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Criminally under-appreciated Canadian director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) is making a welcome return to the big screen, with Splice.
This clip seems to be the online footage at the moment.
In fact, the film’s yet to be picked up for distribution - so keep an eye out at your local film festival, it might be your only chance to see it.
You can, however, watch this interview with Natali, where he talks not only Splice, but also his plans to adapt JG Ballard’s High Rise:
Outlaw Biology, present by the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and Art/Sci, presented a symposium, workshop and exhibition this weekend.
A symposium exploring new forms of public participation in biological research, raising questions and cultivating ideas about how life could and should be studied. Panelists will address issues including do-it-yourself biology, open source science, at home medical genetics, bio-art, and novel ethical engagements with science at the cutting edge. Event schedule includes: Friday, a panelist discussion with artists, scientists and normal people; Saturday, workshops and an open-house exhibition throughout.
A tentative list of workshops and exhibitions included:
1. Bioweathermap, Jason Bobe. With field-trips to the UCLA Arboretum and Hammer Museum (in cooperation with Machine Project
2. Learn to Design a DNA-based nanostructure using cadnano software, Philip Lukeman
3. Paint colorful microbes – luminescent, fluorescent, and pigmented – on do-it-yourself solid media. With a little time and luck, we’ll preserve the painted results in epoxy, like microbiological paintings in amber, Mackenzie Cowell
4. SKDB: Learn to use software tools for open source manufacturing and bioengineering, Bryan Bishop and Ben Lipkowitz
5. Use of Acinetobacter calcoaceticus strain ADP1 as a DIY bioengineering platform, David Metzgar
6. Ars Synthetica: Have an informed, ethical, and open dialogue on the emerging field of synthetic biology, Gaymon Bennett
7. Extract DNA from Strawberries, CSG Staff
8. Lactobacillus Plasmid Recovery and Visualization for fun and profit, Meredith L. Patterson
9. DIY Webcam Microscopy. Join us for a worldwide webcam hacking event and make your own 100x USB microscope for less than $10. We’ll provide the webcams and a live internet feed from other workshop locations across the world, from Bangalore to Australia. Find out more at diybio.org/ucam
10. Velolab, See the first Bicyclized Mobile Biology lab, Sam Starr
From The Telegraph:
Researchers in the Netherlands created what was described as soggy pork and are now investigating ways to improve the muscle tissue in the hope that people will one day want to eat it.
No one has yet tasted their produce, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.
Vegetarian groups welcomed the news, saying there was “no ethical objection” if meat was not a piece of a dead animal.
…
The scientists extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig and then put them in a broth of other animal products. The cells then multiplied and created muscle tissue. They believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to artificially “exercise” the muscle.
The project is backed by the Dutch government and a sausage maker and comes following the creation of artificial fish fillets from goldfish muscle cells.
Which begs the question: if it’s cloned human tissue, is it still cannibalism?
Perhaps soon instead of just having them endorse food, we’ll actually be eating celebrities.
Until then, let them eat cupcakes:
thanks to Nora Wainwright for the tip-off!
See Also:
From Yahoo! News:
An Italian who lost his left forearm in a car crash was successfully linked to a robotic hand, allowing him to feel sensations in the artificial limb and control it with his thoughts, scientists said Wednesday.
During a one-month experiment conducted last year, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello felt like his lost arm had grown back again, although he was only controlling a robotic hand that was not even attached to his body.
…
Petruzziello, an Italian who lives in Brazil, said the feedback he got from the hand was amazingly accurate.
“It felt almost the same as a real hand. They stimulated me a lot, even with needles … you can’t imagine what they did to me,” he joked with reporters.
While the “LifeHand” experiment lasted only a month, this was the longest time electrodes had remained connected to a human nervous system in such an experiment, said Silvestro Micera, one of the engineers on the team. Similar, shorter-term experiments in 2004-2005 hooked up amputees to a less-advanced robotic arm with a pliers-shaped end, and patients were only able to make basic movements, he said.
