of the gray matter, has emerged as a popular compromise, as it achieves higher-accuracy recordings with a lower risk of scar formation.

Read more

Slate book columnist Mark O’Connell’s new book To Be a Machine, which is specifically about #transhumanism, is out tomorrow. So there’s a ton of reviews out in major media. The last chapter in the book is about my work. Here are 3 reviews just out on the book. ALSO, I highly encourage you to BUY the book to help transhumanism grow. Mark’s book is the first book specifically on the movement with this kind of international attention, and the better the book does the first week, the more people will know about transhumanism: http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/25/14730958/transhumanism-mar…biohackers &

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-rev…e34127614/ &

Mark O’Connell Doesn’t Want to Be a Cyborg: The Millions Interview


The strangest place writer Mark O’Connell has ever been to is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation — where dead bodies are preserved in tanks filled with nitrogen, in case they can be revived with future technology. “There was a floor with the stainless steel cylinders and all these bodies contained within them and corpses and severed heads,” he tells The Verge. “That imagery is something that I will take with me to a grave, whether that’s a refrigerated cylinder or an actual grave.”

O’Connell, 37, visited Alcor while writing To Be a Machine, which comes out February 28th. The nonfiction book delves into the world of transhumanists, or people who want to transcend the limits of the human body using technology. Transhumanists want to be stronger and faster; they want to be cyborgs. And they want to solve the problem of death, whether by freezing their bodies through cryonics or uploading their consciousnesses. Transhumanists have been around since at least the 1980s, but have become more visible in the past decade as technology advances have made these ideas seem more feasible and less like sci-fi.

Read more

Since the early seventies, scientists have been developing brain-machine interfaces; the main application being the use of neural prosthesis in paralyzed patients or amputees. A prosthetic limb directly controlled by brain activity can partially recover the lost motor function. This is achieved by decoding neuronal activity recorded with electrodes and translating it into robotic movements. Such systems however have limited precision due to the absence of sensory feedback from the artificial limb. Neuroscientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, asked whether it was possible to transmit this missing sensation back to the brain by stimulating neural activity in the cortex. They discovered that not only was it possible to create an artificial sensation of neuroprosthetic movements, but that the underlying learning process occurs very rapidly. These findings, published in the scientific journal Neuron, were obtained by resorting to modern imaging and optical stimulation tools, offering an innovative alternative to the classical electrode approach.

Motor function is at the heart of all behavior and allows us to interact with the world. Therefore, replacing a lost limb with a robotic prosthesis is the subject of much research, yet successful outcomes are rare. Why is that? Until this moment, brain-machine interfaces are operated by relying largely on visual perception: the robotic arm is controlled by looking at it. The direct flow of information between the brain and the machine remains thus unidirectional. However, movement perception is not only based on vision but mostly on proprioception, the sensation of where the limb is located in space. “We have therefore asked whether it was possible to establish a bidirectional communication in a brain-machine interface: to simultaneously read out neural activity, translate it into prosthetic movement and reinject sensory feedback of this movement back in the brain”, explains Daniel Huber, professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences of the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE.

Providing artificial sensations of prosthetic movements.

Read more