Great overview on Better Living Through Upgrades:

Watch the full episode.

via Wolven

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.

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.

Wonderful gallery in Time Life, In Praise of Prosthetics (via @aeromenthe):

Meanwhile, on Engadget:

“the world’s first and only motor-powered prosthetic knee” was recently approved for reimbursement by the German National Health System, covered by private insurance in France and the UK, and picked up by select healthcare providers in the US. Power Knee combines “artificial intelligence,” motion sensors, and wireless communication to learn and adjust to the walking style of its users — that’s one small step for real-life cyborgs and one giant leap for prosthetic technology.

We’re seriously entering into “chop my weak flesh off and give me that” territory here.

From IEEE Spectrum:

German researchers have built an anthropomorphic robot hand that can endure collisions with hard objects and even strikes from a hammer without breaking into pieces. [Video]

In designing the new hand system, researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), focused on robustness. They may have just built the toughest robot hand yet.

The DLR hand has the shape and size of a human hand, with five articulated fingers powered by a web of 38 tendons, each connected to an individual motor on the forearm.

The main capability that makes the DLR hand different from other robot hands is that it can control its stiffness. The motors can tension the tendons, allowing the hand to absorb violent shocks. In one test, the researchers hit the hand with a baseball bat—a 66 G impact. The hand survived.

The hand has a total of 19 degrees of freedom, or only one less than the real thing, and it can move the fingers independently to grasp varied objects. The fingers can exert a force of up to 30 newtons at the fingertips, which makes this hand also one of the strongest ever built.

Another key element in the DLR design is a spring mechanism connected to each tendon. These springs give the tendons, which are made from a super strong synthetic fiber called Dyneema, more elasticity, allowing the fingers to absorb and release energy, like our own hands do. This capability is key for achieving robustness and for mimicking the kinematic, dynamic, and force properties of the human hand.

During normal operation, the finger joints can turn at about 500 degrees per second. By tensioning the springs, and then releasing their energy to produce extra torque, the joint speed can reach 2000 degrees per second. This means that this robot hand can do something few others, if any, can: snap its fingers.

Keep reading..

UPDATE:

For the two people that hadn’t already seen this, I may as well wedge it in here.  How quickly we go from joke to near-future fact:

From New Scientist:

Light-sensitive plastic might be key to repairing damaged retinas. Creating neuro-prosthetic devices such as retinal implants is tricky because biological tissue doesn’t mix well with electronics. Metals and inorganic semiconductor materials can adversely affect the health or function of nerve cells, says Fabio Benfenati at the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan. And over time the body’s natural defences can be incredibly hostile and corrosive to such materials.

The emergence of flexible, organic semiconductor materials now offers an alternative. To test them, Benfenati and colleagues seeded nerve cells onto the surface of a light-sensitive semiconducting polymer similar to those used in some solar cells. The cells grew into extensive networks containing thousands of neurons. “We have proved that the materials are highly biocompatible,” says Benfenati.

What’s more, the presence of the cells did not interfere with the optical properties of the polymer. The team were able to use the neuron-coated polymer as an electrode in a light-driven electrolytic cell.

When short pulses of light were aimed at specific sections of the polymer, only local neurons fired, suggesting the material has the spatial selectivity needed for artificial retinas, says Benfenati.

“It’s very elegant science,” says Robert Greenberg, whose company Second Sight is close to receiving clinical approval for its retinal prosthesis. But Greenberg questions whether the electrical currents generated would be sufficient to stimulate nerve cells in the eye.

It’s still too early to tell, says Benfenati. But he thinks the new material is worth further study, because of another benefit. It can be tuned to respond only to specific wavelengths of light, raising the prospect of creating artificial colour vision, he says.

Here’s my grinder/cyborg happy place for the night:

Youtube user lovagoa was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident.  As a result, he had months of painful physical therapy, was confined to a bed for 6 months and lost his left arm.

However, he still wanted to ride.

I’m going to start with the Batman – since he’s close to the beginning of the alphabet and as an entry-point into any topic, he’s near and dear to my heart.   Recently in the pages of DC/Warner’s Batman titles, Bruce Wayne (recently returned from a prolonged absence)  publicly announced that he and Wayne Enterprises had been the bankroll behind Batman and that he was going to expand the scope of this operation, globally.   In doing so, he was not only embracing the idea of Batman as a brand but also setting up the basis for a whole group of crimefighters and super-heroes under the Batman roof – multiple Batmen, specialized Batmen, opt-in superheroism.

I’m going to leave the fictional fallout, predecessors, and implications of this idea to the comics blogs and stick to what it means to you and I in the here-and-now in the non-four colour world.   I use Batman because I speak superheroes, and because for me he provides a window into a few concepts I want to explore.

