This is a bit big. As Bruce Sterling reminds us, “Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being.”

Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), led by its director María Blasco, have demonstrated that the mouse lifespan can be extended by the application in adult life of a single treatment acting directly on the animal’s genes. And they have done so using gene therapy, a strategy never before employed to combat aging. The therapy has been found to be safe and effective in mice.

The results were recently published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. The CNIO team, in collaboration with Eduard Ayuso and Fátima Bosch of the Centre of Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), treated adult (one-­‐year-­‐old) and aged (two-­‐year-­‐old) mice, with the gene therapy delivering a “rejuvenating” effect in both cases, according to the authors.

Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average, and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals’ health, delaying the onset of age-­‐related diseases — like osteoporosis and insulin resistance — and achieving improved readings on aging indicators like neuromuscular coordination.

The gene therapy consisted of treating the animals with a DNA-­modified virus, the viral genes having been replaced by those of the telomerase enzyme, with a key role in aging. Telomerase repairs the extreme ends or tips of chromosomes, known as telomeres, and in doing so slows the cell’s and therefore the body’s biological clock. When the animal is infected, the virus acts as a vehicle depositing the telomerase gene in the cells.

This study “shows that it is possible to develop a telomerase-­based anti-­aging gene therapy without increasing the incidence of cancer,” the authors affirm. “Aged organisms accumulate damage in their DNA due to telomere shortening, [this study] finds that a gene therapy based on telomerase production can repair or delay this kind of damage,” they add.

…

In 2007, Blasco’s group demonstrated that it was feasible to prolong the lives of transgenic mice, whose genome had been permanently altered at the embryonic stage, by causing their cells to express telomerase and, also, extra copies of cancer-­‐resistant genes. These animals live 40% longer than is normal and do not develop cancer.

The mice subjected to the gene therapy now under test are likewise free of cancer. Researchers believe this is because the therapy begins when the animals are adult so do not have time to accumulate sufficient number of aberrant divisions for tumours to appear.

Also important is the kind of virus employed to carry the telomerase gene to the cells. The authors selected demonstrably safe viruses that have been successfully used in gene therapy treatment of hemophilia and eye disease. Specifically, they are non-­‐replicating viruses derived from others that are non-­‐pathogenic in humans.

This study is viewed primarily as “a proof-­‐of-­‐principle that telomerase gene therapy is a feasible and generally safe approach to improve healthspan and treat disorders associated with short telomeres,” state Virginia Boccardi (Second University of Naples) and Utz Herbig (New Jersey Medical School-­‐University Hospital Cancer Centre) in a commentary published in the same journal.

…

With regard to the therapy under testing, Bosch explains: “Because the vector we use expresses the target gene (telomerase) over a long period, we were able to apply a single treatment. This might be the only practical solution for an anti-­‐aging therapy, since other strategies would require the drug to be administered over the patient’s lifetime, multiplying the risk of adverse effects.”

This is a good start. Read it in full at Science Daily.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.

~ Tesla (via @NikolaTeslaBot)

Viral video of the year goes to:

Meanwhile in the DANGERZONE… err, WIRED’s Dangerroom, fusing man and machine:

The body’s own nerves are arguably the biggest barrier towards turning the dream of lifelike replacements into a reality. Peripheral nerves, severed by amputation, can no longer transmit or receive any of the myriad sensory signals we rely on every day. Trying to fuse them with robot limbs, to create a direct neural-prosthetic interface, is no easy task.

“We think the interface problem is key to enabling the neuro-prosthetic concept,” Dr. Shawn Dirk, one of the researchers behind the finding, tells Danger Room. “And solving that is how we’re going to give amputees their bodies back.”

Dirk, alongside colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories, the University of New Mexico and the MD Anderson Cancer Center, set out to develop a synthetic substance that could act as a scaffold — that is, an artificial structure that can support tissue growth — successfully merging severed nerves with robotic limbs.

Of course, researchers have already made plenty of efforts to directly integrate nerves and prosthetics. But, according to Dirk, they typically “didn’t use technology that was compatible with nerve fibers,” which are tightly bundled and flexible. “Nerves need to grow and move around; they’re not going to integrate well with a stiff interface.”

