An earlier post on this blog already displayed the possible future of sight using augmented contact lenses. Researchers at MIT take this second sight to a next level by creating a retinal implant that could help blind people regain much of their vision.
People receiving the implant would wear a pair of glasses with a built-in camera that wirelessly powers the implant and sends images to a micro-controller on the eye-ball. These are then processed and send to electrodes implanted below the retina.
Besides the immense value for blind people imagine the future possibilities for truly virtual and augmented reality. Always wanted infrared sight? Or would you prefer to hook it up to your Second Life account? You can also just watch a movie.
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Scientists of the University of Pennsylvania are creating electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body, through the use of thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates.
While implanted electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don’t need protection. The whole process is pretty much seamless: The electronics on the flexible silk substrates conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.
To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal – so far the technique is tested on mice – and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface.
In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers report that such circuits can be implanted in animals with no adverse effects. And the performance of the transistors on silk inside the body doesn’t suffer.
The researchers are now developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.
Journal Article: Silicon electronics on silk as a path to bioresorbable, implantable devices. Related: Conductive body paint, Phone Tooth, Metalosis Maligna. Image credit: Rogers/Omenetto. Via: Techreview.
You wouldn’t give it to her but Barbie is already over 50 years old. The doll made her debut at the American International Toy Fair in 1959 and has been a young girls (and gays) beauty icon for decades. Just image what Barbie would have looked like today if only she wasn’t so utterly plastic fantastic by nature. Still a pretty woman, stylish too! Peculiar image of the week (creator unknown: let us know).
Related: Beauty kit for little girls, Virtual Miss, Photoshop Beauties, Objects of desire, Real Mario, Software that ranks female beauty.
Unlike many people fear that computers will overtake humans, Ray Kurzweil states that robots will merge with humans, robots the size of cells which can do the job way more efficient than our actual cells. An example on this are respirocytes; robots the size and functions of a red blood cell, but way more efficient (movie).
Respirocytes are able to store 1.51 billion oxygen molecules, 100% of which are accessible to the tissues. In contrast, our blood cells store about 1 billion of red blood cells and only 25% is accessible to the tissue. Replacing 10% of your actual red blood cells will enable you to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or allows you to stay underwater for four hours.
In his TED-talk Kurzweil calls this 2020 technology. Many major steps have been made within the field of nanotechnology and Respirocytes are quite likely to be actually manufactured someday. Hence, we may anticipate some new doping scandals world records at the Olympics of 2020.
Related: Voyage of the bacteria bots, How biotech will drive our evolution, Craig Venter: catalyst of evolution, Build a better being.
Make no mistake, you’re not looking at the latest Barbie line: These are the The Pussycat Dolls. Formerly an LA stripper show burlesque show, now upgraded to be pop music sensation and the new face of female empowerment. With virtually every race and hair color represented, the collection of women seemed to have stepped straight out of an adolescent boy’s fantasy.
Yet, their polished perfection also has a certain unheimlich quality: The lips, the breasts, the heavily done faces, the oh-so-perfect noses, the shiny skins, the ’sculpted’ bodies. Too perfect to be human: this cannot be trusted.
Screenshot from the movie Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Could the female pop group perhaps be the latest manufacture of Abyss creations, the Californian company known from Real Doll life-size silicone sex doll mannequin advertised as “the state-of-the-art for life-like human body simulation”?
The name ‘Pussycat Dolls’ certainly adds to the suspect, but then again their hit singles with titles like ‘BUTTONS‘ and ‘BEEP‘ point more in the direction of a robotics project. Perhaps professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, after his so-so attempts to create a robotic schoolteacher and doppelganger of himself, now exceeded himself with this sexy machinery? Not sure, as the comparisons go on…
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Anthropomorphobia is the fear of acknowledging qualities we wish to consider only human in non-human things. Sufferers from the condition used to have trouble mostly at fairs or theme parks, but as designed objects progressively aspire to maintain a human-to-human relationship with their users, the problems become more apparent in everyday life.
If you think you are vulnerable for anthropomorphobia, please DO NOT confront yourself with this interactive staring Mona Lisa-style woman animation created with motionportrait software. Brought to you, straight from the uncanny valley!
Related: Man shoots his lawnmower, Social Robots, Gel Remote, Let the robots do the teaching, Sexy Car, 1 whole human.
Laurent La Gamba makes photographic installations dealing with camouflage. His work juggles with the idea of natural procrypsis in the urban space and deals with the relations among people, living environment, and technology.
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For over 40 years Australian artist Stelios Arcadious Stelarc has made art with medical instruments, prosthetics, robots, virtual reality systems and biotechnology to investigate alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. In one of the interviews he says: The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness.
His ‘Ear on the Arm‘ piece is a full sized ear constructed of the living cells permanently placed under the skin of Stelarc’s forearm – a clear homage to the famous tissue engineered ear mouse. The microphone and sound transmitter were supposed to be inserted inside his body within the ear shaped scaffold. This ended up to be not feasible yet due to infections that electronics caused.
The vision behind the project was to generate an alternative electronically enhanced organ to better interact and operate within the World. At the same time it provokes a debate about a desire to redesign and alternate human’s body evolutionary structure.
Stelarc points out: Now we can engineer additional and external organs to better function in the technological and media terrain we now inhabit. All very well, allthough it’s perhaps a better strategy to redesign our technological environment so that it fits our existing human physique.
Related: Phone Tooth, USB finger, High Heels, How biotech will drive our evolution, Homo desktopus, Humans are the sex organs of technology.
Our peculiar image of the week was created by artist Levi van Veluw, who reinvents the classical fine art of landscape painting, by moving from the traditional ‘oil on canvas’ to the use of his own face as a canvas.
By combing the romantic landscape and self-portrait genres he gives a fresh twist to the obsession inherent in the romantic landscape of recreating the world and simultaneously being part of it.
Look around you and try to find the most natural object in the room you are in now. It is you.
Related: In the Wilderness, Phone Trees, Day in the Dutch dunes, Biopresence: Human DNA trees.
“Paris, printemps 2019: Oh Darling, you look gorgeous.” Nowadays we are so used to Hollywood hyperbodies – a simulation of a body that never existed – it is good to see a different take on them for a change.
In the French interpretation – everyone knows the French have style – a hyperbody isn’t some simple amplification (read: breast-implants) or restoration (read: botox) of a lost nature. Hyperbodies are high culture, an authentic fake. At least in the vision of the Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf who took these pictures as a part of his project ‘Le Dernier Cri’.
We are now awaiting for this French style interpretation of a hyperbody to hit the Hollywood hills. Everyone knows that Americans secretly want to live in Paris and be French, so it shouldn’t take long. Common guys, those boring breast implants are way out of style, your wife deserves something more creative.
Related: High Heels, Objects of Desire, Hyperbreasts, The Photoshop Beauties, A society of simulations (essay). Thanks Tinkebell.