Experts not involved in the study told The Associated Press the experiment was an important step forward in creating a viable interface between the nervous system and prosthetic limbs, but the challenge now is ensuring that such a system can remain in the patient for years and not just a month.
via Joshua Ellis
In this provocatively titled lecture, from the very aptly named Festival of Dangerous Ideas , Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration:
…examines the nature of human beings as products of evolution, in particular their limited altruism, limited co-operative instincts and limited ability to take account of the future consequences of actions. He argues that humans’ biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design.
Which is a nice way of saying he makes a strong case for meddling in the genes of our children, and more importantly, can now identify just which ones to tweak.
This is nugenics kids, and it’s shit scary.
(OK, it would be slightly less creepy if he wasn’t wearing his suit jacket like a cape)
Watch on and be afraid; sooner or later a Government somewhere is going to try this!
The QnA starts mid-way through the second video and is particularly good, in that most of the questions you will have are actually asked by the audience.
thanks to my buddy The Dingo Strategy for the tip-off!
Related:
Researchers are no longer limited to creating artificial bladders or kidneys:
Researchers have engineered artificial penises in rabbits, using cells from the animals, who then used their new organs to father baby rabbits.
The work takes scientists closer to making other complex solid organs such as livers using a patient’s own cells, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
It provides a tailor-made transplant, said Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the study.
“Once the tissue is there, the body recognizes the tissue as its own,” Atala said in a telephone interview.
Atala focused on the penis because he is a pediatric urologist, who has specialized for years in disorders and congenital defects of the bladder and sexual organs.
“That was the inspiration for this work. We are seeing babies born with deficient genitalia all the time. There are no good options,” Atala said.
He is also a specialist in regenerative medicine, which uses the body’s own cells to repair damage. In this case, Atala’s team used ordinary cells, not the stem cells often used in such research.
Via reuters.com.
Winner of Electrolux’s design competition, this the Cocooon. It “would heat pre-mixed food packets containing muscle cells, oxygen and nutrients.” It would also, quite possibly, taste of despair.
Pic and quote from Daily Mail.
The implanted chip, according to the MIT team behind it, features a “microfabricated polyimide stimulating electrode array with sputtered iridium oxide electrodes” which is implanted into the user’s retina by a specially-developed surgical technique. There are also “secondary power and data receiving coils”.
Once the implant is in place, wireless transmissions are made from outside the head. These induce currents in the receiving coils of the nerve chip, meaning that it needs no battery or other power supply. The electrode array stimulates the nerves feeding the optic nerve, so generating a image in the brain.
The wireless signals, for use in humans, would be generated by a glasses-style headset equipped with cameras or other suitable sensors and transmitters tuned to the coils implanted in the head.
Currently implanted in Yucatan minipigs, human trials are still three years away. Link and photo via theregister.co.uk and original article (available to subscribers only) at Biomedical Engineering.
We touched on the same program in March of 2008, and now they are back with a new one this month, via we-make-money-not-art.com:
You might remember that back in May i was throwing seedballs all over Amsterdam along with Adam Zaretsky, the Waag society and other eco-enthusiast.
The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. comes back to town in September and this time the focus will be biology and bacterial transformation. VASTAL is a temporary research and education institute that Zaretsky has created in Amsterdam following an invitation by the Waag Society. The lectures and workshops aim to show the public what it means to work both artistically and scientifically with living organisms and materials. VASTAL also aims to make this form of art-science accessible for a broader audience and invite them to discuss the ethical and aesthetic issues at stake.
Topics include:
Brain thoughts:
Perhaps most perplexing is the question of legal responsibility. If someone wearing a neural prosthesis were to punch someone, who is to blame? The action may have been deliberate, in which case the patient is to blame, or the chip may have been malfunctioning and the responsibility would lie with the manufacturer. Discovering where the truth lay would be no easy task. The law has had trouble catching up with the self-parking car, never mind an electronically controlled limb gone wild.
From the article Bionic brain chips could overcome paralysis, via newscientist. com.
h+ have a great interview with Zach Lynch, author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World .