Yes, the material comprising the scaffold had to be flexible and fluid, but it also needed to be extremely conductive. Nerve signals are highly localized, and also very, very subtle. An effective neural-prosthetic interface would need to transmit thousands of different signals per second to mimic the behavior of a real limb and its relationship to the brain and body.

To create that ideal interface, Dirk and his colleagues developed their own biocompatible polymers, meant to mimic the properties of nerve tissue. The material is also porous, so that nerves can extend through it, and lined with electrodes, to vastly enhance conductivity.

“There was a very limited inflammatory response,” Dirk says. “That’s important, because we’re looking for an interface that won’t be rejected by the body. We want something that can last years, decades, and hopefully entire lifetimes.”

The finding marks a huge, huge improvement over previous research efforts. Even Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm and a leader in prosthetic science, couldn’t seem to figure out a direct neural-prosthetic interface that was adequately sensitive and had a lifespan longer than a few months. In 2010, the agency asked for new research proposals that’d solve both those problems.

And while new prototype prosthetics have some incredible abilities, none of them include a direct interface. In fact, they’ve been designed to avoid one altogether. One Pentagon-funded project used “targeted muscle reinnervation surgery” to develop prosthetics that transmit signals from a bundle of nerves in the chest. Another, led by Johns Hopkins scientists, uses brain-implanted micro-arrays to transmit cues to an artificial limb.

A direct neural-prosthetic interface still remains years away. But if this polymer holds up in subsequent tests, it’ll mean prosthetics far more lifelike than even the most impressive artificial limbs currently in development. Most importantly, in the words of Darpa, prosthetics hooked right into the nervous system “would incorporate the [artificial] limb into the sense-of-self.”

 

But wait, perhaps I can interest you in immortality? Meet Brooke:

“Brooke is a miracle,” says her father, Howard Greenberg. “Brooke is a mystery,” says Lawrence Pakula, her pediatrician. “Brooke is an opportunity,” says Richard Walker, a geneticist with the University of South Florida College of Medicine. They all mean the girl from Reisterstown, a small town in the US state of Maryland, who may hold the answer to a human mystery. At issue is nothing less than immortality: Brooke Greenberg apparently isn’t aging.

She has no hormonal problems, and her chromosomes seem normal. But her development is proceeding “extremely slowly,” says Walker. If scientists can figure out what is causing the disorder, it might be possible to unlock the mysteries of aging itself. “Then we’ve got the golden ring,” says Walker.

He hopes to simply eliminate age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and diabetes. People who no longer age will no longer get sick, he reasons. But he also thinks eternal life is conceivable. “Biological immortality is possible,” says Walker. “If you don’t get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years.”

And we can’t talk about the New Gods without mentioning CHRONICLE (aka #newgodsproblems). Talkback anyone?

Some tasty news lately for aspirant cyborgs. Let’s take a look:

• From BBC News – Monkeys’ brain waves offer paraplegics hope:
  

  
  …researchers trained the monkeys, Mango and Tangerine, to play a video game using a joystick to move the virtual arm and capture three identical targets. Each target was associated with a different vibration of the joystick.

  Multiple electrodes were implanted in the brains of the monkeys and connected to the computer screen. The joystick was removed and motor signals from the monkey’s brains then controlled the arm.

  At the same time, signals from the virtual fingers as they touched the targets were transmitted directly back into the brain.

  The monkeys had to search for a target with a specific texture to gain a reward of fruit juice. It only took four attempts for one of the monkeys to figure out how to make the system work.

  According to Prof Nicolelis, the system has now been developed so the monkeys can control the arm wirelessly.

  “We have an interface for 600 channels of brain signal transmission, so we can transmit 600 channels of brain activity wirelessly as if you had 600 cell phones broadcasting this activity.

  “For patients this will be very important because there will be no cables whatsoever connecting the patient to any equipment.”

  The scientists say that this work represents a major step on the road to developing robotic exoskeletons – wearable technology would allow patients afflicted by paralysis to regain some movement.

• From Engadget – Cyberdyne HAL robotic arm hands-on:
  

  …if all goes well, we may well see a brand new full-body suit at CES 2012 in January, so stay tuned.

• From Gizmodo – Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment:
  

  …according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—”this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

  Indeed, it’s mindblowing. I’m simultaneously excited and terrified. This is how it works:

  They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain’s blood flow through their brains’ visual cortex.

  The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.

  After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting video is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.

