The Advocate is running a first person report on Thomas Beatie, a transgender, legal male, who is now pregnant through home insemination.  Beatie writes:

Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights.

His wife, Nancy had to undergo a hysterectomy and is unable to carry a child, but as they wanted to have a family Beatie took the job in hand.

I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections.  It had been roughly eight years since I had my last menstrual cycle, so this wasn’t a decision that I took lightly. My body regulated itself after about four months, and I didn’t have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy.

However, they suffered a great deal of opposition and discrimination from people and medical workers who were upset by the situation, and their first pregnancy was ectopic, leading to the loss of triplets.

In total, nine different doctors have been involved…it took over one year to get access to a cryogenic sperm bank to purchase anonymous donor vials, and why Nancy and I eventually resorted to home insemination.  On successfully getting pregnant a second time, we are proud to announce that this pregnancy is free of complications and our baby girl has a clean bill of health.  We are happily awaiting her birth, with an estimated due date of July 3, 2008.

Tip off via Boing Boing.

Or, the coolest thing ever inspired by a handbag.

This is a mobile exhibition venue (actually a 700sqm pavillion) designed by Hadid for Chanel, which will be touring the world, kicking off this week on a rooftop in Hong Kong.  From there it will be taken apart and rebuilt in Tokyo on the second leg of a two-year world tour that will take it to New York, London, Moscow and Paris.

Chanel commissioned around 20 artists, including Yoko Ono and the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, to produce works for the show loosely based on its famous bag.  The artists were taken to Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment and shown how the bags were made. The resulting works include sound installations, sculpture and video.

There’s a nice rendering of the design on Youtube

and also a short clip of what it actually looks like in situ

Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have designed a new chip for portable electronics that could be up to 10 times more energy-efficient than present technology.  The power required could be so low that implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and health monitors could be powered indefinitely by a person’s body heat or motion.

The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was finding ways to make the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual – while most current chips operate at around 1.0 volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts.

So far the new chip is a proof of concept. Commercial applications may include portable and implantable medical devices, portable communications devices, and networking devices could be based on such chips and thus have greatly increased operating times. There may also be a variety of military applications in the production of tiny, self-contained sensor networks that could be dispersed in a battlefield.In some applications, such as implantable medical devices, the goal is to make the power requirements so low that they could be powered by “ambient energy,” —using the body’s own heat or movement to provide all the needed power. In addition, the technology could be suitable for body area networks or wirelessly enabled body sensor networks.

The chip, mounted in a plastic package – Image courtesy/Joyce Kwong, MIT

From the MIT Energy Initiative via Slashdot.

We’ve covered the development of mind control interfaces a little, and Spiraltwist trailed the device that looks like it will be first to reach the market – the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset. A few more details have started to surface, which I thought it might be worth noting.

via Gamedev.net:

Release date is provisionally set at Christmas 2008, with a price tag of $299.

The headset is constructed of 16 nodes spaced around the head that detect the EEG patterns emitted by your brain, which are then processed and recognized. Unlike regular EEG scans that require the electrodes to be glued directly to your head, Emotiv has a “patented material” that lets the nodes simply rest against your skull with no adhesive required. You have to train the headset to recognize what kind of thought pattern equates to a certain action. Thoughts picked up by the headset include moods and feelings as well, as your brain signals your muscles to perform certain actions.

The headset has three main Suites:

The Affectiv Suite – Monitors players’ emotional states in real-time, providing an extra dimension in game interaction by allowing the game to respond to players’ emotions.

The Cognitiv Suite – Reads and interprets players’ conscious thoughts and intent and can differentiate between multiple conscious thought commands. The Cognitiv suite reads the player’s thoughts and intent, such as lifting an object, and sends commands through the API to levitate the object in the virtual world. (A demo application demostrated: lift, drop, push, zoom, left, right, rotate CW (object), rotate CCW (object), rotate left (player), rotate right (player), rotate backward, rotate forward and dissapear (object).

The Expressiv Suite – Uses signals measured by the neuroheadset to interpret players’ facial expressions in real-time. The Expressiv suite provides a natural enhancement to game interaction by enabling game characters to mirror the reactions and expression of the player in real time, including complex non-verbal expressions.

via Don’s Blog:

Emotiv’s headset is wireless (well, yeah) transmitting via a 2.4-GHz wireless channel to a computer or game controller via a USB dongle.

