The Guardian informs us that:

The world’s first monkeys to be created from the embryos of several individuals have been born at a US research centre.

Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre produced the animals, known as chimeras, by sticking together between three and six rhesus monkey embryos in the early stages of their development.

Three animals were born at the laboratory, a singleton and twins, and were said to be healthy, with no apparent birth defects following the controversial technique.

 
And are clearly part of a program of weaponized cuteness, prototype post-primate super-soldiers, dropped behind enemy lines, able to reduce the hardest veteran into mushiness with a single blink.

Just take a look:

via The Chairman

Here’s your menu for today’s FuturePresent news round-up:

• MSFT’s “Productivity Vision 2011″ video:
  
  via GeekWire who give this nice description:

  As the new video opens, special eyeglasses translate audio into English in real-time for a business traveler in Johannesburg. A thin screen on a car window highlights a passing building to show where her meeting will be the next day, based on information from her calendar. Office workers gesture effortlessly to control and reroute text and charts as the screens around them morph and pulse with new information.

  And on and on from there, making our modern-day digital breakthroughs seem like mere baby steps on the road to a far more spectacular future.

  Now I want my fucking spex now as much as the next cyberpunk, BUT… actual world problems solved here? ZERO. When the current estimate is that 80 Million new jobs need to be created to replace the ones lost during this recent period of disaster capitalism, building a shinier operating system hardly seems likely to help.

• In better cyberpunky news, from the very same Microsoft, there’s OMNITOUCH:
  
  via Design Taxi, who give us this succinct description:

  OmniTouch is depth-sensing projection system worn on the shoulder.

  With the system, hands, legs, arms, walls, books and tabletops, become interactive touch-screen surfaces—without any need for calibration.

  If only they didn’t look so terrible. Get ya mod on there future-dwellers!

• It may have over 5Million views, but let’s take a look at the QUANTUM LEVITATION video again
  
  via Gizmodo. Advances in basic science and engineering, now we’re talking!

• If you like SCIENCE! you’ll love simulated pocket universes:
  

  Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so weak they could not give rise to atoms or molecules. However, if conditions were suitable, matter would coalesce into galaxies and planets, and if the right elements were present in those worlds, intelligent life could evolve.

  Some physicists have theorized that only universes in which the laws of physics are “just so” could support life, and that if things were even a little bit different from our world, intelligent life would be impossible. In that case, our physical laws might be explained “anthropically,” meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them.

  MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, and decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life.

  The MIT physicists have showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us, even when the masses of elementary particles called quarks are dramatically altered.

  Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, so they decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life. Unlike most other studies, in which varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, they examined more than one constant.

  Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there’s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

  In work recently featured in a cover story in Scientific American, Jaffe, former MIT postdoc, Alejandro Jenkins, and recent MIT graduate Itamar Kimchi showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us. Even when the masses of the elementary particles are dramatically altered, life may find a way.

  “You could change them by significant amounts without eliminating the possibility of organic chemistry in the universe,” says Jenkins.

  Keep reading… And if that’s not heavy enough for you, how about a paper on the Mass of the universe in a black hole (via reddit)

• From the macro to the micro – Scientists create computing building blocks from bacteria and DNA [PhysOrg]:
  

  The scientists constructed a type of logic gate called an “AND Gate” from bacteria called Escherichia coli (E.Coli), which is normally found in the lower intestine. The team altered the E.Coli with modified DNA, which reprogrammed it to perform the same switching on and off process as its electronic equivalent when stimulated by chemicals.

  The researchers were also able to demonstrate that the biological logic gates could be connected together to form more complex components in a similar way that electronic components are made. In another experiment, the researchers created a “NOT gate” and combined it with the AND gate to produce the more complex “NAND gate”.