  Think about those 18 million seconds of random videos as a painter’s color palette. A painter sees a red rose in real life and tries to reproduce the color using the different kinds of reds available in his palette, combining them to match what he’s seeing. The software is the painter and the 18 million seconds of random video is its color palette. It analyzes how the brain reacts to certain stimuli, compares it to the brain reactions to the 18-million-second palette, and picks what more closely matches those brain reactions. Then it combines the clips into a new one that duplicates what the subject was seeing. Notice that the 18 million seconds of motion video are not what the subject is seeing. They are random bits used just to compose the brain image.

  Given a big enough database of video material and enough computing power, the system would be able to re-create any images in your brain.

• Let’s not forget our second-selfs. From WIRED – Clive Thompson on Memory Engineering:
  

  Right now, of course, our digital lives are so bloated they’re basically imponderable. Many of us generate massive amounts of personal data every day — phonecam pictures, text messages, status updates, and so on. By default, all of us are becoming lifeloggers. But we almost never go back and look at this stuff, because it’s too hard to parse.

  Memory engineers are solving that problem by creating services that reformat that data in witty, often artistic ways. 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo was coinvented this past winter by New York programmer Jonathan Wegener, who had a clever intuition: One year is a potent anniversary that makes us care about a specific moment in our past. After developing the Foursquare service, his team went on to craft PastPosts, which does the same thing with Facebook activity, and it has amassed tens of thousands of users in just a few months.

  “There are so many trails we leave through the world,” Wegener says. “I wanted to make them interesting to you again.”

Lastly, some older things that slipped through the cracks:

• From io9 – A gallery of biotech devices that could give you superpowers right now
• http://www.vimeo.com/10184668
  

  A quick tutorial on how to extract serial data from the $80 Mattel Mindflex (mindflexgames.com)

• From MIT’s technology review – Tattoo Tracks Sodium and Glucose via an iPhone:


The tattoo developed by Clark’s team contains 120-nanometer-wide polymer nanodroplets consisting of a fluorescent dye, specialized sensor molecules designed to bind to specific chemicals, and a charge-neutralizing molecule.

Once in the skin, the sensor molecules attract their target because they have the opposite charge. Once the target chemical is taken up, the sensor is forced to release ions in order to maintain an overall neutral charge, and this changes the fluorescence of the tattoo when it is hit by light. The more target molecules there are in the patient’s body, the more the molecules will bind to the sensors, and the more the fluorescence changes.

The original reader was a large boxlike device. One of Clark’s graduate students, Matt Dubach, improved upon that by making a modified iPhone case that allows any iPhone to read the tattoos.

Here’s how it works: a case that slips over the iPhone contains a nine-volt battery, a filter that fits over the iPhone’s camera, and an array of three LEDs that produce light in the visible part of the spectrum. This light causes the tattoos to fluoresce. A light-filtering lens is then placed over the iPhone’s camera. This filters out the light released by the LEDs, but not the light emitted by the tattoo. The device is pressed to the skin to prevent outside light from interfering.

Dubach and Clark hope to create an iPhone app that would easily measure and record sodium levels. At the moment, the iPhone simply takes images of the fluorescence, which the researchers then export to a computer for analysis. They also hope to get the reader to draw power from the iPhone itself, rather than from a battery.

Clark is working to expand her technology from glucose and sodium to include a wide range of potential targets. “Let’s say you have medication with a very narrow therapeutic range,” she says. Today, “you have to try it [a dosage] and see what happens.” She says her nanosensors, in contrast, could let people monitor the level of a given drug in their blood in real time, allowing for much more accurate dosing.

The researchers hope to soon be able to measure dissolved gases, such as nitrogen and oxygen, in the blood as a way of checking respiration and lung function. The more things they can track, the more applications will emerge, says Clark

Steve Fuller, apparently a philosopher-sociologist of science and technology has released this series of book ‘trailers’ for his latest work, Humanity 2.0. This is the Introduction:

The further into these trailers I got, the more concerned I became, and not just because he talks positively about Intelligent Design. What concerns me is EVERYTHING HE SAYS, and that his academic creditionals will lend authenticity to his… argument, and he will be taken as an expert by the media on the future of humanity. This man is what I am now calling a Maladaptor.

