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March 10, 2022 Benzinga — This Startup Is Creating The World’s First Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm — Last Call To Invest

March 10, 2022 Yahoo — This Startup Is Creating The World’s First Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm — Last Call To Invest

March 2, 2022 Interesting Engineering — A new artificial human arm is moving prosthetics one step closer to true bionics.

For the memory prosthetic, the team focused on two specific regions: CA1 and CA3, which form a highly interconnected neural circuit. Decades of work in rodents, primates, and humans have pointed to this neural highway as the crux for encoding memories.

The team members, led by Drs. Dong Song from the University of Southern California and Robert Hampson at Wake Forest School of Medicine, are no strangers to memory prosthetics. With “memory bioengineer” Dr. Theodore Berger—who’s worked on hijacking the CA3-CA1 circuit for memory improvement for over three decades—the dream team had their first success in humans in 2015.

The central idea is simple: replicate the hippocampus’ signals with a digital replace ment. It’s no easy task. Unlike computer circuits, neural circuits are non-linear. This means that signals are often extremely noisy and overlap in time, which bolsters—or inhibits—neural signals. As Berger said at the time: “It’s a chaotic black box.”

Continue reading “Scientists Have Long Dreamed of a Memory Prosthesis. The First Human Trials Look Promising” »

Engineers at EPFL have found a way to insert carbon nanotubes into photosynthetic bacteria, which greatly improves their electrical output. They even pass these nanotubes down to their offspring when they divide, through what the team calls “inherited nanobionics.”

Solar cells are the leading source of renewable energy, but their production has a large environmental footprint. As with many things, we can take cues from nature about how to improve our own devices, and in this case photosynthetic bacteria, which get their energy from sunlight, could be used in microbial fuel cells.

In the new study, the EPFL team gave these bacteria a boost by inserting carbon nanotubes – tiny rolled-up sheets of graphene, a material that’s famously conductive. The nanotube-loaded bugs were able to produce up to 15 times more electricity than their non-edited counterparts from the same amount of sunlight.

AS man and machine get ever closer, the world of sex tech seems to get a little stranger.

We’ve rounded up some of the most bizarre sex tech inventions that are in the works, including an exoskeleton could let humans make love in the metaverse.

Humans may rely on exoskeletons to have realistic sex in the metaverse, one sex tech expert has revealed.

The future of mind-controlled machines might not be as far away as we think.

As director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, Dr Justin Sanchez is part of a team that is looking at how to decode brain signals and use them to control robotic prosthetics.

Continue reading “Direct Neural Interface & DARPA — Dr Justin Sanchez” »

“We put nanotubes inside of bacteria,” says Professor Ardemis Boghossian at EPFL’s School of Basic Sciences. “That doesn’t sound very exciting on the surface, but it’s actually a big deal. Researchers have been putting nanotubes in mammalian cells that use mechanisms like endocytosis, that are specific to those kinds of cells. Bacteria, on the other hand, don’t have these mechanisms and face additional challenges in getting particles through their tough exterior. Despite these barriers, we’ve managed to do it, and this has very exciting implications in terms of applications.”

Boghossian’s research focuses on interfacing artificial nanomaterials with biological constructs, including living cells. The resulting “nanobionic” technologies combine the advantages of both the living and non-living worlds. For years, her group has worked on the nanomaterial applications of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs), tubes of carbon atoms with fascinating mechanical and optical properties.

These properties make SWCNTs ideal for many novel applications in the field of nanobiotechnology. For example, SWCNTs have been placed inside mammalian cells to monitor their metabolisms using near-infrared imaging. The insertion of SWCNTs in mammalian cells has also led to new technologies for delivering therapeutic drugs to their intracellular targets, while in plant cells they have been used for genome editing. SWCNTs have also been implanted in living mice to demonstrate their ability to image biological tissue deep inside the body.

A review paper by scientists at Zhejiang University summarized the development of continuum robots from the aspects of design, actuation, modeling and control. The new review paper, published on Jul. 26 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, provided an overview of the classic and advanced technologies of continuum robots, along with some prospects urgently to be solved.

“Some small-scale continuum robots with new actuation methods are being widely investigated in the field of interventional surgical treatment or endoscopy, however, the characterization of mechanical properties of them is still different problem,” explained study author Haojian Lu, a professor at the Zhejiang University.

In order to realize the miniaturization of continuum robots, many cutting-edge materials have been developed and used to realize the actuation of robots, showing unique advantages. The continuum robots embedded with micromagnet or made of ferromagnetic composite material have accurate steering ability under an external controllable magnetic field; Magnetically soft continuum robots, on the other hand, can achieve small diameters, up to the micron scale, which ensures their ability to conduct targeted therapy in bronchi or in cerebral vessels.

Bionic technology is removing physical barriers faced by disabled people while raising profound questions of what it is to be human. From DIY prosthetics realised through 3D printing technology to customised AI-driven limbs, science is at the forefront of many life-enhancing innovations.

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Continue reading “Beyond bionics: how the future of prosthetics is redefining humanity” »

Researchers have created a way for artificial neuronal networks to communicate with biological neuronal networks. The new system converts artificial electrical spiking signals to a visual pattern than is then used to entrain the real neurons via optogenetic stimulation of the network. This advance will be important for future neuroprosthetic devices that replace damages neurons with artificial neuronal circuitry.

A prosthesis is an artificial device that replaces an injured or missing part of the body. You can easily imagine a stereotypical pirate with a wooden leg or Luke Skywalker’s famous robotic hand. Less dramatically, think of old-school prosthetics like glasses and contact lenses that replace the natural lenses in our eyes. Now try to imagine a prosthesis that replaces part of a damaged brain. What could artificial brain matter be like? How would it even work?

Creating neuroprosthetic technology is the goal of an international team led by by the Ikerbasque Researcher Paolo Bonifazi from Biocruces Health Research Institute (Bilbao, Spain), and Timothée Levi from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo and from IMS lab, University of Bordeaux. Although several types of artificial neurons have been developed, none have been truly practical for neuroprostheses. One of the biggest problems is that neurons in the brain communicate very precisely, but electrical output from the typical electrical neural network is unable to target specific neurons. To overcome this problem, the team converted the electrical signals to light. As Levi explains, “advances in optogenetic technology allowed us to precisely target neurons in a very small area of our biological neuronal network.”