A development of the Cognitiv Suite going by the name of EmoKey lets you map your thoughts to keys, potentially enabling game play (like World of Warcraft) and standard applications mapping – such as web browsing and avatar contol in Second Life.

via PhysOrg:

Several other companies – including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo – are also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

While Emotiv´s headset contains 16 sensors, NeuroSky´s has one, however NeuroSky has existing partnerships with Sega Toys Co. in Tokyo and Musinaut in Paris, an interactive music technology maker that allows users to control the music they hear in a headset based on their thoughts and mood.

EmSense, also in San Francisco, offers technology that focuses on business uses, according to its Web site. It also makes a headset that monitors a person’s neurological and biological impulses to measure the effectiveness of advertising and political speeches.

Another company, Interactive Productline in Sweden, has a game called Mindball, which isn´t a video game, but uses mind control technology that may lead to video mind-gaming. Two players sit across from each other at a table, focusing on a small white ball. The objective is to make the ball roll toward your opponent and away from you, using only your mind. Headbands measure the players´ alpha waves, and the ball rolls away from the player with the calmest mind.

I’m sure there can be very few Grinders unaware of the Easter Crucifixion rituals praticed in the Philippines. This year, Health Officials have stepped up to remind participants of the importance of getting their tetanus vaccinations before the flagellation and nailing, and to practise good hygiene.

The health department has strongly advised penitents to check the condition of the whips they plan to use to lash their backs, the Manila Times newspaper reports.  In the hot and dusty atmosphere, using unhygienic whips to make deep cuts in the body could lead to tetanus and other infections.  They also advise that the nails used to fix people to crosses must be properly disinfected first.  Often people soak the nails in alcohol throughout the year.  Grinders please take note.

BBC News has a couple of pages here and here about the rituals.

Sometimes people repeat the penance year after year, like the fish vendor who will be nailed to the cross for the 15th and last time on Friday to give thanks for his mother’s recovery from tuberculosis.

A flagellant aims to share the pain of Jesus as he is beaten by a man with glass fragments embedded in a piece of wood.

And National Geographic News have a video report here to enjoy with your Easter Eggs.

Brain surgeon Henry Marsh, a distinguished consultant at St George’s hospital in south London undertakes a significant amount of pro bono work in Ukraine.  However, access to some items of kit is a bit more tricky over in Kiev, so Marsh often falls back on something every Ginder needs – a Bosch PSR960 cordless drill.

One of his procedures has been captured as part of a documentary to be screened on BBC2 on March 30 – one to set the PVR for I think!

Henry Marsh, a senior consultant at St George’s hospital in Tooting, south London, has used the Bosch 9.6 volt battery-operated hand tool to open up the skulls of his patients to remove life-threatening tumours. Occasionally the battery has gone flat halfway through.  The 58-year-old consultant travels to Ukraine twice a year to perform free operations at a clinic run by a fellow surgeon, Igor Petrovich.

The operation is performed with the patients fully awake – a technique that fell out of use in Britain 50 years ago. Marsh said that Ukrainians could withstand such a practice because they were “very tough”.

Speaking about the trials of his visits to Ukraine, Marsh said: “I’m not recommending that we should all use Bosch do-it-yourself drills in England, but it shows how with improvisation you can achieve a lot.”

More details at The Times Online.

Quote of the week: “I have used the Bosch drill myself when I’ve been operating with Igor. It’s exactly the drill that you could have in your garden shed. He bought it at a do-it-yourself shop.”

Sorry, sorry, I just like the picture.

Surely few things in this life are as glamourous as working in nuclear physics. And it’s good to know that, so attractive is the industry, Russia runs an annual Miss Atom contest, which is only open to employees working in the Russian nuclear sector. Say Hi to Yulia Nagayeva, this year’s winner.

344 girls from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus took part in the contest organized by Nuclear.ru information portal. Let’s hope this year’s winner gets as positive a vibe as last year’s “liveliest picture” winner, Svetlana Bukreeva, who writes:

Life is splendid. That’s what I’m striving for. That’s what it is worth living for. To look, to get to know, to do, to experience… To smack as much as life could offer. To feel as strong, as varied, as abundant as human soul could perceive!

via Danger Room on Wired

Ok, so you’ve got your home endoscopy kit.  But let’s face it, sometimes you really need to know what’s going on in your body on a whole other scale.  Which is where those cuddly scientists at the University of California have stepped in, by developing a device that turns a common cell phone camera into a medical microscope.

