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Sep 11, 2015

Polaroid’s Latest Instant Camera Doesn’t Need Ink — By Margaret Rhodes | Wired

Posted by in category: media & arts

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“The Snap—Ammunition’s third design for Polaroid, after last year’s Cube action camera and Zip instant mobile printer—is a decidedly modern instant camera. Unlike its predecessors, it doesn’t use ink cartridges. Instead, it uses inkless printing tech developed by a company called Zink. Heat from the printer reacts with dye crystals embedded in the photo paper to create the image.”

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Sep 11, 2015

The First Human Head Transplant Will Take Place in 2017

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, genetics, neuroscience

Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero grabbed the world’s attention this past winter when he announced his plans to perform the first human head transplant. Many doubted that such an outrageous procedure would ever see the light of day. Now, Canavero has a date on the books.

Thirty-year-old Russian computer scientist Valery Spiridonov is set to become the world’s first head transplant patient in December 2017. Spiridonov suffers from a rare genetic muscle-wasting condition known as Werdnig-Hoffmann disease. There’s currently no known treatment.

As you might not want to imagine, the procedure will be filled with challenges and uncertainties. There’s the hair-raising possibility that the head will reject the body or vice versa. The spinal cord might not fuse properly. Even if everything goes well, there’s no telling whether Spiridonov’s mental capacities or personality will remain the same. He’s embarking on totally uncharted medical territory.

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Sep 11, 2015

Spanish cancer patient gets a 3D-printed titanium rib cage

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, biotech/medical

Is there anything 3D printers can’t do? A 54-year-old Spanish man, who had a cancerous tumor in his chest wall, was recently fitted with a 3D printed sternum and rib cage. While the first-of-its-kind implant seems like a Marvel Comics experiment with Adamantium, in reality, it was an ingenious, life saving medical solution that used lightweight yet sturdy, Titanium. The metal printing technique gave the surgeons at the Salamanca University Hospital in Spain the flexibility they needed to customize the complex and unique anatomy of their patient’s chest wall.

They brought in Anatomics, a Melbourne-based company that manufactures surgical products, to help create and print the implant. Based on the patient’s high-resolution CT scan data, the Australian team first created a 3D reconstruction of the patient’s chest wall and tumor so that the surgeons could plan with precision. Next, they used the 3D digital CAD file detailing the patient’s anatomy to build the customized implant, layer by layer, on Arcam’s $1.3 million electron beam metal printer.

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Sep 11, 2015

Will Scientists Ever Solve the Mystery of Consciousness?

Posted by in categories: evolution, neuroscience

We still have no idea how the brain produces conscious awareness. In this excellent short video produced by The Economist, various experts are called upon to explain the “hard problem” that is consciousness, and how scientists might solve this profound mystery.

For the video, The Economist gathered together an impressive collection of philosophers and scientists, including David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Christof Koch, Janet Metcalfe, and Marcus Raichle. Topics discussed include the evolution of consciousness, the binding problem, and theory of mind.

Continue reading “Will Scientists Ever Solve the Mystery of Consciousness?” »

Sep 11, 2015

Gigantic Ice Slab Found on Mars Just Below the Planet’s Surface

Posted by in category: space

“The ice the scientists found measures 130 feet (40 m) thick and lies just beneath the dirt, or regolith, or Mars.

‘It extends down to latitudes of 38 degrees. This would be like someone in Kansas digging in their backyard and finding ice as thick as a 13-story building that covers an area the size of Texas and California combined,’ Bramson said.

Such an extensive ice sheet had never been seen at these latitudes.”

Continue reading “Gigantic Ice Slab Found on Mars Just Below the Planet's Surface” »

Sep 11, 2015

We’re getting closer to space-based solar panels that could beam unlimited energy to Earth

Posted by in categories: energy, space

Scientists call it “stellar energy.”

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Sep 11, 2015

Watson is getting closer and closer to being your doctor

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, supercomputing

Sure, it can beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, tell you about your city, and dream up recipes for delectable delicacies, but now, IBM’s Watson is doing something even more important than all previous capabilities combined — it’s finally getting closer to becoming your doctor. Last April, the century-old company launched IBM Watson Health, and now, it’s opened up a new office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to some of the best universities in the U.S., and some of the most impressive biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well. In the last few months, Watson has already expanded its scope to take on some of our most pressing health issues and diseases, including cancer and diabetes, and with this new establishment, it seems that the supercomputer will only be taking on greater responsibilities in the industry.

More exciting still is the announcement that Deborah DiSanzo, the former CEO of Philips Healthcare, will be leading the unit as its general manager. Under her leadership, IBM hopes that Watson Health will be able to grow and further expand its massive cloud computing capabilities, which the company believes holds significant potential for modern health care. While current “health record systems can do great job storing data,” Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group, told Fortune, “Watson can summarize that data and incorporate nurse and doctor’s notes to give a more complete picture.”

Related: IBM is bringing sports into the digital age, starting with the U.S. Open.

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Sep 11, 2015

Breakthrough NIST study creates molecules out of photons

Posted by in categories: innovation, physics

A new study in manipulating photons has created the first two-photon structure that behaves like a molecule of matter.

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Sep 11, 2015

Skyscraper Farms, Lab-grown Meat & Soylent — Meeting the needs of the 21st Century

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, energy, existential risks, food, sustainability

Meeting the basic needs of humanity is increasingly brought into question as we begin to resemble a cancer to the living organism we inhabit. As mass extinction continues to become an omnipotent reality, it’s apparent that more humans equals more problems. To fix this, we have to approach them in the same way farmers do: with resiliency. Farmers try to nurture their crops and hope for the right season. Although, even the predictability of spring, summer and fall’s outcome can be misleading. Nature has a way of leading things in the exact opposite direction than they seem to be headed. And it is those who’ve treaded, but still embark that truly encounter the rewards. For if farmers were to give up after an adverse season, there’d be no food next year. There’d be no continuity of supply for society. There’d be no method of feeding the hungry. No solution to ease the growing population and its rising demands.

So, with exponential gain in human births this century, how do we combat such problems? One possible solution is to build “green skyscrapers” for the sole purpose of farming, where we are able to control the environment and have multiple levels of plant growth. This could be done by utilizing an array of mirrors to redirect sunlight to every floor, while supplementing with multi-spectral, energy-efficient LED’s. With advanced humidity control and water-recycling techniques, we’d contribute towards the global conservation of water and open up valuable land to reforestation — all through subjugating the unpredictability of nature. This ensures the utmost quality and care goes into producing local, high-quality food, with the added benefit of honing the technology needed for interplanetary colonization.

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Sep 11, 2015

The 5 common traits of negligibly senescent species

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, life extension, neuroscience

The biology of aging is traditionally studied in fast-living organisms such as mice, worms and fruit flies. Short-lived species certainly have a role to play in this field, but they are only the tip of the iceberg.

Within the natural ecosystem, organisms display a range of aging processes, most often accelerated aging, or gradual aging (in the case of humans), but also, a range of species with slow or even negligible aging, which is known as negligible senescence. Unlike humans, such species have a constant mortality rate for the duration of their lifespan, as well as a constant or even increasing fertility rate. The number of negligibly senescent species which we are currently aware of is likely to grow as more and more are studied and discovered, both in the wild and in the lab.

By studying the processes which give these creatures longer lifespans, there is the possibility that they could be recreated in humans in order to extend our own. How negligible senescence is achieved by each individual species varies, but here are five of the most common traits.

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