“Batman, Inc. is the idea that we can all be Batman, if we want to.“

Restructuring the mission statement of Batman as the idea of Batman versus Evil, instead of a one-man war on crime creates a massive amount of operational freedom in how Batman can fight crime/injustice/evil and all of that.  Are you the best person for the job?  Are you on-site or able to do the right thing, when needed?  Congratulations, you’re Batman!  Warren Ellis did something similar and less corporatist with his Global Frequency – an organization that had 1000 experts and 1 rotating specialist slot and tried to diffuse disasters that traditional hierarchies didn’t have the resources or ability to deal with.  Do you have a specialty - no matter how obscure?  Then perhaps, in a crisis, the Global Frequency will call on you.

In doing this, Batman and the Global Frequency could respond to countless situations with expert knowledge and fast reactions.  Now this isn’t a new idea by any means – in either the realms of fiction or the real world.  Batman’s stated objective has long been to “become more than a man” except now he’s taken the logical step of following through on that.  In a way, Batman has become the tights and laser-gorillas version of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.  Just as the idea of MEND draws strength from the ability of non-related groups to take up its flag operationally, the idea of Batman as anti-Evil and fast-reacting draws power from the ability of Batman to operate in the absence of any previously acknowledged Batman presence.

I want to return to this – the ability of self-identified ideological groups to act as fast responders in the absence of pre-established infrastructure – in a bit.   But for now I want to talk about the potential empowerment of brands.

Bruce Wayne and the others under his banner are using Batman as a prosthetic.  Dick Grayson (former Robin, current Batman) + the Bat Symbol brings the weight of the Batman brand with it. The Batman is an interface for all sorts of fictional folks to interact with the world around them – it is an encapsulation of brand not just as a symbol of belonging or allegiance but also of interface with and exploring the environment.

You know, like Kanye West.

Robin Sloan’s brilliant piece on Kanye West: Media Cyborg explores the idea that West and other celebrities are media cyborgs – leveraging the media as prosthetics.

Media lets you clone pieces of yourself and send them out into the world to have conversations on your behalf. Even while you’re sleeping, your media —your books, your blog posts, your tweets—is on the march. It’s out there trying to making connections. Mostly it’s failing, but that’s okay: these days, copies are cheap. We’re all Jamie Madrox now.

Okay, let’s keep things in perspective. For most of us, even the blogotronic twitternauts of the Snarkmatrix, this platoon of posts is a relatively small part of who we are. But I’d argue that for an exceptional set of folks—the Kanyes, the Gagas, the Obamas—it is a crucial, even central, component.

Maybe that sounds dehumanizing, but I don’t think it ought to be. We’re already pretty sure that the mind is not a single coherent will but rather a crazy committee whose deliberations get smoothed out into the thing we call consciousness or identity or whatever. Use your imagination: what if some of that committee operates remotely? If 99.99% of the world will only ever encounter Kanye West through the bright arc of media that he produces—isn’t that media, in some important way, Kanye?

By becoming a transmedia brand, the Batman gains the ability to clone itself and sent out its conceptual mind-babies out into the world, doing the work of Batman even in the actual absence of Batman.   Many people “know” Kanye via his body of work and his carefully sculpted public persona – a persona so information rich and media saturated that it can spawn its own meta-narratives.  Kanye West is the puppet of the Illuminati, and we can prove it!  He’s brilliant!  He’s insane!  He’s…  He’s a story.  The Kanye that 99% of the people reading this know is a story about a man who makes music – a narrative crafted largely BY the man who makes that music.  Its is a story with granularity and richness enough to allow many points of entry and engagement, spin-offs, theories and supposition.    The Kanye West we “know” is a prosthetic identity – an interface program that uses media as its computational substrate that exists between “us” the audience and the “real” Kanye (and his PR team) who operate the prosthetic.

That’s all well and good, but we don’t have access to that particular interface.  You and I, reading this, can’t “jack in” to Kanye West in the same way that say, someone in the fictional DC Universe could jack into “Batman” right?  Yes and no.  Kanye’s media identity isn’t keyed in such a way as you and I could start producing ideologically-aligned art as “Kanye West” but that sort of closed system is not a universal trait of prosthetic identities.   There’s the film version of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and the Anonymous movement/open source prosthetic identity that it inspired as well as other examples of open and accessible identities such as Luther Blissett, Buddha and even  Captain Swing – the open source figurehead of the Swing riots in rual England in the 1830′s.

But a lot of those historical open identities didn’t have the media saturation and complexity to really operate with the degree of pseudo-independence that contemporary prosthetic identities operate with.  Closer to the mark we have the Living God of Partying:  Andrew W.K. who may or may not be a persona-by-committee.  But you or I can’t just start being “Andrew W.K.” without soon having his lawyers carving out our chest cavities and making comfortable homes there.  Maybe, if the rumors are true that superstar street artist Banksy is actually the result of one or more art collectives, that’d be closer still.

