BetaDad

singularitarian:

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more, but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human embryonic stem cells.

Using stem cells as the “ink” in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern.

unexpectedtech:

A postdoctoral student has developed a technique for implanting thought-controlled robotic arms and their electrodes directly to the bones and nerves of amputees, a move which he is calling “the future of artificial limbs”. The first volunteers will receive their new limbs early in 2013.

“The benefits have no precedent,” Max Ortiz Catalan, who carries out research in biomedicine and artificial intelligence at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, told Wired.co.uk. “They will be able to simultaneously control several joints and motions, as well as to receive direct neural feedback on their actions. These features are today not available for patients outside research labs. Our aim is to change that.”

Ordinary myoelectric prostheses work by placing electrodes over the skin to pick up nerve signals that would ordinarily be sent by the brain to the limb. An algorithm then translates these signals, and sends instructions to motors within the electronic limb. Since the electrodes are applied to the skin surface, however, they will undoubtedly encounter countless issues in maintaining the fluid transfer of information back and forth between the brain and the limb. By implanting those electrodes directly to the patient’s nerves, Catalan is hoping to get one step closer than anyone else to replicating natural movement.

“Our technology helps amputees to control an artificial limb, in much the same way as their own biological hand or arm, via the person’s own nerves and remaining muscles,” he said.

Using the Osseointegrated Prosthesis for the Rehabilitation of Amputees (OPRA) method developed by Rickard Brånemark at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Catalan and his team plan to forgo traditional sockets in place of bone-anchored prostheses attached via titanium screws. It was a method inspired by Brånemark’s father, who was the first to discover that titanium can fuse with bone tissue.

“The operation will consist of placing neural and muscular electrodes on the patient’s stumps, as well as placing the bidirectional interfaces into the human body.”

A titanium implant acts as the bidirectional interface, transmitting signals from the electrodes, placed on nerves and muscles, to the limb. It is a truer replication of how the arm was designed to work, with information from existing nerves being transferred to the limb and to the implant, where algorithms can translate thought-controlled instructions into movement. It is, Catalan told Wired.co.uk, a “closed loop control” that moves us “one step further to providing natural control of the artificial limb”. Add to this the fact that every finger is motorised and can be individually controlled, and Catalan’s bold statement might just be accurate.

inthenoosphere:

By Chloe Diggins and Clint Arizmendi (Wired Opinion)

It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain.

This…

inthenoosphere:

By Chloe Diggins and Clint Arizmendi (Wired Opinion)

It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain.

This…

wildcat2030:

See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and health

This device, no larger than a bic lighter, is an implantable device that can read biomedical data and transmit it to the Internet via bluetooth. Instead of taking snapshots of your health by visiting a doctor, you can aggregate weeks…

wildcat2030:

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Hot air passes over the fine piping, plunging to -150C in just 1/100th of a second (credit: Mark Ford et al./Reaction Engines Ltd.) Reaction Engines Ltd.

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Reaction Engines Ltd. has announced what is says is the “biggest…

unexpectedtech:

The Scanadu SCOUT is incredibly easy to use—just raise the handheld device (connected by Bluetooth to a smartphone) to your temple, and wait 10 seconds for it to scan your vital signs, including temperature, ECG, SPO2, heart rate, breathing rate, and pulse transit time (that helps measure blood pressure). “It lets the consumer explore all the diagnostic possibilities of an emergency room,” explains co-founder Walter De Brouwer, a Belgian futurist and entrepreneur who first prototyped a backpack-sized tricorder-like device in the late 1990s.

The device, which will retail for under $150, was surprisingly difficult to build. “It didn’t seem like a complex problem in the beginning,” laughs De Brouwer. “I’ve done many scientific projects in my life, and this was the most difficult of them all. Basically you are up against a time budget and real estate which is very limited.”

Think about it: When you take your blood pressure, it’s usually with a cuff on your arm. Temperature is often taken under the armpit or in the mouth. When was the last you measured either of these things at your temple? As De Brouwer explains, “If you take your heart rate on your heart, the signal is pretty clear. When you do it in another position of the body, you have to take that signal from far away.” But Scanadu’s team pulled it off; the device gets all the information from one point on your temple, and only needs to scan the body for 10 seconds to get a 99% accuracy rate.

Perhaps even more important than the device itself is the way that users interact with it. A free smartphone app records all readings taken so you can see when something looks out of the ordinary. The app has a color rating system—if your breathing rate is out of control, for example, you’ll see red. Scanadu is also working on an “economical system” that lets users send data to their doctors (many of whom may not know what to do with so much data, but that’s another story).

“We really want to show people their health stream. You go to a doctor and you get data points. You probably forget about them,” says De Brouwer. “But in this time of personalized readings we should have personalized parameters. What is a fever for me might not be a fever for you.”

Scanadu is in the running for the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, which asks entrants to create a device that can capture “key health metrics” and diagnose 15 diseases, including step throat, diabetes, and anemia. Another competitor, Senstore, recently launched a Virtual Nurse app.

singularitarian:

Bulletproofing for soldiers and law enforcement officers has lightened up considerably in recent years, but it promises get insanely thin with new nanotechnology coming out of MIT and Rice University.

electronics-geek:

Modern-day form of payment being tested out in Singapore before global roll-out

singularitarian:

Deep in the inner ear of mammals is a natural battery—a chamber filled with ions that produces an electrical potential to drive neural signals. In today’s issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, a team of researchers from MIT, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) demonstrate for the first time that this battery could power implantable electronic devices without impairing hearing.

wildcat2030:

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Education is about to change dramatically, says Anant Agarwal, who heads edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, with plans to teach a billion students, Technology Review reports.

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singularitarian:

Diagnosing autism in children is an important task. Various studies show that early intervention can significantly improve the outcome for children in later life.

singularitarian:

Surgeons have carried out the first ever robotic open-heart operations in Britain at the New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton.