Ultraportable pocket ECG?  Yeah there’s an app for that.  Well, an app and a special case for your iPhone 4. (The biofeedback app is pretty cool as well.)  The iPhonECG will debut at the CES show in Las Vegas next week. The intent is that it will be available to consumers and not just medical professionals.

Wired Threat Level has recently posted a quick profile on Lepht Anonym, a Grinder and practical transhumanist:

Anonym’s vision of the transhuman is rather different. Less visionary, possibly, but more realistic. What she does is “grinding,” with homemade cybernetics and an intimate familiarity with medical mistakes, driven by a consuming curiosity rather than a philosophical creed.

She does her own surgery, with a scalpel and a spotter to catch her if she passes out, and an anatomy book to give her some confidence she isn’t going to slice through a vein or the very nerves she’s trying to enhance.

“The existing transhumanist movement is lame. It’s nano everything. It’s just ideas,” she says. “Anyone can do this. This is kitchen stuff.”

While we’ve mentioned Lepht here, before, the article is quick, and very much worth a read - especially to anyone interested in biohacking and homebrew enhancements who thinks they might be alone in poking at these boundaries.

[Via: Wired Threat Level]

In a matter of days, it will be 2011 and we still don’t have that whole Food and Water thing figured out.  But we can throw millions at turning iPods into watches. (And yes, I realize that I am as much part of the problem, personally, as the solution.)

A little while ago, I was describing virtual pop star, Hatsune Miku, as a “prosthetic identity“.

Now, thanks to Kinect hackers in Japan, you could slide even further into her virtual identity if you wanted.

(Click through for high resolution)

From Emergence Collective.

via Chris Arkenberg

From WIRED’s Danger Room:

In a solicitation released today, Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research branch, unveiled the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras effort, or SCENICC. Imagine a suite of cameras that digitally capture a kilometer-wide, 360-degree sphere, representing the image in 3-D (!) onto a wearable eyepiece.

You’d be able to literally see all around you, including behind yourself, and zooming in at will, creating a “stereoscopic/binocular system, simultaneously providing 10x zoom to both eyes.” And you would do this all hands-free, apparently by barking out or pre-programming a command (the solicitation leaves it up to a designer’s imagination) to adjust focus.

Then comes the Terminator-vision. Darpa wants the eyepiece to include “high-resolution computer-enhanced imagery as well as task-specific non-image data products such as mission data overlays, threat warnings/alerts, targeting assistance, etc.” Target identified: Sarah Connor… The “Full Sphere Awareness” tool will provide soldiers with “muzzle flash detection,” “projectile tracking” and “object recognition/labeling,” basically pointing key information out to them.

And an “integrated weapon sighting” function locks your gun on your target when acquired. That’s far beyond an app mounted on your rifle that keeps track of where your friendlies and enemies are.

The imaging wouldn’t just be limited to what any individual soldier sees. SCENICC envisions a “networked optical sensing capability” that fuses images taken from nodes worn by “collections of soldiers and/or unmanned vehicles.” The Warrior-Alpha drone overhead? Its full-motion video and still images would be sent into your eyepiece.

Keep reading..

The following is a video released by Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc explaining and demonstrating their prototype invisibility cloak.  For the MICROWAVE spectrum.  Which is outside our visual range, but it’s still a major advance in what’s largely been a theoretical and hella SF technology.

More details from nano werk:

The fractal cloak works at microwaves; radio waves used by cell phones and wireless devices. The technology directly applies to infrared, and with technology advances in nanotechnology, can be made to make visual light invisibility cloaks, although Cohen cautions that it will be many years before visual light invisibility cloaks are perfected. “Other researchers are still hiding objects behind mirrors. What’s the point of a cloak if you are already hiding behind a mirror?” asked Cohen.

Just being able to hide something in the infrared spectrum will have a lot of interesting applications..

Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act we become a party to injustice. Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility. Most witnessed acts of injustice are associated with bad governance, since when governance is good, unanswered injustice is rare. By the progressive diminution of a people’s character, the impact of reported, but unanswered injustice is far greater than it may initially seem. Modern communications states through their scale, homogeneity and excesses provide their populace with an unprecedented deluge of witnessed, but seemingly unanswerable injustices.  –Julian Assange

I’ve been putting off laying out my thoughts on Wikileaks, because, honestly; the situation evolves so often that It’s hard to really assay from a high altitude.  First of all, I believe it is absolutely imperative that, if you want to really have an idea of Assange’s likely agenda and why Wikileaks is releasing “unimportant things”…

…though be sure my blood boils every time I hear someone call something like the US warning Germany to not pursue the CIA kidnapping and torture of an innocent German citizen “unimportant” or “gossip”…

…and why the paranoid over-reaction of the US and their allies – especially their corporate allies is probably part of that agenda as well — then you need to read this: “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance”.    After that, you’ll probably want to just go ahead and read Aaron Bady’s excellent breakdown of those essays.  I really feel that these documents are they key to actually exploring the Wikileaks phenomenon with any accuracy.

The short version is that yes, Assange does seem to want to use Wikileaks’ form of journalism as a weapon.

Y’see, they say journalism is the art of controlling your environment, but that’s all wrong. I can’t control anything with this typewriter, all this is, is a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world… – Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan

He is, by his own admission, using journalism as a tool to create systems disruption in conspiratorial forms of government in the style of 4G Warfare.  His conspiracies are not those of the Alex Jones and David Icke type, but the simple banal ones that drive what passes for government in many parts of the world.  The shameless collusion of corporate interests and governments, the systems and structures that rule by secrecy – quite often because the truth of how they move in the world would be horrifying to the people that they claim to represent or govern.   The goal, aside from exposing real crimes, is to disrupt the systems by which those conspiracies do business.  This is why the diplomatic cables leaked contain a high degree of innocuous fluff as well as seemingly TMZ-worthy gossip – not because those particular factoids in and of themselves have value, but because the availability of them causes systems disruption.

Or, as Bady put it:

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

And, as anyone can see from the news, so far the reaction of Wikileaks’ targets has been just that.  The US discusses new interpretations of the Espionage Act to cover more forms of journalism, introduces the information-protecting SHEILD act and bullies private companies to cease their tacit support of Wikileaks.  Meanwhile, credit card companies react to the leaking that they were in collusion with the US government in international affairs by removing avenues of fiscal support for Wikileaks and… colluding in government affairs!  The over-reaction and internalized self-inflicted systems disruption is the point.   In the face of the threat of real transparency, systems that thrive on secrecy will make their natures known and also make their own ability to operate more difficult.   It is, sadly, very similar to the reaction that Al Queada was attempting to – and did – provoke with their 9/11 attacks and the failed and threatened attempts thereafter.

However, wanting to provoke disruption in the kind of systems that interpret transparency/lack-of-secrecy/public action/journalism as some kind of damage or a threat to their existence isn’t Terrorism, unlike Al Queada’s own take on 4G war.   And if it is, then I find myself in the strange position of finding myself and most of the people I know and love, suddenly cast as terrorists.

No lives have been lost due to Wikilleaks (though the life of whistleblower Bradley Manning certainly hangs in the balance) and contrary to what a lot of media-wonks have stated they have redacted information with the cooperation of several newspapers – but not the US government whose aid they’ve solicited, repeatedly.  If anything the greatest flaw in Assange’s master plan is Assange himself — both in his highly questionable actions regarding Swedish rape charges but also in his apparent bouts of unchecked ego and the cult of personality that has formed up around him.   To quote anarchist writer Magpie:

The second reason I’m fine with Assange having been arrested is that no revolutionary organization should be so top-down structured that removing the head destroys the body. I can’t believe I would have to even worry about that in the internet era, when dealing with tech-savvy folks. Decentralization is clearly the only useful way to run an organization that will run into conflict with the state or capitalism. When I heard Assange was arrested, I was sad, but I figured it wouldn’t really affect Wikileaks at all. If Wikileaks is/was something worth supporting, it will function just as smoothly without its founder.

Assange, to the detriment of Wikileaks, has become a cause célèbre to the kind of folks who can’t wait to jump into a cult of personality with very little information, while Bradley Manning – the man who put the bullet in the gun for Assange and Company to aim at the world – sits in solitary confinement in a military prison with the very real specter of capital crimes and lethal injection hanging over his head.  Suddenly half the story of wikileaks has become the story of how various celebrities make fools of themselves when faced with the idea that someone they champion is also wanted for questioning regarding rape.