Failing to find a high-profile, complex, media-enriched, identity prosthetic accessible to most of us,  we move to the things we DO have available – the prosthetic identities many of us have access to in the form of social media.  I hate writing about Facebook.  I really do.  But in this case it’s pretty applicable – being one of the most direct and efficient means I have at my disposal to create an identity prosthetic and use it to explore the environment semi-autonomously.

The Kevin Lovelace (not my birth name) on Facebook is the result of  my entering in lots of data – both in the form of straight data-entry as well as pictures, postings, updates, likes and dislikes and connections.  It’s not me, but a reflection of myself – an extension of the data cloud and strange loops that make up “me”.  However, after it acquired a certain mass of information it began to function with a shambling form of semi-autonomy.  I can walk away from my digital life for a week and come in to discover it has acquired more information, it has tried to find people I would like to talk to and things I would like to know about.  It has even – in its own way – started conversations for me.   I’ll log into Facebook and find that someone wants to talk to me about something and the conversation has already bypassed the introduction and setup because the mass of information available is complex enough and the algorithms that organize it are smart enough that in essence my Facebook profile has started the conversation for me.   For better or worse, my Facebook profile is an incredibly limited smart agent modeled after myself and sent out in the world to generate connections and have knowledge of them on my behalf.  Via Facebook, I have cloned myself… extremely imperfectly.

This is what social media does – it democratizes the process by which Kanye West becomes a cyborg at play in the fields of the media and gives it to anyone who has the time and computer access.  Social media platforms create a more engaging  agent than just blogging or writing or videoblogging or any single-method means of broadcasting the self because the image they create is jagged and full of holes and mini-narratives and angles of entry and engagement.  It’s complex and messy and that’s why its so frighteningly effective.  No, we can’t be “Kayne West”, but we can make our own hyper-complex media homunculi and send them out to make friends on our behalf.  Like attention-starved, developmentally-challenged Huginns and Muninns our Facebook profiles fly out into the media landscape and bring us back wisdom.  Or Farmville.  Or dating website ads.  It’s not a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination.

So, to bring things back to Batman – if Bruce Wayne has turned the identity of Batman into a Kanye West-ian prosthetic identity – something that can enact change in its media environment and engage others simply due to its narrative structure where does that leave us?  The statement that we can all “be” Batman is hyperbole, right?  We can’t “be” Kanye, we can’t “be” Gaga and we can’t “be” Batman.

But what if we could?

“I will become a bat.”

(To be continued…)

From the UK’s Science Museum’s History of Medicine:

Made from steel and brass, this unusual prosthetic arm articulates in a number of ways. The elbow joint can be moved by releasing a spring, whereas the top joint of the wrist allows a degree of rotation and an up-and-down motion. The fingers can also curl up and straighten out. The leather upper arm piece is used to fix the prosthesis to the remaining upper arm. The rather sinister appearance of the hand suggests the wearer may have disguised it with a glove. Among the most common causes of amputation throughout the 1800s were injuries received as a result of warfare.

via Warlach & Commuter Dirge

In happy news, it seems the returning vets from OS wars are owning their prostheses; far from hiding them, they are doing everything to ‘pimp them out’.

Which this Doonesbury strip captures:

(Click thru for higher rez)

This via Rob ‘Eyeborg’ Spence, who is seeking a suitable female volunteer to create a real-life Cherry Darling from Death Proof.

From the New York Times comes news of the X2:

…a prosthetic knee loaded with microprocessors, sensors and even a gyroscope that gives amputees more freedom of movement, and better balance, than previous prostheses, veterans affairs officials say. It is smaller, lighter and has a longer-lasting battery (up to four days) than other widely used prostheses.

…built by Otto Bock HealthCare, the same company that builds one of the most advanced prosthetic legs available, the C-leg. Both units use microprocessors and sensors to calculate and control movement, but the X2 also includes a gyroscope and accelerometer, Mr. Miller said. Those devices convey more detailed information about the movement and speed of the leg, enabling microprocessors to determine whether a person is, say, taking a small step up a stair versus hopping over a large obstacle.

With the X2, users should be able to step backward without stumbling or ride a bike without having the knee lock — potential problems with earlier prosthetics, Dr. Miller said.

“They can more closely mimic the natural gait pattern,” he said.

via AnthroPunk

We’ve mentioned Lunocet’s dolphin-like prosthetics for swimming before, but this is the first video I’ve seen of them in motion:

They’re now saying “the tails – attachable to human feet for dolphin-kick swimming – help users attain speeds twice as fast as the swiftest Olympic swimmer.”