In “This is your brain on neurotechnology” they look at how society might be re-shaped as neurotech matures and becomes more widely used.
This is just a taste:
For example, there are over 100 compounds in clinical development right now focused on treating some form of memory loss. And we expect a small handful of these over the next decade to improve memory in normal humans. So you can imagine the inherent coercive force that will emerge as those treatments become developed. Imagine a 65-year-old programmer living in San Francisco and she’s competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai, India. Neither one knows whether the other is using one of these cognitive-enabling drugs.
And it’s not just drugs; there are neurodevices in development that will be able to improve memory and speed learning. What we’re going to see is what I call “neuro competition.” This is the next form of competition that individuals and businesses and nations will adapt to gain competitive advantage –- except this will be a neuro advantage. Just as companies today compete for a competitive advantage in information technology –- whether it’s the latest social software, the latest IT backbone, the latest servers, or the latest customer relationship management systems –- they will use neurotechnologies to improve their competitive positioning.
Imaginary advertisement, via nextnature.net.
Rebooting your sleep cycle? Totally possible, according to Harvard researcher Clifford Saper:
Harvard researcher Clifford Saper explains that one’s body has more than just a single clock dictating some magical eight-hour sleep period. Sleep needs are regulated in part by exposure to light, but also by food intake. By fasting for 16 hours before your breakfast in a new time zone or on a new sleep/wake schedule, or perhaps after some really rough sleep nights, one can “override” the body’s other sleep clocks that have a really aggravating way of demanding obedience. The Wise Bread blog suggests 12 hours might be a decent compromise if you can’t hold off for 16 hours, though Saper seems to suggest 16 is the magic number.
Link and video via lifehacker.com.
Recent research seems to have poinpointed exactly how birds can detect magnetic fields to guide themselves on long journeys. It’s been theorized for a while that a protein called Cryptochrome was the source of their magnetic sensitivity, but until now it was unknown how Cryptochrome actually created the “magnetic sight” effect.
Due to a laboratory mishap, scientists have discovered that toxic superoxides may be the previously missed ingredient.
“One of the researchers in our lab noticed that compounds called superoxides would partner very well with reactions associated with cryptochrome,” said study co-author Klaus Schulten, a biophysicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“However, what he did not realize was that superoxides are toxic to cells,” Schulten explained.
Although their initial reaction was to discard the experiment, the research team realized that low levels of superoxide would work with cryptochrome without damaging birds’ eyes.
So while it’s toxic, it seems that in birds’ “evolution has favored a bit of cellular damage in return for the navigational benefits of magnetic vision”. Which brings me to the obvious questions:
Superoxides exist in the human body, though in limited quantities because of their toxic nature, and Cryptochromes are responsible in part for maintaining circadian rhythms. Could this “magnetic vision” effect be duplicated in humans if a balance could be found between sensitivity and toxicity?
And the part of me that reads Fortean Times wonders if anyone has studied the concentrations of magnetic-sensitive compounds in people who claim to be sensitive to various (real or imagined) electromagnetic phenomena such as auras and the like.
[Via National Geographic News]
Neurosky’s mind control headset, the aptly named MindSet, is now available for purchase.
I had the chance to see an early version of these in action at the Tokyo Game Show last year, and it was pretty impressive tech.
The demo video gives a quick run-down on what apps are currently available with it:
Probably only for the first-adopter crowd right now, but I think we all can see the potential here.
Previously:
From Technology Review:
By adding fluorescent dyes to DNA and then spinning the DNA strands into nanofibers, researchers at the University of Connecticut have made a new material that emits bright white light. The material absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colors of light–from blue to orange to white–depending on the proportions of dye it contains.
…
The new material could be used to make a novel type of organic light bulb. The light emitters should also be longer-lasting because DNA is a very strong polymer, Sotzing says. “It’s well beyond other polymers [in strength],” he notes, adding that it lasts 50 times longer than acrylic.
