Double Amputee Transformed Into Mermaid With Help From Prosthetics Despite her passion for swimming, it was never Nadya Vessey's dream to be a mermaid. She started swimming after losing her first leg when she was seven, and continued to swim competitively after the second was amputated at the age of sixteen. Vessey picked herself back up on two prosthetic legs and, unlike many Disney fans, didn't give in to any mermaid fantasies. She's used these legs for decades, until now that she's received some assistance from Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop. It all started on the beach where a four-year-old boy questioned her lack of limbs when he saw her taking her fake ones off. She replied that she was a mermaid and the boy said, “Wow, that’s cool!” The peeps at Weta let us in on how exactly the tail works. Now that she’s been whipping her tail back and forth for a bit, Vessey plans to use it for the swimming section of an upcoming triathlon. Source: the Telegraph Photos via Oprah.com, Matmantra, and Stuff
LED-er Of the Pack: Animated Programmable LED Tattoos Tattoos have been around nearly as long as the human race itself, and apart from improved tools and safety measures they haven’t changed much. But with futuristic technology comes futuristic body modifications, and the next generation of skin art is on its way. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are developing implantable flexible silicon transistors on dissolving substrates that could, at some point, be used as medical tattoos. The tattoo could, in theory, display whatever the owner wants it to display, making it ideal for displaying shifting designs or even watching TV right on your arm. But the transistor technology involved in the LED tattoo research isn’t limited to this one function. Of course, artistic applications for LED tattoos are already being explored.
Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment | Wired Business SAN DIEGO, California — Imagine a drug that can reduce your need for sleep, increase your concentration and make you smarter, with minimal side effects. Call it Morvigil. What would such a drug do to society? Would governments ban it, would it become the drug of the rich or become a virtual prerequisite for your workday? The best answers to those questions, writer Quinn Norton told conference-goers at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego Wednesday, is to be found in the history of another substance: coffee. Coffee debuted in the late 17th century in Oxford, England — leading to rowdy coffee houses, jittery arguments and even an attempt by King Charles II to ban the substance for inspiring seditious behavior. The other consequence: the Enlightenment. (Disclaimer: Norton is a Wired.com contributor and a friend, but her talk was clearly one of the hits of the conference.) Call it a second Enlightenment. "How do we give ourselves permission to modify?" Photo: Quinn Norton
Mind-Reading Experiment Reconstructs Movies in Our Mind The approximate reconstruction (right) of a movie clip (left) is achieved through brain imaging and computer simulation.UC Berkeley It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. He believes such a technique could eventually reconstruct a dream or other made-up mental movie well enough to be recognizable. People shouldn't be worried about others secretly eavesdropping on their thoughts in the near future, since the technique requires a person to spend long periods in an MRI machine, he noted.
Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound Dr. William J. Tyler is an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, is a co-founder and the CSO of SynSonix, Inc., and a member of the 2010 DARPA Young Faculty Award class. Every single aspect of human sensation, perception, emotion, and behavior is regulated by brain activity. Recent advances in neurotechnology have shown that brain stimulation is capable of treating neurological diseases and brain injury, as well as serving platforms around which brain-computer interfaces can be built for various purposes. For example, deep-brain stimulating (DBS) electrodes used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease require neurosurgery in order to implant electrodes and batteries into patients. These illustrations show the surgical invasiveness of deep-brain stimulating electrodes (left) and depict the low spatial resolutions conferred by transcranial magnetic stimulation (right). A portion of our initial work has been supported by the U.S.
Scientists Read Dreams By Mo Costandi of Nature magazine Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep. A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep. This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between seven and ten times, on different days, for each participant. Perchance to dream Most of the dreams reflected everyday experiences, but some contained unusual content, such as talking to a famous actor. “We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams,” says Kamitani.
On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces Brain computer interfaces (BCI) are becoming increasingly popular in the gaming and entertainment industries. Consumer-grade BCI devices are available for a few hundred dollars and are used in a variety of applications, such as video games, hands-free keyboards, or as an assistant in relaxation training. There are application stores similar to the ones used for smart phones, where application developers have access to an API to collect data from the BCI devices. The security risks involved in using consumer-grade BCI devices have never been studied and the impact of malicious software with access to the device is unexplored. We take a first step in studying the security implications of such devices and demonstrate that this upcoming technology could be turned against users to reveal their private and secret information. We use inexpensive electroencephalography (EEG) based BCI devices to test the feasibility of simple, yet effective, attacks. Text of BibTeX entry:
How Team Obama’s tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust Despite running a campaign with about twice the money and twice the staff of Governor Mitt Romney's presidential bid, President Barack Obama's campaign under-spent Romney's on IT products and services by $14.5 million, putting the money instead into building an internal tech team. Based on an Ars analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, the Obama campaign, all-inclusive, spent $9.3 million on technology services and consulting and under $2 million on internal technology-related payroll. The bottom line is that the Obama campaign's emphasis on people over capital and use of open-source tools to develop and operate its sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure ended up actually saving the campaign money. As Scott VanDenPlas, lead DevOps for Obama for America put it in an e-mail interview with Ars, "A lesson which we took to heart from 2008 [was that] operational efficiency is an enormous strategic advantage." Smart, not perfect The armor-plated cloud Build, borrow, or buy
First mind-reading implant gives rats telepathic power - life - 28 February 2013 Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 Video: Watch a pair of rats communicate by mind-reading The world's first brain-to-brain connection has given rats the power to communicate by thought alone. "Many people thought it could never happen," says Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The feat was achieved by first training rats to press one of two levers when an LED above that lever was lit. An array of microelectrodes – each about one-hundredth the width of a human hair – was then implanted in the encoder rats' primary motor cortex, an area of the brain that processes movement. Next, the team recreated these patterns in decoder rats, using an implant in the same brain area that stimulates neurons rather than recording from them. Implants linked The researchers then wired up the implants of an encoder and a decoder rat. The rats' ability to cooperate was reinforced by rewarding both rats if the communication resulted in a correct outcome. Wake-up call
Creating indestructible self-healing circuits Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips. The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers. The amplifiers are so small, in fact, that 76 of the chips -- including everything they need to self-heal -- could fit on a single penny. "It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits," says Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G.