  The next stage of the research will see the team trying to develop more complex circuitry that comprises multiple logic gates. One of challenges faced by the team is finding a way to link multiple biological logic gates together, similar to the way in which electronic logic gates are linked together, to enable complex processing to be carried out.

via Scientific American

via Justin Pickard

I’ve gotten a lot of mail this weekend about the supposed new “Canadian cure for cancer” and while I hate to rain on parades, I thought I’d do a bit of fact checking before getting too excited.  There were a few things that made me scratch my head when reading the initial article. (Starting with the fact it’s a four-year-old piece on a notorious Content Mill site that is just now circulating.)  So, I went to a friend of mine, who has worked extensively in the field of nuclear medicine and this is what she had to say:

If you read the article it talks about how University of Alberta scientists have used a drug called dichloroacetic acid (DCA), and according to the article, Big Pharma aren’t interested because the drug is off-patent and they can’t make money off of it. So bang, the Canadians cured cancer and no one cares.

…Except that’s not really true.

University of Alberta scientists are currently working on small-scale clinical trials of DCA; according to their most recent update, they’ve trial-ed this on five patients–five–which is not a large enough sample for us to go ahead and say that cancer has been ‘cured.’

Furthermore, they don’t go into great detail, but what they do say isn’t that they cured any of those patients. “In some patients there was also evidence for clinical benefit, with the tumors either regressing in size or not growing further during the 18 month study.” No idea how many “some” of the five patients are, but clearly at least one of the five had further tumor growth during the 18 months. There’s also a note mentioned about how it took 3 months for the drug to reach therapeutic levels; three months in a glioblastoma patient is pretty damn long (a GBM is a fast-growing brain tumor that untreated will kill you in two to four months, on average; with treatment it tends to kill you in fourteen months, and it has a ridiculously low five year survival rate. The wikipedia page gives a decent overview.)

Anyway. Point being, this ‘magic bullet’ has been trial-ed on five people at this point, and they’re still very much in the clinical trials stage. This means we’re likely years off from the point where we have to start worrying who’s going to make money off of DCA as a cancer treatment, because we’re years off from knowing whether or not it’s actually, well, a cure. (Or, like most things in cancer treatment, just a promising treatment that helps some people and has some unpleasant side effects.)

If you’re worried about whether or not they’ll be able to get adequate funding (which, in all things scientific these days, is a well-founded concern), visit the U of A team’s home page, read what they’re doing, and make a donation if you think it’s something worth exploring further. But please, for the love of god, let’s not continue to propagate mistruths and obfuscations published by a website whose advertising slogan is ‘publish easily, attract readers, earn rewards.’ There’s a reason publishing is hard, and it’s not because Big Pharma makes it so–it’s because we publish scientific results in peer reviewed journals, and they’re held to fairly rigorous standards there.

I’m under no illusion that we will see a FDA approved, Big Pharma approved cure for cancer until pharmaceutical companies can figure out a way to charge more for it than the billions they rake in from cancer treatment each year.  But it’s way too early to imply that this avenue of research is the suppressed holy grail of cancer research.   Trust me – I’ve lost my father, my sister and all of my aunts and uncles to cancer and I’ve had my own scare – when a cure is developed, no matter how off the grid it may be, I’ll be thrilled beyond words.  But an out of date, poorly researched Hubpages article misrepresenting the work of a group of hard-working scientists is no reason to uncork the champaign and thaw out the Duke…

…not just yet at least.

This short-film by Interdisciplinary Fashion Designer Nancy Tilbury and Visual Artists 125 Creative gives us a glimpse at what they think fashion in 2050 might look like:

Couture becomes a biological experience, gowns are assembled by gas and nano-electronic-particles, where tailoring and cosmetics are constructed by 3D liquid formations, including swallowable technologies exciting the mind, body and soul through physical expression. It is a time when couture will be cultured and farmed as fashion facets of human flesh. A Fashion Futures Film to provoke…

thanks for the tip-off Emily Crane!
In fact, check out this film of her work too:

There’s not that much that’s new here, for those of us that have been closely following this over the years, but it’s still quite something to see listed, one after another, the many achievements made recently in genetic and bio engineering.

