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WASHINGTON — Scientists have created a hair-thin implant that can drip medications deep into the brain by remote control and with pinpoint precision.

Tested only in animals so far, if the device pans out it could mark a new approach to treating brain diseases — potentially reducing side effects by targeting only the hard-to-reach circuits that need care.

“You could deliver things right to where you want, no matter the disease,” said Robert Langer, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose biomedical engineering team reported the research Wednesday.

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The end of men? Experts reveal how the male sex chromosome could one day disappear completely.

Since the dawn of humanity, men have played a vital role in determining the sex of their offspring.

The Y chromosome, carried by roughly half of a man’s sperm, dictates whether a child will be male or female.

Continue reading “The male Y chromosome is slowly fading, and could disappear completely” | >

As we hear more and more about the upcoming Winter #Olympics in a few weeks, let’s remember the idea for a future Transhumanist Olympics: http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Embrace…211040.php #transhumanism

The 2016 Paralympics, which began this week in Rio de Janeiro, is bringing together 4,500 athletes to compete in 23 sports from wheelchair fencing to swimming to hand biking.

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Cyberdyne, the Japanese robotics company with the slightly suspicious name, has just gotten approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin offering its HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) lower-body exoskeleton to users in the United States through licensed medical facilities. HAL is essentially a walking robot that you strap to your own legs; sensors attached to your leg muscles detect bioelectric signals sent from your brain to your muscles telling them to move, and then the exoskeleton powers up and assists, enhancing your strength and stability.

Users in the United States can now take advantage of this friendly exoskeleton to help them with physical rehabilitation.

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That wisdom from Ecclesiastes is the theme of five new novels, which, if they did not give me a taste of immortality, at least made me feel like the week would never end. The coincidence of their arrival is a little creepy, but it suggests the growing relevance of this subject for a generation reviewing itineraries to the undiscovered country with deep ambivalence. In shades of comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy, these contemporary authors dig up a lot of old conceits and, like Dr. Frankenstein, zap them to life with mixed results.

The dark side of immortality: “How to Stop Time,” “Eternal,” “The Immortalists,” “Immortal Life” and “The Afterlives.”

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For those working in the field of advanced artificial intelligence, getting a computer to simulate brain activity is a gargantuan task, but it may be easier to manage if the hardware is designed more like brain hardware to start with.

This emerging field is called neuromorphic computing. And now engineers at MIT may have overcome a significant hurdle — the design of a chip with artificial synapses.

For now, human brains are much more powerful than any computer — they contain around 80 billion neurons, and over 100 trillion synapses connecting them and controlling the passage of signals.

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