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
La nanotechnologie moleculaire, par Frederic Levy. Jusqu’à présent, toutes les méthodes de fabrication manipulent les atomes en très grande masse. Même la fabrication ultra fine des puces informatiques traite les atomes de façon statistique. Car les atomes sont extraordinairement petits par rapport à notre échelle. Par exemple, dans l’épaisseur de cette feuille de papier –je l’ai mesuré, elle fait environ un dixième de millimètre d’épaisseur–, il est possible d’empiler environ 400.000 atomes de métal. Il y a donc beaucoup de place à cette échelle ! En fait, pour en fournir une image plus concrète, Feynman avait donné l’exemple suivant : en utilisant un cercle d’une superficie de 1000 atomes par point d’impression, il serait possible d’imprimer toutes les pages de l’Encyclopedia Brittanica sur la tête d’une épingle. Le but de la nanotechnologie moléculaire, et des recherches en cours actuellement, est d’arriver à ce contrôle précis et individuel des atomes. Etat de la recherche actuelle, Voies explorées Applications Fabrication Construction
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?
Hello 3 - Jambe et fibre optique : petit co Hôpital La Musse, Saint Sébastien de Morsent (Eure) - Samedi 1er août 2009 Plaidoyer pour fibrer la France par emprunt d'Etat (on a des idées fixes ou en en a pas...) Comme je vous l'ai raconté dans mon premier post Hello, cela a pris 7 heures, voir un peu plus, entre le premier coup de fil donné par mon fils aux autorités sanitaires, et mon arrivée sur une table d'opération. "7 heures, m'a dit mon chirurgien, c'est beaucoup pour une jambe qui n'est plus irriguée normalement". Effectivement, j'ai dû subir l'amputation suite à cet anévrisme poplié.Je lui ai demandé à son avis, qu'elle aurait été la durée limite pour "rattraper" la jambe. Supposons maintenant que le territoire national ait été couvert par un réseau de télécommunications à TRES haut débit (100 mégas symétriques, voir, ne mégotons pas, 1 giga). Donc mon problème de jambe survient. Que faire ? Surtout n'allez pas croire que j'en veuille aux pompiers, aux ambulanciers, aux médecins de garde, aux internes... Et les USA ? Note 1.
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 La 3ème Révolution d'Homo Sapiens... L'Inte Le passé c'est bien, mais le futur c'est mieux. Pourquoi ? Parce que c'est là où nous allons passer notre vie (je crois que cet adage est de ma pomme ? Depuis la nuit des temps, Homo Sapiens est une créature "bricolée" par Dame Nature (ou Dieu le Père ?). Je pense que les 30 prochaines années vont être - comment dire - assez sportives... Prenons un peu de hauteur, voulez-vous ? Il me semble qu'aujourd'hui tout est en place pour que les Homo Sapiens démarrent une 3ème grande Révolution... Il y a 7 millions d'années environ, nous avions un ancêtre commun avec les primates (le fameux chaînon manquant, que l'on a toujours pas trouvé). Voilà pour le très loin... Selon la théorie actuelle admise par de nombreux paléontologues (dont Yves Coppens), les premiers spécimens d'Homo Sapiens seraient donc apparu en Afrique de l'Est il y a environ 150.000 ans, suite à un accident géologique (la grande faille du Riff) qui s'est produite bien avant, et qui a conduit à une modification du climat local.
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."
L'Intelligence artificielle va-t-elle dépasser l'intelligence h Les progrès technologiques ont indéniablement été plus rapides ces soixante dernières années que durant tout le développement humain. Or, l'intelligence artificielle se développe à une telle vitesse que d'aucuns se demandent si elle ne finira pas par dépasser l'intelligence humaine. Et dès lors, ce serait la fin théorique de la domination du genre humain. Les soixante dernières années ont sans aucun doute été les plus prolifiques dans le domaine scientifique et technologique. Vernor Vinge, professeur d’informatique et de mathématique à l’université de San Diego surtout connu pour avoir popularisé le concept de singularité technologique, a ainsi déclaré que « l’intelligence artificielle dépassera l’intelligence humaine peu après 2020. Ainsi, les théories post-singularité fleurissent sur le web. Dès lors qu’une IA sera un peu plus intelligente que nous, elle sera capable d’apprendre toujours plus vite que nous ne le pourrons jamais.
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