What I also like about this TED Talk, being by a bio-ethicist, is that he focuses on identifying the areas ethics need to be applied, without prescribing solutions or making immediate value judgements, something that seems to be increasingly rarer these days.

It’s got a long way to go before there are practical applications, but this is still seriously cool stuff. From Science News:

The discovery that offshoots from nascent mouse nerve cells explore the specially designed tubes could lead to tricks for studying nervous system diseases or testing the effects of potential drugs. Such a system may even bring researchers closer to brain-computer interfaces that seamlessly integrate artificial limbs or other prosthetic devices.

When the team seeded areas outside the tubes with mouse nerve cells the cells went exploring, sending their threadlike projections into the tubes and even following the curves of helical tunnels, the researchers report in an upcoming ACS Nano.

“They seem to like the tubes,” says biomedical engineer Justin Williams, who led the research. The approach offers a way to create elaborate networks with precise geometries, says Williams. “Neurons left to their own devices will kind of glom on to one another or connect randomly to other cells, neither of which is a good model for how neurons work.”

At this stage, the researchers have established that nerve cells are game for exploring the tiny tubes, which seem to be biologically friendly, and that the cell extensions will follow the network to link up physically. But it isn’t clear if the nerves are talking to each other, sending signals the way they do in the body. Future work aims to get voltage sensors and other devices into the tubes so researchers can eavesdrop on the cells. The confining space of the little tunnels should be a good environment for listening in, perhaps allowing researchers to study how nerve cells respond to potential drugs or to compare the behavior of healthy neurons with malfunctioning ones such as those found in people with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s.

Eventually, the arrangement may make it easier to couple living cells with technology on a larger scale, but getting there is no small task, says neuroengineer Ravi Bellamkonda of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

“There’s a lot of nontrivial engineering that has to happen, that’s the real challenge,” says Bellamkonda. “It’s really cool engineering, but what it means for neuroscience remains to be seen.”

One of a rare breed of scientists willing to volunteer their own bodies in the service of science, professor Warwick let British surgeons place a silicon chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his nervous system in March 2002.

Any excuse to post a pic of Kevin Warwick, but this is taken from TIME’s overview of the advances made via self-experimentation and how it’s continuing today amongst enthusiasts on the internet; My Body, My Laboratory:

For centuries, self-experimentation was an accepted form of science. Sir Isaac Newton almost burned his cornea because he could think of no other means of understanding visual hallucinations than staring at the sun. But in recent years, the academic institutions, grant agencies and journals that have codified the scientific method have come to view self-experimentation with suspicion, worrying that it leads to bias or misleading results. Nevertheless, the practice continues among a small number of professors and doctors who see it as the last chance to prove an underfunded theory, as an act of solidarity with other study subjects. Or simply as an avenue to fame.

Self-experimentation has also found new life on the Internet. So-called self-tracking has already made lay scientists of many of us as we buy the latest exercise device or nutritional supplement and then log into forums to compare our findings with other investigators. What the practice lacks in rigor, it makes up for in zeal, not to mention the sheer number of subjects running their mini-studies. Somewhere in there, real — if ad hoc — science might occur. “To me, [self-tracking] is the future of self-experimentation,” says Seth Roberts, a professor of psychology at Tsinghua University in China, whose work led to the quirky best-selling diet book The Shangri-La Diet. The practice will continue among “normal people who are simply intent on discovering what works for them.”

…

Denis Harscoat, co-organizer of the Quantified Self group in London, agrees. Workers are more productive if they complete regular, small tasks rather than an occasional large project; the same is true of do-it-yourself science, he says. At the meetings Harscoat convenes, members discuss everything from monitoring their blood pressure to which behaviors best facilitate writing a play. “You might think we are a bunch of data-crunching geeks,” he says, “but it’s good to track.”

And track the Quantified Selfers do, often aided by new products designed for them: Zeo headbands, said to monitor sleep phases; Nike plus, shoes with a distance, speed and time sensor embedded in them; Asthmapolis, which records the location, time and date of each breath so asthmatics can monitor their attacks. Every bit of data is shared in meetings so it can be considered in the aggregate.