Unfortunately I don’t have the spare brain capacity at the moment to read and dissect his rationale in detail, but if you are willing to suffer so we don’t have to, please do so, send in your review/retort and we’ll publish a set of them here.

They’re the first version of the next stage of human evolution, peope with a “neurological difference that confers some exceptional advantage.” They fight crime.

Alphas is SyFy’s new ‘superhuman’ crime drama - basically a grounded, more constrained version of the X-Men, complete with it’s own Brotherhood of Mutants, Red Flag. It’s far from perfect (it’s certainly no Misfits), but it has potential and is immediately far surperior to Heroes.

Great overview on Better Living Through Upgrades:

Watch the full episode.

via Wolven

Always interesting to see how the mainstream re-packages the fringe as the cutting edge.

Song of the Machine is my favourite kind of design fiction, combining multiple forms of extrapolation from the present into the future.

Unlike the implants and electrodes used to achieve bionic vision, this science modifies the human body genetically from within. First, a virus is used to infect the degenerate eye with a light-sensitive protein, altering the biological capabilities of the subject. Then, the new biological capabilities are augmented with wearable (opto)electronics, which, by mimicking the eye’s neural song, establish a direct optical link to the brain. It’s as if the virus gives the body ears to hear the song of the machine, allowing it to sing the world into being.

So we’ve got advances in genetic engineering combined with electronic ones to overcome a biological disability through continuing man’s progress, it’s ongoing co-evolution with the tools he creates. Except this marks a Rubicon Moment, the crossing of a threshold into a merger between man and his technology and the result is something far more, a step toward the posthuman.

Get used to this. Better living through upgrades.

For more details see this article in the Guardian by the consultant to this project, Dr Patrick Degenaar, optogenetics researcher at Newcastle University and leader of the OptoNeuro project.

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:

• 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.

There is a piece by author Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books that has been going around on the Internet the last few days.  It starts as a review of The Social Network and then becomes a critique of Facebook in general.  That it’s largely being spread by vocal quitters of the world’s most successful social networking system (SNS) gives you a clue to her conclusion.

It’s a very, very long piece (it’s taken me two days to wade through it) and while she frequently approaches some keen insights, she quickly gives in to hateful generationalism of GenYs instead.  It was my great fear that this would be the take Fincher and Sorkin would go with the film; instead they delivered a masterful origin tale.  So I was very surprised to find myself reading a piece like this.  Take this passage:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?⁴

She identifies as a superior “Person 1.0″, where Facebookian’s are “People 2.0″, the online generation. (Sidenote – I am so over this use of versioning.)  Continuing in the long tradition of the elders wanting the kids to get off her lawn.  OK, let’s grant the versioning..  Facebook is just a stepping stone; a sure to be primitive version of life online (that great Transhumanist dream), adopted by the masses.  En masse; one giant Eternal September.  It’s far from perfect.

As Cory Doctorow has frequently said, contemporary SNSs function like Autistics – requiring every bit of personal data to be explicitly stated, impossible to infer because they lack the onboard social software that provides this.  As the film so accurately protrays, right from the beginning, Zuckerberg himself appears to be a high-functioning autistic.  That this is what it took for a widely successful SNS, an outsider divining the workings of inter-personal relationships and capturing that with software, perhaps speaks more about it’s users, than it’s developer(s).  Maybe we get the SNS we deserve.

Now, I’ve advised caution with online personas many times here.  Using an alias, for instance, is a great idea.  If Facebook is a virtual nation, then as citizens we can protest for great rights and improvements to our conditions.  And they do appear to listen, and get the hint eventually.  After all, though Zuckerberg is an on-paper bazillionaire, that will fade to nothing once a better SNS comes along and everyone immigrates to that superior nation.  And that will happen.  This is just an initial step.

Again, Smith approaches this in her review section:

Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin wants your disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world.

Now I don’t agree that Sorkin wanted our disapproval.  The strength of this movie is (like Facebook) that they’ve distilled the subject matter down to it’s key elements.  She’s drawn her own conclusions and it putting this forth as the one-true-fact.  Everyone I’ve spoken to about the film seems to find sympathy with different characters.  (Personally, the only character I liked was the internet rockstar take on Sean Parker.)

