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Category: cyborgs – Page 92

Superhuman Skin Senses Sound Waves and Magnetic Fields

Researchers have developed a new kind of sensor designed to let artificial skin sense pressure, vibrations, and even magnetic fields. Developed by engineers, chemists, and biologists at the University of Connecticut and University of Toronto, the technology could help burn victims and amputees “feel” again through their prosthetic skin.

“The type of artificial skin we developed can be called an electronic skin or e-skin,” Islam Mosa, a postdoctoral fellow at UConn, told Digital Trends. “It is a new group of smart wearable electronics that are flexible, stretchable, shapable, and possess unique sensing capabilities that mimic human skin.”

To create the sensor for the artificial skin, Mosa and his team wrapped a silicone tube with a copper wire and filled the tube with an iron oxide nanoparticle fluid. As the nanoparticles move around the tube, they create an electrical current, which is picked up by the copper wire. When the tube experiences pressure, the current changes.

Artificial skin could give superhuman perception

For a long time, biohackers have been playing with magnets by embedding then under their skin as a novelty extra-sensation. I, personally, don’t see the point, but morphological, taxonomic, and cladic freedom are at work so I celebrate their actions.

Our skin’s ability to perceive pressure, heat, cold, and vibration is a critical safety function that most people take for granted. But burn victims, those with prosthetic limbs, and others who have lost skin sensitivity for one reason or another, can’t take it for granted, and often injure themselves unintentionally.

Chemists Islam Mosa from UConn, and James Rusling from UConn and UConn Health, along with University of Toronto engineer Abdelsalam Ahmed, wanted to create a sensor that can mimic the sensing properties of skin. Such a sensor would need to be able to detect pressure, temperature, and vibration. But perhaps it could do other things too, the researchers thought.

“It would be very cool if it had abilities human skin does not; for example, the ability to detect magnetic fields, sound waves, and abnormal behaviors,” said Mosa.

AI Helps Amputees Walk With a Robotic Knee

A movie montage for modern artificial intelligence might show a computer playing millions of games of chess or Go against itself to learn how to win. Now, researchers are exploring how the reinforcement learning technique that helped DeepMind’s AlphaZero conquer chess and Go could tackle an even more complex task—training a robotic knee to help amputees walk smoothly.

Computer algorithms help prosthetics wearers walk within minutes rather than requiring hours of training.

BrainRobotics’ EMG Controlled Prosthetic Hand

Here is another advanced prosthetic device that can make life easier for amputees. BrainRobotics’ EMG Prosthetic Hand features a modular mechanical design. It comes with 8 signal detection channels for precise EMG readings. An advanced machine learning algorithm is used to allow users to intuitively control this robotic prosthesis.

More like this ➡️ here.

“Bionic Mushrooms” Fuse Nanotech, Bacteria and Fungi

(Hoboken, N.J. — Nov. 7, 2018) — In their latest feat of engineering, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have taken an ordinary white button mushroom from a grocery store and made it bionic, supercharging it with 3D-printed clusters of cyanobacteria that generate electricity and swirls of graphene nanoribbons that can collect the current.

The work, reported in the Nov. 7 issue of Nano Letters, may sound like something straight out of Alice in Wonderland, but the hybrids are part of a broader effort to better improve our understanding of cells biological machinery and how to use those intricate molecular gears and levers to fabricate new technologies and useful systems for defense, healthcare and the environment.

“In this case, our system – this bionic mushroom — produces electricity,” said Manu Mannoor, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens. “By integrating cyanobacteria that can produce electricity, with nanoscale materials capable of collecting the current, we were able to better access the unique properties of both, augment them, and create an entirely new functional bionic system.”

Becoming the First Transhuman: A Call For The Right Stuff

Many scientists research the practical and immediate applications of bio molecular technology but it seems most fail to study our most important, and largest organ, our skin.

Who will officially be the first transhuman? Will it be you? Why wait decades? This article explains one approach to speeding up the process and also the challenge involved.

Defining the Object of the Goal:

Although the words ‘cyborg’ and ‘transhuman’ are often used interchangeably, and someone can aspire to be a combination of both, there are fundamental differences between the two — as has been articulated by Dr. Natasha Vita-More: The transhuman will be genetically programmed and otherwise equipped towards indefinite life extension and to attain a great many other physical and mental capabilities and other benefits. The transhuman also maintains specific transhumanist values and may actively foster the far-reaching humane goals of the transhumanist movement, including guaranteed social justice for all and highly-advanced space colonization to foster indefinite life, peace, etc. Whereas, a cyborg may not uphold transhuman values or goals, and may or may not seek to live longer or indefinitely, but will be fitted with a device or devices to acquire one or more enhanced capabilities (such as better vision and/or hearing, faster running ability, etc.).

What Makes You So Special

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed “cyborg,” walked into a café in the Nolita district of Manhattan. The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. “May I do a sound portrait of you? It will just take one minute. For nine years, I’ve been listening to colors,” he explained.

Byrne eyed his questioner from under raised eyebrows. On a slight frame, the 30-year-old Harbisson wore a white T-shirt, deep-pink jeans and black-and-white showman’s brogues. His face was angular, with an aquiline nose and a chin smudged with grown-out stubble. A small plastic oval floated in front of his forehead, attached to the end of a flexible stem that reached around from the back of his head and over a sandy pageboy mop, like the light on the head of an angler fish. This “eyeborg,” as Harbisson calls it, converts light into audible sound, with a pitch that varies according to the color of the light.

With a good-natured shrug, Byrne relented. Harbisson darted down next to his quarry, intent, but with a boyish smile that betrayed his excitement. He pointed the eyeborg first at Byrne’s ear, then his lips, then his left eye, then the bridge of his nose, and finally his salt-and-pepper hair, scribbling down musical notes on the back of a cardboard coffee-holder. Byrne gave him his agent’s email. When Harbisson got back to a computer, he would make a sound file that combined the notes from each bit of Byrne’s anatomy, and send it back to the actor. Harbisson’s collection already included Prince Charles, Nicole Kidman, and Al Gore.

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