This BBC Horizon documentary, Are We Still Evolving? is an excellent overview of the current research into evolution in general, continuing human evolution and genetic engineering. It does stop short of the really interesting implications though; with radical technological change affecting the selection criteria, will we see an explosion in human evolution in the coming generations? We’ll soon find out.

Meanwhile, Danish researchers are attempting to create ‘cyborg DNA’, adding an extra strand to create a triple helix. Yep, things haven’t even started to get interesting yet.

• Toward computers that fit on a pen tip: New technologies usher in the millimeter-scale computing era
  

  A prototype implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients is believed to contain the first complete millimeter-scale computing system…

• Organs-on-a-Chip for Faster Drug Development
  

  The chips are still in their early stages, but investigators are translating more and more body parts to the interface. Last summer bioengineers at Harvard University..created a device that mimics a human lung: a porous membrane surrounded by human lung tissue cells, which breathes, distributes nutrients to cells and initiates immune responses.

• The ‘core pathway’ of aging
  

  DePinho published a study in Nature in January 2011 that demonstrated it was possible to reverse the symptoms of extreme aging in mice by increasing their levels of telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the health of the telomeres.

• Neuroscientists Create Perception Of Having Three Arms
  

  To prove that the prosthetic arm was truly experienced as a third arm, the scientist ‘threatened’ either the prosthetic hand or the real hand with a kitchen knife, and measuring the degree of sweating of the palm as a physiological response to this provocation.

• Learning the Alien Language of Dolphins
  

  Herzing’s method is effectively the same as that used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The keyboard allows for dolphins to teach humans as much as the humans teach the dolphins.

The following video is Google’s soon to be ex-CEO, Eric Schmidt, presenting to IFA 2010 a vision to create an ‘age of Augmented Humanity’; it also features demos of then new GoogleTV and various new automagical apps for Android. It goes for an hour, if that’s too long, there’s the cliff-notes version over on GIGAOM.

Now I love Accelerando and other such SF novels as much as the next post-cyberpunk, so the idea of my own personal AGI has its appeal. And so long as we don’t up with the world’s most annoying Microsoft Paperclip, I’m cool with that. BUT.. there’s a few holes in this vision, at least the way I see it.

Primarily, that it’s based on a nice smooth vision of the future, projected from an ideal yesterday.

Foremost being that these automagical apps they’re demoing seem to be designed to solve middle class problems. And, if you’re paying attention, the middle class is vanishing. Which leaves the over-educated and/or under/un-employed on one side and the global elite on the other. Neither of which need help buying shoes while visiting Berlin (the example given for Conversation Mode of Google Translate.) The Favela Chic (as Sterling calls them; soon to be, if not already, us) will gladly take the free OSs and services, but won’t be clicking on ads. Nor will the Global Elite (see: The Rise of the New Global Elite, if you haven’t already). If they want translation services, they’ll hire a human with 100% accuracy.

And it’s advertising that Google are and shall continue to use to monetize their system. Maybe I’m the only one that find the ads before popular YouTube clips (and nearly every other video streaming service) highly annoying.. a tax, no less, that I refuse to pay. Just as I never click on the ads that appear in search results or gmail, I don’t even see them. But then I don’t use loyalty cards either, and all of these things are apparently popular. For the moment.

So, point number two. The mythical always on high-speed network, the various flavours of delicious mobile and wired broadband. Which it is. Mostly. In cities (where we’re told the population will continue to centre themselves in). In what we used to call the first-world. Which have largely been under-invested in infrastructure thanks to widespread implementation of economic rationalism. So that a tiny, weany little thing called the weather breaks it. Snowed under, cables freeze and snap. Floods shut off power stations. Hurricanes and tornadoes etc etc. Life in the 21C. All the supercomputers are still there in the Cloud, but inaccessible.. useless. Also, there’s the little thing of being in a country that decides to just shut off the internet. That too.