Software may reduce humans, but there are degrees. Fiction reduces humans, too, but bad fiction does it more than good fiction, and we have the option to read good fiction. Jaron Lanier’s point is that Web 2.0 “lock-in” happens soon; is happening; has to some degree already happened. And what has been “locked in”? It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)

Here we witness Smith cherry-picking from Jaron Lanier’s book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, to bolster her arguments. Again, note the dismissive tone – GenY is stupid and does not like The Right Stuff, unlike superior Zadie.  Frankly, how fucking dare she. Now, I have Laniers book still on my to-read list so I can’t comment on that, but..  BUT.. if Zadie had better researched her piece she’d know that, just for starters, blaming the blue’n'white layout on Zuckerberg’s colorblindness is insulting to anyone with a CompSci degree, or a modicum of knowledge;  blue and white is infact the best colour scheme on the eyes – perfect from keeping the attention glued on the screen without distracting strain pain.  So yes, Facebook is kinda a little bit evil like that.  No physical nation-state we live in so is far perfect either.

You can give up and go live in a cave or fight to make it better.  Blanketly dismissing an entire generation is no way to do either.  Shame on you Zadie Smith!

As was mentioned in our interview with Amber Case, it’s Cyborg Month.  Tim Maly has created the 50Cyborgs project; 50 posts about Cyborgs to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the coining of the word.  He writes:

…when you think about cyborgs… Don’t think about total loss of self, bodies encroached and erased by technology, humanity swallowed whole.

Instead think of cellphones.

Think about off-loaded memories, of constantly renewed enhancement and new abilities. But also think about insistent ringtones, and demanding interruptions, think of externally controlled access, and a reliance on a sprawling infrastructure.

We are shaped by the technologies because in integrating them, they become us. And though we can discard or upgrade them, this is no less true of our cultural selves. Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow but those possibilities are shaped and constrained by the biology, culture and technology that is part of you.

There have been some fantastic submissions so far and it’s only up to no. 34.  From Kanye West as a Media Cyborg to Kevin Kelly’s piece on Domesticated Cyborgs and Cities For Cyborgs: 10 Rules by Keiichi Matsuda, the creator of Domestic Robocop and Augmented City.  Not to mention excellent pieces by our friends Chris Arkenberg and Paul Raven.  I could go on and on.

For Grinding though, the clear favourite is Cyborg Realism: IEDs, Prosthetic Limbs and Military R&D.  To quote Tim himself, it’s about “war enhancements, soldiers bodies and mass-produced, replaceable materiel, bluetooth replacement legs that send computers on the fritz and sometimes bug out and kick at random.” Featuring this video:

Kick ass! Dive in, and dive deep, into this excellent examination of the past and future of all things Cyborgery.

We kind of like Kevin Warwick a lot here. And for good reason, he is, like Tony Stark, using himself as a test-pilot for the future.

So, of course, we must post this interview with him over on Motherboard.tv:

Most interesting is him further confirming that neuro-streaming will be the Next Big Thing, in Lifeblogging..

via Gizmodo

In a great victory for the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY, Mattel have released the perfect gift for all the little Transhumanists in the house, Barbie Video Girl.

As this video shows, the camera quality is pretty decent, and the design is frankly hilarious:

I am hoping this could mean the return of the Barbie Liberation Organization.

thanks for the tip-off Seej500!

The UK’s Astronomer Royal, Baron Martin Rees, recently gave a fascinating lecture as part of the Seminars of Long-term Thinking series, put on by the Long Now Foundation.

From Stewart Brand’s summation of the speech:

“We are the nuclear waste of stellar fusion,” Rees noted, the ash from long-dead stars all over the galaxy exchanging their gases in a complex ecology, and the galaxies show a mega-structure of density contrasts generated by gravity. Poised midway in scale between atoms and stars, biological life appears to be the peak of complexity in the universe—a flea is more complicated than a star.

Since we don’t know how our own life emerged and haven’t discovered any elsewhere, we still have no idea whether life is common in the universe or if we are unique. We can be certain that we are not the culmination of life forms here, because we are less than halfway through the Sun’s lifespan. In the six billion years to come, there are likely to be creatures as far beyond humans as we are beyond microbes, and science as far beyond our present understanding as quantum theory is remote to a chimpanzee.

Now that we are stewards of this planet, we are responsible for maintaining life’s possibilities in this cosmic neighborhood.