What good has wikileaks done?  It’s shown that government transparency is possible even if it’s not wanted.  They’ve shown that a small group of volunteers can fight a war against the most powerful forces on earth without ever firing a shot or raising a fist in violence.  They’ve given the tools to do the same to many, many other people and organizations.  They’ve forced governments and their allied entities to once again show their true nature and to damage their own ability to act.  They’ve given any number of people who “know” their masters do horrible crimes in their name more solid proof of those crimes and their weight in human lives, as well as the tools to actually do something about them.  They, like so many other journalists and whistleblowers before them, have put an actual price tag on the futures we’ve sold for a slick AT&T phone and no health care.

There are many problems with Assange’s master plan, however much I support it in theory.  It makes the (logical) assumption that the degradation of signal within a conspiracy to act, and its inability to function with anything resembling efficiency will be interpreted by the systems around it as damage.  What he’s not taking into account is the ability of these same systems  to spin “damage” as “efficiency and security”.  Look at the recent TSA regs, or almost any bit of Homeland Security legislation since the Patriot Act.  Look at the banking industry failure.  Look at how the “Transparency President” has upheld the Patriot Act and strengthened wiretap laws.  America in particular has a deeply ingrained tendency – thanks to the very systems Assange seeks to break down – to interpret cultural, societal, and infrastructural damage as “progress” and “security.”  His view of systems as wanting to embrace radical transparency fails on contact with the current state of the human element much in the way that  Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to get Facebook users to embrace personal transparency have.

The irony there is that Assange, himself, exemplifies the tendencies that allow this to happen.  We, as people, tend to like Leaders.  Just as Assange, the current “leader” of a “leaderless network” has become the focus for a cult of personality that has made it easy for the Heihachi cybercrime ring to hijack Anonymous in his name, call down celebrity support that muddles the issue with rampant fan-worship and rape apologisim, and for detractors to write the whole event off as the machinations of a terrorist rapist – the American Culture of Fear allows ex-comedians, Australian billionaires, ex-war heroes, religious pundits, Muslim-hating IRA supporting Representatives, Secretaries of State, supposedly progressive Presidents, and charismatic soccer moms from Alaska to reassure vast swathes of people that institutional damage is not damage, or censorship – it’s normal and good.

The real problem is that the rest of the “work” of Wikileaks relies on us.  It relies on the concept of Wikileaks – no matter the name – still existing when their current directors are in obscurity or holes in the ground and Assange is just a punchline on next-month’s late night TV.  If people don’t act on what they reveal, or don’t continue to campaign for transparency, then Wikileaks will just be a 3 minute blip on some “I Love the Oughts” retrospective show and their sacrifices – especially Manning’s, a soldier who knowingly put his life on the line for an ideal – will be for naught.

(Don’t you just love the 2010s?)

From New Scientist:

THE world’s first xenotransplantation treatment – where animal cells are transplanted into humans – has been approved for sale in Russia.

The treatment, developed by Living Cell Technologies in New Zealand, is for type 1 diabetes. It consists of insulin-producing pig cells coated in seaweed, says Bob Elliott of LCT.

…

LCT’s treatment involves surgically implanting the replacement cells into the pancreas. The “seaweed” coating is alginate, which prevents the immune system from attacking the foreign cells.

In Russian trials, eight people with type 1 diabetes received the treatment in June 2007, while continuing to have daily injections of insulin. After a year, six showed improved blood glucose control and were able to lower their daily dose of insulin. Two of them stopped injections entirely for eight months. One person left the trial and another showed no improvement, which LCT believes was due to problems inserting the cells into the pancreas.

(Via Atom Jack)

[Posted without attribution.  If you know the source of this image or are the rights-holder, please feel free to contact me.]

How about an onboard, dynamic AR language translation app for your iPhone?

(Insert obligatory: just needs Spex to be perfect cyberpunk future present app).

Remember that scene from The Abyss, well it’s coming soon to a reality near you.

Here’s The Independent, with more details:

Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.

Lande envisages a scuba suit that would allow divers to inhale highly-oxygenated perfluorocarbons (PFCs) – a type of liquid that can dissolve enormous quantities of gas. The liquid would be contained in an enclosed helmet that would replace all the air in the lungs, nose and ear cavities.