The color-tunable DNA material relies on an energy-transfer mechanism between two different fluorescent dyes. The key is to keep the dye molecules separated at a distance of 2 to 10 nanometers from each other. When UV light is shined on the material, one dye absorbs the energy and produces blue light. If the other dye molecule is at the right distance, it will absorb part of that blue-light energy and emit orange light.
To make the fibers, Sotzing and his colleagues make a solution of salmon DNA and mix in the two types of dye. The solution is pumped slowly out from a fine needle, and a voltage is applied between the needle tip and a grounded copper plate covered with a glass slide. As the liquid jet comes out, it dries and forms long nanofibers that are deposited on the glass slide as a mat. The researchers then spin this nanofiber mat directly on the surface of an ultraviolet LED to make a white-light emitter.
Time and money, one of the enemies of skin grafts, could soon be a thing of the past:
Now, a team from Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute have created a way to mass-produce artificial skin, complete with blood vessels, that can be used for grafts, plastic surgery, or even cosmetics testing.
The basic skin production system, which Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft hopes to start selling next year, can produce 5,000 little swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around $49 to produce, far less than the current cost.
The system, which should be available in 2010, is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product. So far, this project has generated 19 patents for Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
In addition to providing new skin to burn victims, these swatches can also take the place of animals in medical and cosmetic testing. Also, since the swatches can be made to contain blood vessels as well as skin cells, scientists can run circulatory as well as skin-related experiments on them.
Photo and words via popsci.com.
Thanks to LBA for the tip!
image by e-spaces
From PhysOrg:
The methods that are currently used to stimulate nerve signals in the nervous system are based on electrical stimulation. Examples of this are cochlear implants, which are surgically inserted into the cochlea in the inner ear, and electrodes that are used directly in the brain. One problem with this method is that all cell types in the vicinity of the electrode are activated, which gives undesired effects.
Scientists have now used an electrically conducting plastic to create a new type of “delivery electrode” that instead releases the neurotransmitters that brain cells use to communicate naturally. The advantage of this is that only neighbouring cells that have receptors for the specific neurotransmitter, and that are thus sensitive to this substance, will be activated.
The scientists demonstrate in the article in Nature Materials that the delivery electrode can be used to control the hearing function in the brains of guinea pigs.
“The ability to deliver exact doses of neurotransmitters opens completely new possibilities for correcting the signalling systems that are faulty in a number of neurological disease conditions”, says Professor Agneta Richter-Dahlfors who has led the work, together with Professor Barbara Canlon.
The scientists intend to continue with the development of a small unit that can be implanted into the body. It will be possible to program the unit such that the release of neurotransmitters takes place as often or as seldom as required in order to treat the individual patient. Research projects that are already under way are targeted towards hearing, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.
From io9.com:
A group of Spanish researchers reported today in Science that they may have stumbled upon a substance that could become the ultimate memory-enhancer. The group was studying a poorly-understood region of the visual cortex. They found that if they boosted production of a protein called RGS-14 in that area of the visual cortex in mice, it dramatically affected the animals’ ability to remember objects they had seen.
Mice with the RGS-14 boost could remember objects they had seen for up to two months. Ordinarily the same mice would only be able to remember these objects for about an hour.
Researchers at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT have developed an implant that could take the place of a laboratory when it comes to monitoring the growth, shrinkage, metastasis or drug response of a tumor. The tiny implant would be placed when the initial biopsy is done on the tumor, and then, the device would obviate the need for additional biopsies and time consuming lab work.
How? The tiny implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies that are specific to the molecules they want to attract. Instead of returning to the lab in two weeks or four for another biopsy, which would take at least a few days to return to the doctor’s office, you would get a quick MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and your progress would be known immediately. And if your cancer is starting to metasticize, your doctor needs to know right away, not four days away, when something else is going on. No surgery. No waiting.
Michael Cima, MIT professor of materials science and engineering, who developed the device with his colleagues, said he believes an implant to test for pH levels could be commercially available in a few years, followed by devices to test for complex chemicals such as hormones and drugs.
Image and words via inventorspot.com.