It’s over an hour and half long, but it’s riveting stuff. Grab the link and (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere) sit outside, stare at the stars and listen. Or just hit play here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Bonus Content!

For your patience you get a treat – A Glorious Dawn, an auto-tuned mash-up of Carl Sagan’s work, featuring Stephen Hawking:

Second, a profile of Elon Musk and his desire to retire to Mars.

Lastly, Charlie Stross has been having fun dissecting various aspects of space colonization; from working out the size of an independent off-world colony, to critiquing the much worn ‘space as another Wild Frontier’ myth.

“Man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” – Julian Huxley

“Transhumanism is the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, physically, mentally and socially using rational methods.” – Dr. Anders Sandburg

“[Transhumanism is] a strange liberation movement” [that wants] “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.” – Francis Fukuyama

“Transhumanism is the idea that new technologies are likely to change the world so much in the next century or two that our descendants will in many ways no longer be ‘human’” – Dr. Robin Hanson

“Transhumanism is the doctrine that we can and should become more than human.” – Mitch Porter

“Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life [..]. Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies[…]” – Dr. Max Moore

I want to share something with you – probably the most important thing I’ve told you in these pages.  It’s not quite a secret, though you probably won’t hear it this way from anyone at the Singularity Summit.  Still, it is the single most important thing you will ever learn about the “Transhumanist movement.”

There is no such thing as Transhumanism.

Don’t ignore the bulk of Transhumanist and Extropian research and writing.  Don’t ignore the  vast amount of pontificating on post-singularity existance.  Don’t ignore the ten-thousand dollar a head business day camps and the tech seminars and the religious zealots who desperately need a mind-controlling conspiracy to oppose.  All of that work and thought and effort is very real and, even if you’re just hearing about Transhumanism in the last couple of years you will see these things trickle into your life in the most unexpected places.

That’s because Transhumanism is real.

What do you think of when you think of Transhumans?  Life extension. Cyborgs.  Artificial Intelligence.  Uploading. Skynet. Nanoswarms. Uplifted octopi. Geoengineering. Sex-bots.

What if I asked you to think about examples of Transhumanism in the present?  Life extension. Athletes with prosthetics.  Prosthetic faces. RFID chips. Artificial eyes. Printable organs. Transexuals.  Rudimentary robots.  Industrial exoskeletons.  Military exoskeletons. Genetically Modified Organisms.  Artificial life. Patenting genomes. Augmented Reality. Sex-bots.

What if I asked that question in 1990?  1970? 1960?

It’s pretty easy to answer in these decades.  There’s a wealth of books and articles and essays and failing that, it’s simple to turn to fiction as the decades move backwards.   Implants hook antiheroes to computers beneath skies the colour of dead televisions while FM-2030 tries to open eyes to Transhumanity in the 80′s before his date with an Alcor storage chamber and hopeful cold resurrection.

The term “Transhuman” wasn’t coined until 1957, so before then to ask our hypothetical question, we might have to be a bit more descriptive.  Still, if you conjured an image of human and technological hybridity for the advancement of the human organism in years prior you’d get different but amazingly similar images as you traveled back to the industrial revolution and beyond.

There would be repeating themes as you traveled back – immortality, health, flight, a desire to be smarter/faster/stronger.  After that, though, you’d be left with  - just as our technological obsessions reveal, today – the image of humanity in the interviewee’s eyes.

Transhumanism – the desire to refine the human vessel and spirit into something more via technology is not new.  As Erik Davis points out in his book TechGnosis – this drive has been there as far as we know how to look back to.  The tools are new but the aims are the same.   Yesterday’s mysticism beget yesterday’s alchemy, which brought the enlightenment, which brought industrialization, which brought futurism and today, we call the mass of thoughts surrounding this drive “Transhumanism.” (Or better still: Extropianism, which is a more specific and technically precise term but one that hasn’t permeated the popular consciousness, yet.)

Here’s the trick of it, though.  Many individuals when discussing Transhumanism, get tied up in the technology aspect of it and the miss the forest for the trees because the trees seem to be growing human tissue.  To consider Transhumanism a movement, you have to realize that it is refering to a series of events that began when Grock picked up his first rock.

Transhumanism is a name applied to a kind of thinking concerning technological hybridity.  It is a mathematics that adds human to a variable to get Human Plus, which in turn is added to a variable and a new result is produced.

