I was trying to ignore this one, but it seems to be the story of the day.

Thankfully, the reaction far and wide seems to be one of incredulity, or else I’d have to have a long slow cry over a glass of scotch regarding the state of the internet.  As it is, I’ll stick to the scotch.

Ryan Singel over at Wired’s Threat Level broke the story* regarding the latest horror to target our kids in the US – of course I’m talking about iDosing.

That’s right, your standard binaural beats are being packaged by at least one clueless Oklahoma school district and ratings-starved, journalist-devoid local CW affiliate as the newest cyber-danger to cyber-come from cyber-space to cyber-molest your cyber-children under your very own cyber-nose.

Which is to say, that if you live in Oklahoma, your tax dollars are paying for someone at the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics to actually be worried that kids are “getting high” off of music and noise and that it will lead them to harder non-cyber-drugs.

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?

I normally try and restrain myself on here, but I’m out of ways to wittily articulate the tax-dollar supported stupidity on display here, so I’ll try and make this brief.

If you are a school board member/Oklahoma narcotics officer/journalist/parent concerned that there are now cyber-drugs going in the ears of innocent children, I’d encourage you to do one of two things:

Step 1: Get on the internet and make a vague attempt to educate yourself.  Yes, we all know that Chris Hanson has told you that the internet is a living meat-pyramid of pedophiles, but really, it’s not that bad.  If you don’t at least have a clue regarding cyber-anything, how are you supposed to know a cyber-drug if you see it?   And if you’re on the official drug enforcement end of things you have no right to enforce cyber-jack-all without knowing what the hell you’re actually cyber-doing.

And if you can’t be bothered to do the 5 minutes of looking to realize this has been around for ages, and is a technique on CDs, in music, and in movies and not just on shady ripoff websites designed to make a quick buck off of the fact that you won’t let your kids have the good shit, then we move on to the next option:

Step 2: Go fuck yourself. Seriously, if you’re actually, really concerned about iDosing, then you are in fact not tall enough to ride this ride and are a contributing factor to why we can’t have nice things. Stop letting waxen-faced local news personalities fill your head with fear – which might be hard since it is the drug they’re peddling and it’s probably your drug of choice – and check yourself…

…before you wiggity-wreck yourself, or make a goddamn ass out of yourself in front of your kids and the rest of the world.

Merciful Vishnu, wait till they get a load of the the Brown Note.

[*Actually the first time I ever saw it was over on Technoccult, but every panic on the internet makes everything new again.]

[Via Wired: Threat Level, Technoccult]

For the discerning biopunk, presenting vat-grown couture.

Via ecouterre comes “BioCouture, an experiment in growing garments from the same microbes that ferment the tasty caffeinated beverage”:

More pix over on BoingBoing.

Here’s the teaser trailer for a forthcoming documentary “exploring mankind’s journey to ‘play jazz with the universe’… it is a story of our ultimate potential, the reach of our intelligence, the scope of our scientific and engineering abilities and the transcendent quality of our heroic and noble calling.”

How about a round-up post showing a few ways in which (if we can survive long enough) we just might get to live forever?

First off, scientists! have created stretchy artificial skin:

Scientists at Spain’s University of Granada have created artificial skin with the resistance, firmness and elasticity of real skin. It is the first time artificial skin has been created from fibrin-agarose biomaterial. Fibrin is a protein involved in the clotting of the blood, while agarose is a sugar obtained from seaweed, commonly used to create gels in laboratories. The new material could be used in the treatment of skin problems, and could also replace test animals in dermatological labs

They say perfect for burn victims, I say skin-covered body mods would be neat too.

Speaking of DIY efforts, how about an interview in the Economist about DIY BIO?

It will surprise few of you that DARPA is still bent on creating super-soldiers, or in this case making them super-survivors.

Lastly, this TEDMED Talk from 2009 on regenerating organs is just… whoa:

Previously:

• TED Talk: Suspended animation is within our grasp

To Age or Not to Age profiles the science of aging, it also addresses some of the moral, religious, practical and economic implications of increased, lifespan. Who will have access to the medicine? Who will benefit from the breakthroughs? Will the price of these compounds make this a drug for the elites?

This has had very limited screenings so far, but if you’re in, or near, Paris you can see it on the 29th.

The TED Talk that blew everyone away this year; not only have they figured out how to induce a form of suspended animation in humans, it’s already in clinical trials!

thanks for the tip-off Rusty!

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:

• Cocoon – the cooker that grows it’s own meat

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:

• Nick Bostrom on existential risks and posthumanity

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:

• Alt-Biology: Solar Transgenics, Synthetic Biology, Nanotech Biomimicry, Post-Natural History and Green Biofuel

• Tissue Culture Lab

• Growing Politics: Tissue Culture and Art meets Urbanibalism

• (De)Mystified DNA: Sequencing Lab

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]