Six Million Dollar Man come to life!
40 years later and only now does the 6 million dollar man come closer to realization.
Canadian Researchers Testing Electronic Implants on Cadavers: Human Implants Coming Soon?
Researchers at Autodesk, a software company in Toronto, Canada, checked to see whether the methods we currently use to interface with our gadgets work when the device is implanted in human tissue.
The answer was a resounding “yes”. A button, an LED and a touch sensor all functioned appropriately when embedded under the skin of a cadaver’s arm. The team was even able to communicate transcutaneously using a Bluetooth connection and charge the electronics wirelessly.
“That’s the bottom line,” says Christian Holz of the Autodesk team, who presented the work this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas. “Traditional user interfaces work through the skin.”
Would anyone want a piece of consumer electronics inside their body? …there is a risk that the device could malfunction and need to be removed, or that it could infect the surrounding tissue, not to mention the dystopian vision of a society in which our phones become tracking devices that we can never be free of. Yet there are reasons for thinking that the cyborg future will come to be.
The team, who worked with University of Toronto anatomist Anne Agur, says that medical risks such as infection need to be better understood before a device can be implanted into a living person. But it is a problem that manufacturers of existing implants, such as stents and replacement hips, have successfully tackled. There are also clear benefits to implanted electronics. “The device is always there,” says Holz. “You cannot lose it.” And implants provide new interface methods. A gadget similar to a smartphone could provide a calendar alert by means of a gentle sub-skin vibration, for example.
(via Gadgets work under your skin – but are you ready? - tech - 14 May 2012 - New Scientist)
![The science of skateboarding puppies. Too cute not to post.
thefrogman:
Teamwork.
[video]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m40vq5Ro2I1qzrlhgo1_400.gif)
Creepy robots
When the day does come that a robot get a Mother’s Day card, this is what will be sending it.
A recap of Stanford’s third annual Robot Block Party. It ain’t a party until dancing robots and driver-less cars walk in.
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.Donna J. Haraway