This isn’t new.  We’ve been a tool-using species for a hell of a long time.  Grok plus a rock for hitting things was Grok Plus.  Grock with a rock and fire was the Grok Kurzweil of his time.   It might have been a low-bandwith exchange, but Grok was changed by his usage of tools as much as he used his tools to change his environment.

We have always been human/technology hybrids.

Throk has symbols and sounds.  Those symbols become language.  Language both changes how the brain works and jacks Throk and his descendants into the very first augmented reality.  Throck pointing at a symbol on the wall and evoking a wolf shares the same technological space as my pointing at a wolf made of prims in Second Life as a kid pointing at the wolf on an AR display in Tokyo.   Throk has the killer app and from now on everyone will have proto-Augmented Reality and someday it will be so ingrained and natural that we will be unable to uninstall it.

Throk begat a species of Transhumans who will always have self-upgrading versions of Language installed.  Even if for some freak reason the app doesn’t get installed, the wetware will still be optimized to use it.

Language and tools gave us discernible culture – a whole series of interlocking technologies that are designed to propagate and spread and protect the clients who have it installed.  Culture becomes agriculture and suddenly everything changes all over again.  The technologies of agriculture make humans change their lives around them.

Transhumanism is concerned with events that began before the dawn of recorded history.  Transhumanism – as most people will present it to you – does not exist because the core concern of Transhumanity is the Human condition itself.

Human history is Transhuman history.  We have always been a species using technology to transform ourselves, make ourselves better or even just figure out what “better” means.

In fact I’ll go out on a limb here and lay out my most tightly held belief - I’m not a big believer in “human nature” but if there is one facet of human nature that I believe in it’s this:

The nature of mankind is to transcend itself.

The urge for technological transcendence and refinement – and the follow-through upon it is not new.  What changes is the scale and complexity involved.  Things become more complex, which creates change at a faster and faster rate however; while the shells may be moving faster and there may be more of them – the game remains the same.

William Godwin tells his daughter Mary Shelley about the link between liberty and human immortality as elsewhen Thomas Aquinas St. Ambrose performs the nearly miraculous act of reading silently without moving his lips.  Agriculture causes a vast population boom, but also creates the conditions that will one day develop into global war, ecological disaster, patriarchy, and genocide.

Fukuyama who has devoted his life to Capitalism and Democracy proclaims that Transhumanism is a threat even though Capitalism in and of itself is a technology designed to propagate and maneuver goods, services and currency which are all in and of themselves technologies designed to enhance or expand the human condition.  Francis Fukuyama is a Transhumanist, too.

Transhuman technologies heal your diseases, bind your wounds, purify and pollute your air.   Memory palaces made the mind bigger, psychedelics make the ego membrane more permeable.   The internet makes us smarter or maybe it just makes us faster at being shallow.

Transhumanism does not exist – it is an illusion.   It is a construct that allows the examination of Humanity through a lens that makes the implicit hybridization of the human organism and technology explicit.   It is a trick of the eye to try and help us not suffer ontological shock when the future comes and it is both different from the one we expected and filled with changes to ourselves.   Each generation takes technologies and normalizes them – moving them from the realm of the strange and the Other into their accepted schema of how the world works.  Glass eyes move on to artificial hearts, to personal internet  to sex changes to better-than-human prosthetics.

This is how it works, because this is how it has always worked.

There is no such thing as Transhumanism. And that is why it is such an important and vital concept at its core when stripped of the commercial baggage.

Transhumanism is a story we tell ourselves in order to recover from the culturally-stagnating and dangerous idea that we as humans are separate from and somehow not responsible for our technologies.  And in that way, while it is a fiction, it is a useful fiction – a minor trick of mental prestidigitation that people of all types can use to contextualize themselves in the ever more complex and constantly transforming narratives of history.

It’s the eternal romance that even though the dancers may change – somewhere out there, humanity will still be dancing.

Time for a chuckle, as we watch this stumbling interview between a NY Times journalist and the robot “Bina48″, a creation of Terasem:

As is made clear, Bina48 isn’t actually a robot, but rather an imperfect digital emulation of a person, based on an incomplete ‘upload’. Which would be a far more interesting thing to explore. Rather than, “LOL, robot speak funny”. Better luck next time, NY Times!

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.