The Medical Benefits of Body Modification. By Dave Paul Strohecker, Mar 9, 2012, at 01:00 pm Today I bring you one example of how medical technology and body modification are converging. The Tongue Drive System uses magnetic field sensors to track the movement of a magnetized tongue piercing. The image above comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where they have engineered a new form of wheelchair mobility through the use of a tongue piercing. The Tongue Drive System uses a dental plate that captures the movement of the tongue piercing below, which is fashioned with a tiny magnet on top.
The information is then sent to an iPod Touch or iPhone, where Software installed on the Apple device works out the relative position of the magnet with respect to the array of sensors in real time and interprets the user’s commands. The Brain-Tongue-Computer Interface can be equipped with more complex commands than many standard mobility technologies. This technology is but a recent example of the (new) cyborg body. New system allows robots to continuously map their environment. Robots could one day navigate through constantly changing surroundings with virtually no input from humans, thanks to a system that allows them to build and continuously update a three-dimensional map of their environment using a low-cost camera such as Microsoft’s Kinect.
The system, being developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), could also allow blind people to make their way unaided through crowded buildings such as hospitals and shopping malls. To explore unknown environments, robots need to be able to map them as they move around — estimating the distance between themselves and nearby walls, for example — and to plan a route around any obstacles, says Maurice Fallon, a research scientist at CSAIL who is developing these systems alongside John J.
Leonard, professor of mechanical and ocean engineering, and graduate student Hordur Johannsson.
Education For Free. Timeline. Will We Soon Be Able to Fire Laser Beams From Our Eyes? By day, Seok-Hyun Yun and Malte Gather are physicists at Massachusetts General Hospital. But at night, for the past four years, they worked on making a human cell behave like a laser. They built their human laser out of the same three components found in all lasers: a pump source, which provides the initial light energy; an optical cavity, which concentrates the light from the pump source into a beam; and a gain medium, a substance in which electrons are excited until they reach a higher-energy state and simultaneously release that energy as a beam of photons—laser light. Awesome! Yun and Gather modified a human kidney cell to produce green fluorescent protein (GFP), the substance that makes jellyfish bioluminescent. This was their gain medium.
They cultured these modified cells and placed one between two mirrors, creating the optical cavity—"a cell sandwich," Yun says. Now What? A living laser could be used to activate cancer-treating drugs using photodynamic therapy. Expert System - About us - Cogito – a unique technology. At Expert System, our products are based on the award-winning, patented Cogito semantic technology. Cogito relies on deep semantic analysis and a rich semantic network to ensure a complete understanding of a text, finding hidden relationships, trends and events, and transforming unstructured information into structured data.
At the heart of Cogito is the Sensigrafo, our rich and comprehensive semantic network, which enables the disambiguation of terms, the secret behind semantic intelligence. Sensigrafo allows Cogito to understand the meaning of words and context (Jaguar: car or animal? ; apple: the fruit or the company?) ―a critical differentiator between semantic technology and traditional keyword and statistics based approaches. Sensigrafo is available in different languages and contains more than 1 million concepts, more than 4 million relationships for the English language alone, and a rich set of attributes for each concept. Texture Messaging: Breakthrough May Help Spinal Cord Patients Experience Tactile Sensations | Cogito.
Scientist creates lifelike cells out of metal. Scientists trying to create artificial life generally work under the assumption that life must be carbon-based, but what if a living thing could be made from another element? One British researcher may have proven that theory, potentially rewriting the book of life. Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow has created lifelike cells from metal — a feat few believed feasible. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that there may be life forms in the universe not based on carbon, reports New Scientist. Even more remarkable, Cronin has hinted that the metal-based cells may be replicating themselves and evolving. "I am 100 percent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology," he said. The high-functioning "cells" that Cronin has built are constructed from large polyoxometalates derived from a range of metal atoms, like tungsten.
The metallic bubbles are certainly cell-like, but are they actually alive? The early results have been encouraging. How Quantum Suicide Works". A man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; it's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle -- or quark -- is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the quark is spinning counterclockwise, the gun won't go off. There'll only be a click. Nervously, the man takes a breath and pulls the trigger. Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. But, wait. This thought experiment is called quantum suicide.