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Category: cyborgs – Page 105

The bionic pancreas system developed by Boston University (BU) investigators proved better than either conventional or sensor-augmented insulin pump therapy at managing blood sugar levels in patients with type 1 diabetes living at home, with no restrictions, over 11 days. The report of a clinical trial led by a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) physician is receiving advance online publication in The Lancet.

“For study participants living at home without limitations on their activity and diet, the bionic pancreas successfully reduced average blood glucose, while at the same time decreasing the risk of hypoglycemia,” says Steven Russell, MD, PhD, of the MGH Diabetes Unit. “This system requires no information other than the patient’s body weight to start, so it will require much less time and effort by health care providers to initiate treatment. And since no carbohydrate counting is required, it significantly reduces the burden on patients associated with diabetes management.”

Developed by Edward Damiano, PhD, and Firas El-Khatib, PhD, of the BU Department of Biomedical Engineering, the bionic pancreas controls patients’ blood sugar with both insulin and glucagon, a hormone that increases glucose levels. After a 2010 clinical trial confirmed that the original version of the device could maintain near-normal blood sugar levels for more than 24 hours in adult patients, two follow-up trials — reported in a 2014 New England Journal of Medicine paper — showed that an updated version of the system successfully controlled blood sugar levels in adults and adolescents for five days. Another follow-up trial published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology in 2016 showed it could do the same for children as young as 6 years of age.

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In light of the recent attacks in Europe, the search for terrorists, and the ongoing refugee/immigration issues, I still support considering this idea of implants. In fact, so long as the Middle East is in strife, and large amounts of refugees are created, and fundamental religiosity thrives, I’m certain some type of tracking technology implementation in the developed world is inevitable over the next 2–15 years for refugees and some immigrants. Such technology broadly remains the humanitarian thing to do (read the article!), while still protecting the public and national interests.

https://www.cnet.com/news/presidential-candidate-suggests-mi…-refugees/ #transhumanism #Germany #terrorism #immigration

The question of allowing Syrian refugees in to the United States has created a political firestorm in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and one Presidential candidate proposes a novel, high-tech solution, but it’s also likely to make plenty of Americans uncomfortable.

Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan suggests that small microchips could be implanted under the skin of Syrian refugees as part of the process of admitting them into the United States or other countries around the world.

Continue reading “Presidential candidate suggests microchips for Syrian refugees” | >

A column on #transhumanism I did for Flaunt:

Are you ready for the future? A Transhumanist future in which everyone around you—friends, family, and neighbors—has dipped into the cybernetic punch bowl? This is a future of contact lenses that see in the dark, endoskeleton artificial limbs that lift a half-ton, and brain chip implants that read your thoughts and instantly communicate them to others. Sound crazy? Indeed, it does. Nevertheless, it’s coming soon. Very soon. In fact, much of the technology already exists. It’s being sold commercially at your local superstore or being tested in laboratories right now around the world.

We’ve all heard about driverless test cars on the roads and how doctors in France are replacing people’s hearts with permanent robotic ones, but did you know there’s already a multi-billion dollar market for brainwave-reading headsets? Using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that pick up and monitor brain activity, NeuroSky’s MindWave can attach to Google Glass and allow you to take a picture and post it to Facebook and Twitter just by thinking about it. Other headsets allow you to play video games on your iPhone with only your thoughts as well. In fact, a few months ago, the first mind-to-mind communication took place. A researcher in India projected a thought to a colleague in France, and using their headsets, they understood each other. Telepathy went from science fiction to reality, just like that.

The history of cybernetics—sometimes used to describe robotic implants, prosthetics, and cyborg-like enhancements in the human being and its experience—has come a long way since scientists began throwing around the term in the 1950s. What a difference a generation or two makes. Today a thriving pro-cyborg medical industry is setting the stage for trillion-dollar markets that will remake the human experience. Five million people in America suffer from Alzheimer’s, but a new surgery that involves installing brain implants is showing promise in restoring people’s memory and improving lives. The use of medical and microchip implants, whether in the brain or not, are expected to surge in the coming years. NBC News recently reported that many Americans will likely have chip implants within a decade’s time. It’s truly a new age for humans.

Continue reading “Flaunt Magazine” | >

There is a longstanding debate among artificial intelligence experts and futurists: When, not if, AI emerges on the scene, will it help humanity or destroy it?

The scenario has played out through innumerable iterations in popular culture, the most popular being The Terminator series.

Steven Spielberg, riffing on the film Stanley Kubrick was going to direct before his death, presented the counterpoint, espousing a benevolent vision of AI in A.I. Then there are more nuanced, ambiguous iterations, like the recent Ex Machina.

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Another breakthrough on our path to Singularity.

Researchers at Duke University have demonstrated for the first time an electronic link between the brains of pairs of rats. The link allowed the rats to communicate directly and solve simple tasks. A follow up research demonstrated a similar link created between animals thousands of miles apart—one in North Carolina and one in Brazil. The research might allow scientists in the future to connect multiple brains to form a combined multi-brain which could allow sharing of both motor and sensory information between several animals. How easily can you connect one brain directly to another? The surprising answer is that it might be significantly easier than previously thought, at least when it comes to rats. Professor Miguel Nicolelis from Duke University School of Medicine and his team, discovered in previous studies that rat brain are much more “plastic” than we expected, and that they can adapt quickly to accept input from devices outside the body and even learn how to process invisible infrared light generated by an artificial sensor (somewhat similar experiments are currently being done in humans, where blind people are fitted with bionic eyes connected to the optical nerve which is given time to adjust to the new stimuli with the hope of eventually allowing them to process the information and regain partial sight).

Following his initial research Professor Nicolelis asked himself an important question: “if the brain could assimilate information from artificial sensors, could it also assimilate information from a different body?”. This was the trigger which pushed Nicolelis and his team to conduct the current series of experiments.

Continue reading “First Brain-to-Brain Interface Demonstrated” | >

In the George Lucas classic Star Wars, hero Luke Skywalker’s arm is severed and amputated during a lightsaber fight and consequently fitted with a bionic arm that he can use as if it were his own limb. At the time the script was written, such a remedy was pure science fiction; however, the ability to manufacture bionic arms that have the functionality and even feel of a natural limb is becoming very real, with goals of launching a prototype as soon as 2009. Already, primates have been trained to feed themselves using a robotic arm merely by thinking about it, while brain sensors have been picking up their brain-signal patterns since 2003. The time has come for implementing this technology on paralyzed human patients and amputees. This article will provide a brief explanation of the technology, its current status, and the potential future it holds.

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In an epidsode of the dystopian near-future series, Black Mirror, a small, implantable device behind the ear grants the ability to remember, access, and replay every moment of your life in perfect detail, like a movie right before your eyes.

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, can’t promise that level of perfect recall—perhaps for the better—but he is working on a memory prosthesis. The device, surgically implanted directly into the brain, mimics the function of a structure called the hippocampus by electrically stimulating the brain in a particular way to form memories—at least in rats and monkeys. And now, he’s testing one that could work in humans.

Berger’s device hinges on a theory about how the hippocampus transforms short-term memories, like where you deposited your keys, into long-term memories—so you can find them later. In his early experiments, he played a tone and then puffed air in a rabbit’s face, causing it to blink. Eventually, just playing the tone would make the rabbit blink, just like Pavlov’s famous salivating dogs. Berger recorded the hippocampus’ activity with electrodes, and as the rabbits learned to associate the tone with the air puff, patterns in those signals changed in a predictable way.

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