So, think a few years ahead. You’ve all read about the potential of biocomputing and have been pirating tv shows and movies for years (partly because they have the advertising already chopped out of them) thanks to.. what’s that? Peer to Peer technologies. What if the Favela Chic-types figure out how to homebrew, say in 5years, in DIYbio labs, their own supercomputers and seed their own clouds? Google.. you say? I remember them.

Even this year we could see open-source phones that can create and communicate across their own mesh network; it’s not hard to do this with the Android platform, and the openmoko project also has a lot of potential. There’s a reason WalMart busted ass to be the first help out the victims of Katrina. That because there’s no reason that leaderless, self-organising groups couldn’t themselves pour into the next city or area that is the next victim of heavy weather, with just this tech to distribute, donated from hackerspaces local and abroad. Because everyone’s connected now; if they don’t know someone directly affected, they know someone that knows someones that is.

Now, I’ll jump back into this from another angle, in another post, shortly, but suffice to say: a top-down, device to network to cloud computer and back again, automagical friendly (not in any way censored.. oh no, heaven forbid) solution looks awful nice yesterday; but in today’s world, which is just a preview of tomorrow’s.. it’s already looking like wishful thinking. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but these are increasingly dramatic times.

Third and finally, do we really want to merge with the Googleplex? To become Google’borgs? Because that’s what this ‘Age of Augmented Humanity’ amounts to. Now, believe me, I’m all for the continued co-evolution between man and his tools, BUT.. I’m also, clearly, emphasising the importance of questioning and critiquing this.  And doing it ourselves, with full control.

Fundamentally, it comes down to two questions: how much trust will you place in an Algorithm? and how much is your data really worth? To be continued..

So you wanna be a superhero?

‘This spider dragline-silk is a product of transgenic research done by Dr. Randy Lewis at the university of Wyoming and Notre Dame and is produced by transgenic goats and more recently also by transgenic silkworms,’ the artist explained me. ‘This spider-silk is up to five times as strong as steel but still keeps the smooth properties of silk.’

The silk will be woven with special bulletproof vest techniques into a matrix that can be used for culturing human skin cells. Once the flexible bulletproof spider-silk matrix is done the dermatology department of Leiden university medical center (LUMC) will help Essaidi with the embedding process. Finally the skin will be tested at the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) with real bullets and be recorded with a high-speed camera.

No, they’re not upgrading the flesh of a lucky volunteer.. this is an art project!

Is the skin going to repair itself after the shock or will it manage to completely repel the bullet?

The organic skin, made for protection, will be displayed in a steel, sterile life-support frame. Protection needs to be protected.

It will be showing the yet unknown result of the test on the firing range. I am aiming for it to actually repel the bullet, if not the spider silk has the properties to enhance the skin regeneration process.

From We Make Money, Not Art | via Killing Denouement

slashdot reports:

“In its just-published patent application for Adapting Parasites to Combat Disease, Microsoft lays out plans to unleash ‘altered parasitic organisms’ on humans, including mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, bed bugs, leeches, pinworms, tapeworms, hookworms, heart worms, roundworms, lice (head, body, and pubic), and the like.

‘Irradiated mosquitoes can be used to deliver damaged Plasmodium to individuals,’ explains Microsoft. ‘Instead of contracting malaria, an individual receiving the damaged Plasmodium develops an immune response that renders the individual resistant to contracting malaria.’ Don’t worry about runaway breeding, advises Microsoft — ‘a termination feature [that] can include programmed death’ makes this impossible.

In these seemingly dire times, optimism can be a revolutionary act.

Here’s two quick doses:

• Dose 1: Charles Stross’s Reasons to be Cheerful:
  

  There’s been enormous progress in genomics; we’re now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn’t materialized, we now know why it hasn’t materialized, and it’s possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It’s not a blueprint; it’s not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it’s like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.) My bet is that we’re going to have to wait another decade. Then things are going to start to get very strange in medicine.

• Dose 2: a fan-made promo clip for NASA:

  

This is the full text of A Biopunk Manifesto (an update of A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto), as delivered by Meredith Patterson at the UCLA Outlaw Biology Symposium, January 29th-30th, 2010.

