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A team at Wake Forest University has used a combination of living cells and a special gel to print out living human body parts — including ears, muscles and jawbones.

It’s an advance on previous attempts, which either involved making a plastic scaffold and then trying to get cells to grow in and on it, or that printed out organ shapes that ended up being too floppy and dying.

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Here is a thought — we’re already seeing criminals using drones for smuggling and hackers are enjoying holding data for ransom; what is going to happen when we add self driving cars, robots, etc. to this ever growing Cyber risks? Will we see a day that we have to register our drones and other robots with a national register and do a background check on owners because these things can be used as weapons?


“In Latin America drones are being used as part of the War on Drugs as both regional governments and the US are using surveillance drones to monitor drug trafficking and find smuggling routes. However, as drones are increasingly being used by drug cartels themselves to transport drugs between countries, could Latin America find itself at the forefront of emerging drone countermeasures?”

Source: From surveillance to smuggling: Drones in the War on Drugs | Remote Control Project Blog.

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With the success of Graphene as a material for BMI plus the new micro stints that can travel through blood cells to the brain; prosthetic technology is only going to continue to improve to maybe even a point where some athletes may wish to have physical and endurance capabilities improved through this type of technology if it is approved and allowed by the various athletic associations.


A team of researchers has demonstrated the first-ever successful prosthetic arm that can control individual fingers with thoughts.

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Wonderful news for Glioblastoma patients; 2nd clinical trails is underway for the two drug combination that researchers are using to disrupt the cellular process cancer cells use to hide from the immune system and allow the immune system to recognize and attack the cancer.


The UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center has started phase 2 clinical trials, targeting glioblastoma patients.

Glioblastoma is a particularly aggressive type of brain cancer. Only about one fifth of adults diagnosed with it survive two years or more after their diagnosis, UNM researchers said.

“Unfortunately, it is also the most common form of primary brain tumor, about 70 percent of newly diagnosed primary brain tumors,” Omar Chohan, director of Neurosurgical Oncology and a part of the clinical trials team said.

A new two-drug combination, currently in use in the clinical trials, might help people diagnosed with glioblastoma to fight the disease, according to a UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center press release.

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Amazing.

The Singularity isn’t NEAR…

It’s in progress.


For the first time ever, researchers have successfully demonstrated a system that enables a person to move the individual fingers of a prosthetic hand using just their thoughts.

To test the device, scientists at Johns Hopkins University recruited the help of an epilepsy patient who was preparing for surgery to pinpoint the source of his seizures. (The patient himself was not missing a limb.) The scientists used the same electrode array implanted in his brain to control the prosthetic limb. After mapping the parts of the brain responsible for individual finger control movements, the researchers programmed the prosthesis to move the corresponding finger. The details of the experiment can now be found in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

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A bioprinter – a three dimensional printer that uses living cells in suspension as its ink, and injection nozzles that can follow a CT scan blueprint – brings the dream of transplant surgery a step nearer: a bespoke body part grown in a laboratory and installed by a robot surgeon.

Scientists and clinicians began exploring tissue culture for transplant surgery more than 20 years ago. But researchers in the US report in Nature Biotechnology that they have harnessed a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer to print living muscle, cartilage and bone to repair battlefield injury.

The printed body parts so far have been tested only in laboratory animals. But tested organs have the size, structure and function for human use: once transplanted, they could be colonized by blood vessels and begin to grow and renew themselves normally. The study was backed by the US Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

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82% of Energy Industry (power grids, nuclear, solar, gas, etc.) say that a Cyber Attack Could Cause Physical Damage — and they didn’t highlight those on some sort of life support or machine to help patients, etc. to live.


According to the results of a recent Tripwire survey of more than 150 IT professionals in the energy, utilities, and oil and gas industries, 82 percent of respondents said a cyber attack on operational technology (OT) in their organization could cause physical damage.

The survey, conducted in November 2015 by Dimensional Research, also found that almost 60 percent of respondents said they aren’t able to track all the threats targeting their OT networks, either because they don’t have the visibility necessary to track all threats (16.2 percent), because they only track threats that directly target their department (8.1 percent) or because there are just too many threats (35.4 percent).

“After hundreds of years protecting our nation’s geographic borders, it is sobering to note that possibly the most vulnerable frontier happens to be the infrastructure that runs the largest companies in the country,” Rekha Shenoy, vice president and general manager of industrial IT cyber security for Tripwire parent company Belden, said in a statement.

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Interesting read mostly about the SV income divide. Bottom line, is that we need technology in many ways to save humanity. I know many are questioning that remark. However, since technology has been existence, many have gained through medical treatments, research, and accessibilities to connect with people like we never did in the past. The future of tech holds great promise as a tool to help researchers and medical teams to eliminate cancer, neurological diseases and disorders, enabling the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk. The good does outweigh the bad.


Editor’s note: Income equality — a hot-button political issue — is not going to improve; technology is about to make things much worse. It will, over the next decade, begin to disrupt almost every industry, wipe out millions of jobs, and make the rich even richer. Even though everyone will be able to live better and healthier lives and benefit from the technology advances, the widening gap will cause greater resentment and create a larger cauldron of dissent. This is something we need to be prepared for, writes former Triangle tech entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa.

SAN FRANCISCO - There are very few issues that Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton all agree on. One of them is the growing problem of inequality in income and wealth. From the extreme left to the extreme right, everyone is angry about the one percent who have the majority of the wealth. There has always been an income and wealth gap, but the divide between average worker and the very wealthy has not been so great since the Roaring Twenties. This is fueling the rise of both the Tea Party and the socialists.

Income equality is not going to improve; technology is about to make things much worse. It will, over the next decade, begin to disrupt almost every industry, wipe out millions of jobs, and make the rich even richer. Even though everyone will be able to live better and healthier lives and benefit from the technology advances, the widening gap will cause greater resentment and create a larger cauldron of dissent. This is something we need to be prepared for.

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