They sure look better than those jumping stilts. And free diving is fun.

via Warren Ellis

Here, have a TED Talk about Emotiv‘s EPOC neuroheadset:

Meanwhile, DARPA are looking into wiring prosthetic arms straight into patient’s brains:

A team of scientists at Johns Hopkins, behind much of Darpa’s prosthetic progress thus far, have received a $34.5 million contract from the agency to manage the next stages of the project. Researchers will test the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) on a human. The test subject’s thoughts will control the arm, which “offers 22 degrees of motion, including independent movement of each finger,” provides feedback that essentially restores a sense of touch, and weighs around 9 pounds. That’s about the same weight as a human arm.

The prosthetic will rely on micro-arrays, implanted into the brain, that record signals and transmit them to the device. It’s a similar design to that of the freaky monkey mind-control experiments, which have been ongoing at the University of Pittsburgh since at least 2004.

Within two years, Johns Hopkins scientists plan to test the prosthetic in five patients. And those researchers, alongside a Darpa-funded consortium from Caltech, University of Pittsburgh, University of Utah and the University of Chicago, also hope to expand prosthetic abilities to incorporate pressure and touch.

Previously:

• Neurosky’s MindSet is now available
• Emotiv EPOC Neuroheadset Update

The Internet loves cats, we all know that. So the Internet will be pleased to learn that when this napping kitty cat got it’s legs chopped off by a combine harvester, while it was lying in the sun, a local vet made sure it could get back on it’s feet.

More now, from BBC News:

The prosthetic pegs, called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (Itaps) were developed by a team from University College London led by Professor Gordon Blunn, who is head of UCL’s Centre for Biomedical Engineering.

Professor Blunn and his team have worked in partnership with Mr Fitzpatrick to develop these weight-bearing implants, combining engineering mechanics with biology.

Mr Fitzpatrick explained: “The real revolution with Oscar is [that] we have put a piece of metal and a flange into which skin grows into an extremely tight bone.”

“We have managed to get the bone and skin to grow into the implant and we have developed an ‘exoprosthesis’ that allows this implant to work as a see-saw on the bottom of an animal’s limbs to give him effectively normal gait.”

As this clip from The Bionic Vet shows, science is all about looks of glee, surgical hi-fives and, of course, duct tape:

via Next Nature

Previously:

• Grind on your pets, starting with contact lenses for animals

Do yourself a favour and check out today’s COILHOUSE’s article on Kim Graham’s Weta Legs.

Even if these backwards-facing legs are not your particular cup of tea, you can at least be happy that we are entering the age of functional commercially available designer prosthetics.   If you did want to stride out into your favourite urban or rural environment upon mechano-hooves, you could do so with these for under a grand.  (Which, you know, is still a lot of money, but progress is what progress is.)

Now, you get the talented Ms. Graham to combine her new legs with PowerIzers or AirTrekkers or even Cheetahs…

…and stand back and watch while tribes of folks in prosthetic legs run along the outskirts of the city at upwards of 20 MPH, hurtling high over the heads of commuters.  Well, I mean, that’s what I see in my head at least.

[Coilhouse - Inventor/Sculptor Kim Graham’s Weta Legs]

What exactly is a cyborg anthropologist? 

Let Amber herself tell you, in this video from late last year on ‘prosthetic culture’:

Like to know more?  Our friends over at Technoccult just did a great interview with her.

Thanks for the YouTube link Vertigo Jones!

From Technology Review:

The UK company Peratech, which last month signed a deal to develop novel pressure-sensing technology for screen maker Nissha, has announced that it will use the same approach to make artificial “skin” for the MIT Media Lab.

Peratech makes an electrically conductive material called quantum tunneling composite (QTC). When the material is compressed electrons jump between two conductors separated by polymer insulating layer covered with metallic nanoparticles. QTC has already been used to make small sensors for NASA’s Robonaut and for a robotic gripper made by Shadow Robot Company.

QTC robot skin could perhaps let a robot know precisely where it has been touched, and with how much pressure. It could also be helpful in designing machines that have better grasping capabilities, and for developing more natural ways for machines to interact with humans.

The company says QTC can be screen-printed as a flexible, robust sheet as thin as 75 microns or made into a coating just 10 microns thick. Because the material reacts only when a force is applied, it consumes little power. And it’s flexibility will let it conform to unique robotic shapes.

First factory robots, then better prosthetics and in the future, whole new sensory organs for posthumans, I say.

(OK, fine, and better sexbots..)

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

Via BotJunkie comes the video a lot of people have been waiting a long time to see; an actual, functional cyborg hand:

In a display of how times are changing in regards to visual representations of the differently able as well as the mass-media relationship with prosthetics and those who use them, athlete Sarah Reinertsen graces the cover of this week’s ESPN Magazine.

Reinersten was the first female leg amputee to complete the Ironman World Triathlon, she was also featured in The Amazing Race 10.  More NSFW pictures from the shoot can be found on ESPN’s site as well as within the magazine, which was released Friday, October 9th.