The CO2 that would normally exit our body when we breathe out would be “scrubbed” from our blood by attaching a mechanical gill to the femoral vein in the leg.

By using oxygen suspended in liquid, divers would no longer have to worry about decompression sickness – the often fatal condition known as “the bends” which occurs when nitrogen dissolved in the blood under the immense pressures of deep water bubbles out as we rise. It could potentially allow them to descend to far greater depths than is currently possible.

Thanks for the tip-off Lonesamurai!

Here’s an interesting piece of design fiction, via BLDGBLOG.

Dunne & Raby, commissioned by Design Indaba as part of Protofarm 2050 for the ICSID World Design Congress in Singapore, have come up with an interesting solution for our “need to produce 70% more food in the next 40 years”.

In short, turn more things into food.

So far we have not really embraced the power to modify ourselves. What if we could extract nutritional value from non-human foods using a combination of synthetic biology and new digestive devices inspired by digestive systems of other mammals, birds, fish and insects?

As such, a group of people take their fate into their own hands and start building DIY devices. They use synthetic biology to create “microbial stomach bacteria”, along with electronic and mechanical devices, to maximise the nutritional value of the urban environment, making-up for any shortcomings in the commercially available but increasingly limited diet. These people are the new urban foragers.

Foragers is about the contrast between bottom-up and top-down responses to a massive problem and the role played by technical and scientific knowledge. It builds on existing cultures currently working on the edges of society, who may initially appear extreme and specialist – guerrilla gardeners, garage biologists, freegan gleamers etc. By adapting and expanding these strategies, they become models to speculate on what might happen in the future

The video is as a crazy as the concept might seem.  But is it so crazy it just might work?

Acasa have released this video showing their plans to use 3D printing technology to print out new homes for the “over one and a half billion people worldwide [who] reside in substandard housing” in a few years.

This is something that’s been talked about for years, but should finally be possible soon.  It’s a fantastic thing.  Drop a massive 3D printer off to a devastated region and watch it go to work, using local materials.

Bleeding Cool’s Vicki Isitt writes:

The marketing minds supporting Neil Burger’s Limitless have released a viral video advertising NZT – The Clear Pill. The film will star Bradley Cooper as Eddie Morra, a copywriter who discovers a drug that gives him supernatural powers and this ad sells that drug.

[Via: Bleeding Cool]

Students with the STARMAC project at Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley have used a hacked Microsoft Kinect to serve as the guidance system for an autonomously navigating flying robot.

The attached Microsoft Kinect [2] delivers a point cloud to the onboard computer via the ROS [3] kinect driver, which uses the OpenKinect/Freenect [4] project’s driver for hardware access. A sample consensus algorithm [5] fits a planar model to the points on the floor, and this planar model is fed into the controller as the sensed altitude. All processing is done on the on-board 1.6 GHz Intel Atom based computer, running Linux (Ubuntu 10.04).

A VICON [6] motion capture system is used to provide the other necessary degrees of freedom (lateral and yaw) and acts as a safety backup to the Kinect altitude–in case of a dropout in the altitude reading from the Kinect data, the VICON based reading is used instead. In this video however, the safety backup was not needed.

Birger Hartung contacted me with news that Germany is planning on introducing these robots to it’s aircraft industry, to perform quality checks and lift heavy parts.

More details here:

Even though the pi4_workerbot is no humanoid robot, it does possess certain similarities to humans: its size (just under 2 meters / 6’ 6”) and proportions approximate those of a human, so that it needs about as much space as a person. Like a human, it has two highly movable arms, a head and eyes. It has no legs, precluding independent movement, but instead stands with full steering technology on a rolling platform, allowing it to be easily moved from one workstation to the next. The pi4_workerbot does require a power supply at its new workstation; otherwise, it brings everything else along.

Thanks to its built-in sensor array (cameras and power sensors built into its arms), the pi4_workerbot can “see” and “feel” what it grasps and manipulates. Thus, it is equipped to take on sensitive joining tasks and to self-monitor the quality of its own work.

Personally, I can’t help but imagine seeing (with my power of FUTURE VISION!) a busted-up Eye Robot hustling tourists with three-card monte on some city’s sidewalk, 20years from now.

I know Kevin posted about this last month, but I just found this video interview by CNN and.. well, you’ve got to see it.  (Just try and self-filter out the CNN lady)