Using Bluetooth, wi-fi and cellular networks, and a magnification of 5-50X, cell-phone microscopy will enable images captured by health workers to be annotated, organized, and transmitted to medical experts.

The ability to capture images of, for example, malarial blood samples, infected skin, or ulcerous lesions, and then to send those images for remote diagnosis could drastically reduce both the cost and time of performing critical disease diagnosis – as well as provide early warning of outbreaks – in poverty stricken regions of the globe.

“This could be useful even at home,” suggests Dan Fletcher at Berkeley, “where, for example, early warnings of a change in the shape of a mole could be sent to your clinician on a regular basis to monitor.”

In addition, cancer patients could conduct their own blood cell counts that today require larger microscopes and particle counters.

See ABCNews for more, and a video of the handy little cell (via Medgadget).

I do so hope that the daleks make a return in the next series of Doctor Who.  Now they’ve started to have names like Dalek Sec and Dalek Thay, it can only be a matter of time before we get Dalek Pron.  And for those of us who can’t wait for that, the gods of the Internet (well, I09) have dug up footage direct from the future: Abducted by Daleks, the banned dalek sex flick.

They’ve also gone to the trouble of reviewing the piece:

After watching the movie, all the way through, it’s never entirely clear to me exactly why the Daleks want to capture healthy human women in stripper heels in the first place. They make a huge show of “interrogating” the women, but never actually ask any questions. It’s also not clear if they want to mate with these women — which would be quite out of character for the Daleks, who are obsessed with racial purity on Doctor Who.

Sexy Davros, anyone?

Ok, to be fair, a pretty small bullet – but nevertheless, there is now a working device that can slow down and stop objects without touching them. Discovery News has the low-down on the device they’re calling the reverse coilgun:

The researchers trap particles from the air, store them in a tiny chamber, and release them in the direction of the gun. When a particle reaches the gun and encounters the coils, each coil’s magnetic field progressively slows the particle down without touching it.

The coilgun brought atoms and molecules traveling at 500 meters per second (1,118 mph) to a compete stop.

“What motivated this was weapons research,” said Mark Raizen, a professor of physics at the University of Texas and one of the study’s authors. “It’s not often that weapons technology leads to basic research.”

A coilgun accelerates a magnetic projectile, usually iron-based, with a series of coiled wires that create a strong magnetic field. There is no physical contact between the projectile and the coils. This device works in reverse, stopping atom- and molecule-sized bullets in flight.

Look closely.  This is Kenya, specifically a hill overlooking the Olmelil Valley, where Maasai warriors are clashing with members of the Kalenjin tribe on a regular basis.  The tribal violence is a depressing comment on a country that only a year ago was promoted as a stable democracy in volatile West Africa.  TIME has an interesting photo journal of the battles.

“We were using swords but they were not effective,” says Sylvester, 24, slashing a knife in the air. “In a day we can make between 80 and 100 [arrows],” he adds, refusing to give his last name out of fear. Community members pool money together to buy the necessary tools in secret; the arrows are then distributed within the neighborhood. Local leaders know about the arrow factories, but police forces do not.

Warren mused this morning – How many people have ever lived? And are there more people alive now than have died since the dawn of Homo Sapiens?

Worldometers has the current population at around 6,656,156,576 (6.66 billion).

Population Reference Bureau gave a figure in 2002 for an estimated total humans that have ever lived at 106,456,367,669 (106.46 billion) – taking a start date for homo sapiens at around 50,000 BC – so the current earth population is about 6% of the total ever population (although there are other estimates ranging from 45 billion to 125 billion)

Imagining a world where there are more people alive now than dead – a total population of over 110 billion – is almost unthinkable – the point would presumably only be reached with colonisation of other planets…

Oh, and is it just me, or is this cover just wrong 

We’ve talked before about a variety of devices for improving communications in high-noise environments, but Ambient Corporation has developed a neckband, called the Audeo, that can translate thought into speech by picking up nerve signals.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.  Producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires “a level above thinking” – users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.

