The Easiest, Most Horrifying Way to Create Artificial Wombs abortion. ultimately, i feel like this is how the issue of abortion will be resolved. first, a couple of ground rule, undeniable facts: 1. we do not know when human life worthy of protection - i.e. 2. it is IMPOSSIBLE to know with certainty when "personhood" begins. it will forever be the fodder for philosophical musings and never one of absolute certainty. ultimately, as it manifests in government and societies, it is a matter of pragmatism and the freedom of one party who is undeniably a person with rights - women. as with all rational people, i am pro choice. i do not believe that the 8 cells of a blastocyst are a "person" with a life worth protecting. but at the same time, what of a fetus that 8.5 months old still within the womb of its mother and yet to be born but could easily survive even without an incubator. just as i would instantly dismiss the blastocyst as human in any significant way, i would say an 8.5 month fetus is a human child. not even a iota of doubt. so: where's the line? or
Could Brain Imaging Replace The SAT? Imagine it's the year 2032. You are a high school student. You are at a center where a visual scanner confirms your identity so you can enter a room where you are about to receive a brain scan. You wake up. Well, as you were sleeping, you just took the neuro version of the SAT. This fictional scenario is certainly not a reality today, but perhaps something like it may be a reality in the future. Haier paints a picture of our future: "Can it be done today? In 1988, Haier and his colleagues scanned volunteers while they attempted to solve problems from the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal intelligence test. In other words, smarter people had brains that could be more efficient. Since that landmark study, the field of has started to take off. In Haier's words, "There was a network distributed around the brain that was related to intelligence, which we named the Parieto-Frontal Integration or P-FIT theory. Says Haier, "That's kind of a no brainer." © 2012 by Jonathan Wai
3 Ideas That Are Pushing the Edge of Science | Gadgets 1 Sperm-powered Nanobots The next wave in health care may include a brigade of medical nanobots, devices tiny enough to ride the flow of blood through the body's arteries to a problem area. The bots might arrive at a clot, for example, and then using an internal power system, obliterate the clot with a precisely targeted drug or therapy. Designing a power source to accomplish such a task has been a challenge, but from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University comes a possible answer. The same molecular power packs that fuel sperm in their journey through the uterus and to a fallopian tube might be copied and used to keep the nanomachines running once they reach their targets. Led by reproductive biologist Alex Travis, the engineering effort focuses on a chain of enzymes that metabolize glucose molecules into the biological fuel ATP (a process known as glycolysis), which enables sperm locomotion. Does this mean we could actually experience a second dimension of time?
Ultrasound Helmets Control Brain Activity Scientists at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona are exploring the use of ultrasound to stimulate brain activity without the invasive procedures or internal implants required for current electrical stimulation methods. In addition to treatment of neurological diseases like Parkinson’s disease, they are exploring military applications of direct brain stimulation using ultrasound devices placed inside helmets worn by soldiers. The helmets could help improve and retain soldier alertness levels for extended periods of time, provide pain management assistance in the field, reduce stress, and protect against traumatic brain injury. A team led by Dr. Prototypes of the transcranial pulsed ultrasound devices can fit inside helmets. Civilian uses of the technology include treatment of diseases like Huntington disease and Parkinson’s disease by specifically targeting very localize portions of damaged brain tissue.
It Is Almost Impossible To Create Fake Meat 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.
m.guardian.co.uk As mission statements go, it takes some beating. Scrawled on a whiteboard are the words: "We will change how the Earth looks from space!" It surpasses "Don't be evil" (the motto of Google, just down the road), and in terms of hubris it trumps even that of Facebook (also just round the corner): "Move fast and break things!" In this anonymous laboratory on a low-rise industrial estate in Menlo Park, 40km south of San Francisco, there is a whiff of revolution in the air. Professor Patrick Brown could easily be taken for a deranged visionary. The fake meat business has been around for decades, of course, but it has never really taken off. But the meat-fakers say they are on the verge of a breakthrough, that there is a real possibility that a new era of fake meat – nutritious, cheap and indistinguishable from the real thing, made either of synthesised animal tissue or derived from plant material – may be upon us. Eating meat is bad for the environment, of that there is no doubt. "Sure."
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.
You Can't Run From the Cop Car of the Future Computer Used To Decode Brain Activity Scientists believe they have found a way to read people's minds in what could be the first step towards helping brain-damaged patients who cannot speak. US researchers used a computer programme to decode brain activity and put it into words using a form of electronic telepathy. Experts described the breakthrough, unveiled in the journal Public Library of Science Biology, as "remarkable" and believe it could ultimately be possible to decipher people's thoughts. Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley used the programme to predict what spoken words volunteers had listened to by analysing their brain activity. Previous research has shown imagined words activate similar brain areas as words that are said aloud, raising hopes they can also be uncovered by "reading" brain waves. Professor Robert Knight, who worked on the study, said: "This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak.
10 of the Weirdest Futurist Scenarios for the Evolution of Humanity Curious to know which of these visions you feel is the most and least plausible. I've got to hand it to you, Mr. Dvorsky. First off, I would say that the future will hold some combination of "all of the above", with no one particular hypothesis prevailing in the next few hundred years as each hypothesized outcome exploits a unique ecological niche. That said, brain size is DEFINITELY correlated with intelligence. The reason Americans' heads are getting bigger may be due to the high rate of C-sections in the US. I actually agree with you about speciation. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Wow, surprised to see so many people in support of the uploading scenario. Did Rob Schneider give you permission to use his face on that top photo?? Heh, that actually occurred to me, too. Hm...None of the above. This article has given me a lot of inspiration for the novel I'm working on. Glad to hear it!
What San Francisco Would Look Like After Climate Change The 55 States of America: 5 places that could become U.S. States in your lifetime Before we run off and admit the UK and Cuba, what about Canada and Mexico? They obviously already share geographic borders with the US; Canada shares culture with Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, and politics with a number of other states. Mexico has a shared cultural history with the American Southwest (much of it having previously been Mexico). Moreover, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have grown to the size that their metropolitan areas would make them among the larger states, population and representation wise, in the country. As someone else mentioned, Japan makes as much if not more sense than the UK. South America would probably unify in some fashion; perhaps a Confederacy. On the UK, I think it's more likely that the Euro collapses and the UK, Germany, and France create a new European Union, eventually adding Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Scandanavian countries, and Eastern Europe.