Paging Doctor Cylon, Paging Doctor Cylon

Shape Of Things To Come - Cylons Among Us?

Robots will soon pass scalpels to surgeons, retrieve blood from hospital blood banks and even answer the phones at busy unit desks - all so that nurses can spend more time with patients.

A researcher examining the future of nursing says breakthroughs in robotics could completely revamp the [...]

Scientists Research Brain Implant Chip

Scientists Research Brain Implant Chip

Researchers at the University of Washington are working on an implantable electronic chip that may help establish new nerve connections in the part of the brain that controls movement. Their most recent study showed such a device can induce brain changes in monkeys lasting more than a week.

…

When awake, the brain [...]

Are you ready for a cell phone implant?

Check out this fun bit of speculation form the St. Petersburg Times Floridian Website…

In-your-face interface
Wrap your head around this: As technology gets smaller, faster, more futuristic, imagine yourself connected to a device that doesn’t just lamely hang on your ear but invades your skull. Not yet. Soon.

“We’re going to wind up in essence with ‘intelligent [...]

Adult Stem Cells Help Weakened Hearts

The cells within the human body are quickly becoming a canvas for medical art. Look at what researchers are announcing these days:
Regenerating hearts…

Even patients who suffered an episode decades ago can benefit, researchers say.

Using stem cells harvested from patients’ own bone marrow, researchers improved cardiac function in heart attack patients months, years — and even [...]

RFID Privacy Issues and News

Spychips.com added to the PoliTech Reading list.

The Spychips website is a project of CASPIAN, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering.

Nanotech and immortality

John Carroll reviews Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near,”
we are all a bunch of nano-machines that have evolved over the course of billions of years. Weird stuff, and even weirder is to think that this kind of thing happened all on its own. That’s probably the reason some think there had to be some rational [...]

Solving the Embryonic Stem Cell Political and Ethical Debate

New stem cell technique may help solve political, ethical debate

A group of U.S. scientists has for the first time extracted stem cells from human embryos without destroying a budding life in the process.
The breakthrough technique, pioneered at a Massachusetts-based biotech firm, could yield a source of human embryonic stem cells for medical research — and [...]

More Video Game Health Benefits

Video games taken as serious medicine
Video games are being treated as serious medicine in the battle against health woes ranging from obesity to cancer and dementia.
Several hundred US game developers, medical workers and government policy makers were set to collaborate in Maryland in September at the Games for Health Project devoted to putting video [...]

New Source of Replacement Brain Cells Found

The neural progenitor cells seen in this image show stem-cell like qualities and could one day be used to treat a host of brain diseases. The green marker indicates support brain cells and the red marker indicates the presence of a protein normally found in stem cells. Blue marks the cells’ nucleus. Credit: Noah Walton/UF [...]

DDT about to be reintroduced as pesticide

UPI: DDT about to be reintroduced as pesticide
One of the most controversial chemicals on Earth DDT is about to make a comeback as a prime weapon in the fight against malaria in Africa. Scientists say DDT helped eradicate malaria from the United States during the 1940s, but was indiscriminately overused for agricultural purposes during [...]

Raise Your Right Hand: Chip Implants for Everyone!

Some technology seems outlandishly intrusive when it first emerges. Cameras above street corners, along highways and in rail stations come to mind, but even this big-brother technique has become routine and hard to argue against as a common-sense safety measure.
No it’s time for everyone to get chip implants. Well, nearly time.
Read the rest here…
read more | digg [...]

Ray Kurzweil Answers Questions About Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence
When Humans Transcend Biology
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil was online Monday, June 19 at 2 p.m. ET to answer your questions about Artificial Intelligence.
In his latest book, “The Singularity Is Near,” he examines the next step of the evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which knowledge and skills embedded in our [...]

Stem cell trigger pinpointed

The protein that turns back time

Stem cell scientists have pinpointed a molecule that confers the cells with amazing powers of self-renewal and maintains their ability to develop into any other type of cell in the body.
The discovery could help pave the way for stem cells derived from adult tissues, giving ethical debates over the use [...]

Want to see what a Stem Cell looks like?

The link says it all. It's pretty amazing if you haven't seen it before.
read more | digg story

Biosingularity Blog on WordPress

New on the PoliTech Reading List
eneve at the Travelling Through The Wire Blog has this entry:
‘Biosingularity’ Blog Launched
Derya Unutmaz, M.D. has started the Biosingularity blog, covering advances in biological systems and inspired by KurzweilAI.net and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity ideas, says Dr. Unutmaz, who is Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University School [...]

Magic Nano Has No Nano!

Why can’t the MSM understand this point? Check out this “News” from the Los Angeles Times. That article was again reprinted verbatim by the Arkansas Gazette yesterday.
The story just won’t die!
The author hyperventilates over something that was a non issue from the beginning. Even though he acknowledges that the initial report about Magic [...]