Scientific literacy is necessary for a functioning society in the modern age. Scientific literacy is not science education. A person educated in science can understand science; a scientifically literate person can *do* science. Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to be active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water, and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them.

Society has made dramatic progress in the last hundred years toward the promotion of education, but at the same time, the prevalence of citizen science has fallen. Who are the twentieth-century equivalents of Benjamin Franklin, Edward Jenner, Marie Curie or Thomas Edison? Perhaps Steve Wozniak, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard or Linus Torvalds — but the scope of their work is far narrower than that of the natural philosophers who preceded them. Citizen science has suffered from a troubling decline in diversity, and it is this diversity that biohackers seek to reclaim. We reject the popular perception that science is only done in million-dollar university, government, or corporate labs; we assert that the right of freedom of inquiry, to do research and pursue understanding under one’s own direction, is as fundamental a right as that of free speech or freedom of religion. We have no quarrel with Big Science; we merely recall that Small Science has always been just as critical to the development of the body of human knowledge, and we refuse to see it extinguished.

Research requires tools, and free inquiry requires that access to tools be unfettered. As engineers, we are developing low-cost laboratory equipment and off-the-shelf protocols that are accessible to the average citizen. As political actors, we support open journals, open collaboration, and free access to publicly-funded research, and we oppose laws that would criminalize the possession of research equipment or the private pursuit of inquiry.

Perhaps it seems strange that scientists and engineers would seek to involve themselves in the political world — but biohackers have, by necessity, committed themselves to doing so. The lawmakers who wish to curtail individual freedom of inquiry do so out of ignorance and its evil twin, fear — the natural prey and the natural predator of scientific investigation, respectively. If we can prevail against the former, we will dispel the latter. As biohackers it is our responsibility to act as emissaries of science, creating new scientists out of everyone we meet. We must communicate not only the value of our research, but the value of our methodology and motivation, if we are to drive ignorance and fear back into the darkness once and for all.

We the biopunks are dedicated to putting the tools of scientific investigation into the hands of anyone who wants them. We are building an infrastructure of methodology, of communication, of automation, and of publicly available knowledge.

Biopunks experiment. We have questions, and we don’t see the point in waiting around for someone else to answer them. Armed with curiosity and the scientific method, we formulate and test hypotheses in order to find answers to the questions that keep us awake at night. We publish our protocols and equipment designs, and share our bench experience, so that our fellow biopunks may learn from and expand on our methods, as well as reproducing one another’s experiments to confirm validity. To paraphrase Eric Hughes, “Our work is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of our research topics.” We are building on the work of the Cypherpunks who came before us to ensure that a widely dispersed research community cannot be shut down.

Biopunks deplore restrictions on independent research, for the right to arrive independently at an understanding of the world around oneself is a fundamental human right. Curiosity knows no ethnic, gender, age, or socioeconomic boundaries, but the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity all too often turns on economic opportunity, and we aim to break down that barrier. A thirteen-year-old kid in South Central Los Angeles has just as much of a right to investigate the world as does a university professor. If thermocyclers are too expensive to give one to every interested person, then we’ll design cheaper ones and teach people how to build them.

Biopunks take responsibility for their research. We keep in mind that our subjects of interest are living organisms worthy of respect and good treatment, and we are acutely aware that our research has the potential to affect those around us. But we reject outright the admonishments of the precautionary principle, which is nothing more than a paternalistic attempt to silence researchers by inspiring fear of the unknown. When we work, it is with the betterment of the community in mind — and that includes our community, your community, and the communities of people that we may never meet. We welcome your questions, and we desire nothing more than to empower you to discover the answers to them yourselves.

The biopunks are actively engaged in making the world a place that everyone can understand. Come, let us research together.

via biopunk | TheGeneHackMan

Video of Lepht Anonym‘s presentation at 27c3, mentioned earlier, is now online.

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]

(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.

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!