New Scientist has full details, and you can watch a demo:

French designer Jean-Marie Massaud has some great design pieces for a flying hotel called “Manned Cloud” up at Design Magazine Dezeen:

MANNED CLOUD Cruise Airship, Paris, France

Living in the sky, watching the Earth from above. Rediscovering the marvel of traveling, experiencing contemplation. Exploring the world without trace

Manned Cloud is an alternative project around leisure and travelling in all its form, economic and experimental, still with the idea of lightness, human experience and life scenarios as the guiding principles. The spiral of Archimedes is the driving force of this airship in the form of a whale that glides through the air.

Manned Cloud is a hotel with a capacity of 40 passengers and staffed with 15 persons, that on a 3-day cruise in 170 km/h permits man to explore the world without a trace: to re-experience travelling, timelessness and enhance the consciousness of the beauty of the world – and to experience spectacular and exotic places without being intrusive or exploitative. For me this project sums up a way of thinking that is the stake of tomorrow.

Don’t Look Gallery, 419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, NSW, Australia
Wednesday 9th April – Saturday April 19th 2008.

Had your tea yet?

Curdle is an endurance-based installation piece, where the main activity performed is inducing lactation. This is achieved by regular pumping and the ingestion of a variety of herbs including fenugreek, fennel and milk thistle. I have done this before, but not to the same degree, so one of the main focuses will be on seeing how much milk I can produce. The first part of the piece will concentrate on the process of inducing, documenting the changes to my body and what milk I produce. The second part of the piece, once lactation has been achieved, will involve myself and other artists creating a series of milk-based pieces, by using the lactation process and the actual milk itself as inspiration, as material, or both…

This is part of a larger body of work that has previously centered on other body fluids and processes, most usually blood and bleeding. Curdle, and the entire induced lactation project I have undertaken, grapples with questions of how bodies (and more specifically, body fluids) are gendered, how they communicate with other bodies, and what happens when bodies and embodied practices are allowed to drift loose of their traditional boundaries.

More at Zoo’s GalactaBlogue

$159 is all you need to explore your intimate orifices in loving colour, thanks to the Miharu Intraoral Camera!

The video cable plugs straight in to your TV, for family occasions.  Using the Miharu intraoral dental camera, tartar and dental plaque become visible by the one touch mode changer.

It’s also useful on many other parts of the body such as the back, skin, head, etc for easy and sanitary viewing.

via Medgadget

Swarms of nanobots are all very well, but how do you control the blighters?  Scientists in Japan have now developed a machine made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone, which was able to control eight microscopic machines simultaneously in a test.

If [in the future] you want to remotely operate on a tumour you might want to send some molecular machines there,” explained Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, Tsukuba, Japan.  “But you cannot just put them into the blood and [expect them] to go to the right place.”  Dr Bandyopadhyay believes his device may offer a solution. One day they may be able to guide the nanobots through the body and control their functions, he said.  “That kind of device simply did not exist; this is the first time we have created a nano-brain,”

BBC News has more details:

The machines resemble a ring with four protruding spokes that can be independently rotated to represent four different states…One duroquinone molecule sits at the centre of a ring formed by the remaining 16. All are connected by chemical bonds, known as hydrogen bonds.  The state of the control molecule at the centre is switched by a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).  Researchers showed they could change the central molecule’s state and simultaneously switch the states of the surrounding 16.  To test the control unit, the researchers simulated docking eight existing nano-machines to the structure, creating a “nano-factory”.

MSNBC has a brief explanatory animation

Sackcloth and ashes are all very well, but today’s sinners need something that can be plugged in.  So the Mindwire V5 is just what we’ve been needing – an electroshock feedback device:

Playing Half-Life 2 with the promise of a real electric current running through your skin when you get fragged has got to be fun, yuh?

Enagadget has more details, and a funky video.

The device works by splitting your controller input to the “brain” of the V5 and your console, then sends electric jolts via electrode pads on your skin. Right now the company has a model tested and working with the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PCs.

For Cumulus Fans:

Thanks Pink Tentacle:

“cloud streets are created when convection currents cut low-lying cumulus into long, clean strips…these clouds floated just over the sea surface, stood 300 meters tall and stretched for over 100 kilometers.”