Things That Make You Go … Hmmmmm

When you read about this success story…
Who’s playing who?
WHEN a leading Japanese brain specialist said that playing video games rendered parts of the brain inert, it did not take long for Nintendo to arrive at his door. The video games mammoth didn’t threaten him with legal action: that’s not the way in Japan. Instead it [...]

More Video Game Brain Health Benefits

Antique media such as Television and Magazines, regularly publish and broadcast anti video game propaganda in spite of the beneficial findings reported repeatedly by the scientific community.
Here is one such story that you will not hear much about anywhere else but on the internet.

Image courtesy of: USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Healing games: Therapy and [...]

Scientists Will Attempt To Clone Human Embryos

I love the first paragraph of this story. As it’s something that has also concerned me for several years. I’ve blogged about Fraudulent Stem Cell “Science” both here and here.
Stepping into a research area marked by controversy and fraud, Harvard University scientists said Tuesday they are trying to clone human embryos to create stem cells [...]

Timely Commentary by Ray Kurzweil

Golden era of nanotechnology: a post-evolutionary world
Trends hint at a golden era of nanotechnology
Innovations like robotic blood cells portend a “golden era” of nanotechnology
By Ray Kurzweil
(May 11, 2006)
BEAUTIFUL MINDS: By 2029, scientists will understand how human intelligence works.
(Source: Dr. Abdon Guerra F/Flickr)
It turns out that information technology is increasingly encompassing everything of [...]

Blueprinting the human brain

Blueprinting the human brain

Image by: Brandon Pletsch,
Medical College of Georgia - Class of 2003
According to Henry Markham, a scientist working on the Blue Brain project … The project is an attempt to create a blueprint of the human brain to advance cognition research.
The group only recently simulated the firing of 10,000 neurons in a single [...]

Nanotech, More Fear Mongering

Believe it or not, at one time scientific advancement was seen as a POSITIVE thing.

Industry urged to be open about nano testing
Scientists urged industry on Thursday to disclose how it conducts safety tests for products containing nanoparticles.
The Royal Society, an academy of leading scientists, said a new inventory shows that 200 consumer products such [...]

Italy now assigning civil rights to seafood!

Italy restaurant fined for “cruel” lobster display
The real prey here is the poor restaurant owner. (oh! and also … human rights).
An Italian restaurant was fined 688 euros ($855) for displaying live lobsters on ice to attract patrons, in an innovative application of an anti-cruelty law usually affecting to household pets.
A court in the northeastern city [...]

Adult Stem Cells … positive clinical results.

Adult stem cell implant first in orthopaedic patient
The Royal Melbourne Hospital has performed the world’s first implant of cultured specialist stem cells into an orthopaedic patient who suffered a broken femur nine months ago which failed to heal.
Mr Richard de Steiger, the Director of Orthopaedics at the hospital, performed the operation as an alternative to [...]

Motorized nanocars!

Rice scientists attach motor to single-molecule car

Two motorized nanocars on a gold surface. The nanocar consists of a rigid chassis and four alkyne axles that spin freely and swivel independently of one another….

The car’s light-powered motor is attached mid-chassis. When struck by light, it rotates in one direction, pushing the car along like a paddlewheel.

More Machine & Life Convergence

One technology that has been slow to evolve, when comapired to the rest of the electronics industry, is energy storage (batteries). So any news indicating even incremental inprovement to the current state of the art is really important. This news is a big big deal!
Ultra-small batteries powered by viruses
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [...]

Anti-Human earth worshipers are at it again!

Report: Species loss worst since the dinosaurs
OSLO, Norway (Reuters) — Humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on Monday.
Habitats ranging from coral reefs to tropical rainforests face mounting threats, the Secretariat [...]

Cyborg Insect Soldiers in the Future?

Insect ‘cybug’ plan hatched

US defence researchers are all abuzz about the possibilities of recruiting an insect army capable of being controlled remotely to perform military operations.
The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has already envisaged a wide range of users for such an army of “cybugs”, but is seeking outside expertise to help it overcome [...]

Three stories, One trend.

DNA Art: Origami Goes Nano
The software of life has now been woven into smiley faces, snowflakes and stars.
Caltech researcher Paul Rothemund calls his new technique “DNA origami,” and he can weave any two-dimensional shape or pattern using DNA molecules. The technology could one day be used to construct tiny chemical factories or molecular electronics [...]

Highly Energetic Fuels Power Improved Artificial Muscles

University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) nanotechnologists have made alcohol- and hydrogen-powered artificial muscles that are 100 times stronger than natural muscles, able to do 100 times greater work per cycle and produce, at reduced strengths, larger contractions than natural muscles. Among other possibilities, these muscles could enable fuel-powered artificial limbs, “smart skins” and morphing [...]