Archive for the ‘biotech’ Category

…I’m all for it.

Chamberland joined NASA as a bioengineer in the mid ‘80s, just as the manned space program was starting to thunder forward. But rather than looking up to the stars, he began looking down – deep down. As a developer of the agency’s Advanced Space Life Support Systems, which monitors the safety for all off-planet habitation pursuits, Chamberland soon became a lead proponent of research on an idea being floated by NASA at the time: using the sea as a testbed for space exploration. Before long, this homegrown explorer would become one of the country’s leading proponents of undersea habitation, and an advocate for what he calls the “space-ocean analog.”

An aquanaut and Mission Commander on seven NASA underwater missions, Chamberland has also pursued landmark research in bioengineering and become a prolific writer ofscience books and sci-fi novels. But it was his work for NASA that resulted in his harvesting of the first agricultural crop in a manned habitat on the sea floor, and led to his designing and construction of the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station, a two man undersea habitat off Key Largo. The little permanent submarine has been visited by a range of curious futurist explorers, including James Cameron and TV producer Rod Roddenberry, Jr.

The rest is here.

…are addicting, just like everything else. What do we do, live in the woods with a sharp stick sticking fish and deer?

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted_p1.html

…before we can plug our brains into computers. Or put computers INTO OUR BRAINS!!

The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived atCeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training.

The rest is here.

…is proven. The mind is the brain, the brain can shift and change, we can control our minds.

Nobody connected those accidents to the difficulties he had in school as he acted out, stopped talking for three months and cried daily for two years. As an adult, he seemed to be a thriving, successful stockbroker, until traumaticbrain injury from a 1999 soccer accident led to seizures and sidelined his ability to talk to people and stay on task, it seemed, for good.

Two realizations have turned his life around at 42. First, he realized that braininjuries were behind the troubles he had had all his life. And second, he read about brain plasticity — the concept that the brain can heal and learn at all ages.

“It was a relief,” says Hayner, who credits his 2008 training at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth for helping to restore abilities that he thought were long gone. “It helped me regain my self-esteem and self-confidence. It gave me hope.”

Neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to adapt and change through life, is gaining increased traction in medical circles.

The rest is here.

…we must overthrow the capitalist pigs that have taken over our world! No less than our very brains demand it!

Tricomi et al took 20 pairs of men. At the start of the study, both men got a $30 payment, but one member of each pair was then randomly chosen to get a $50 bonus. Thus, one guy was “rich”, while the other was “poor”. Both men then had fMRI scans, during which they were offered various sums of money and saw their partner being offered money too. They rated how “appealing” these money transfers were on a 10 point scale.

What happened? Unsurprisingly both “rich” and “poor” said that they were pleased at the prospect of getting more cash for themselves, the poor somewhat more so, but people also had opinions about payments to the other guy:

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-your-brain-communist.html

…DOOM DOOM DOOM!

Since stories have started surfacing more recently, many have wondered, if the rumors are true. Are there really ‘continents’, or massive
floating garbage patches residing in the pacific ocean? Apparently, the rumors are true, and these unsightly patches are reportedly
killing marine life and releasing poisons that enter the human food chain, as well. However, before you start imagining a plastic version of Maui, keep in mind that these plastic patches certainly aren’tsolid surfaced islands that you could build a house on! Ocean currents have collected massive amounts of garbage into a sort of plastic “soup” where countless bits of discarded plastic float intertwined just beneath the surface. Indeed, the human race has really made its mark. One enormous plastic patch is estimated to weigh over 3 million tons altogether and cover an area roughly twice the size of Texas.

Are There Really ‘Continents’ of Floating Garbage?

…well, Ben Franklin shocked himself with a bolt of lightning to see its conductive properties, so I suppose a guy carving himself up to turn himself into a cyborg isn’t all that far out. It’s usually people like that, that end up changing science for the better.

Let’s just hope he doesn’t seriously hurt himself.

I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get.

Sadly, they don’t do it like that on TV. The art of improving the human is shiny and bright in the media. You see million-euro cryogenics policies and hormonal life-extension regimes that only the elite can afford. You see the hypothesis of an immortal silicon body to house your artificially-enhanced mind. You could buy that too, maybe, if you sold most of your organic body and the home it lives in. But you can do something to bring it down a notch: homebrewing.

Scrapheap Transhumanism

…you mean acting like a bunch of Type-A, self-centered assholes concerned with instant gratification and riches and bitches and the timing of your next orgasm leads to a culture prone to depression? My mind, she is blown.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves.

“People from highly individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe are more likely to value uniqueness over harmony, expression over agreement, and to define themselves as unique or different from the group,” said Joan Chiao, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

‘Culture Of We’ Buffers Genetic Tendency To Depression

…is coming!

Step one towards the Singularity, check. This opens up all kinds of doors, eventually allowing us to install computers in our brains. A scientific revolutions would then take place.

This research is the first step in examining how memories create neurological structures in the brain, and how the brain stores specific pieces of data. The researchers hope that this will lead to a better understanding of diseases and disorders that affect the brain such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke, and brain injury.

Warwick comments, “This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorizes its experiences. This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine.”

Using Human “Wetware” to Control Robots

…cannot be seperated from the body.

What more proof do we need? Here we have clear evidence that the mind can influence what happens in the body. They two cannot be seperated. Mind, body, soul, are all one.

Albeit, the study involves only 15 healthy male volunteers with a mean age of 25 years and a range of 21 to 30 years. A series of systematic and highly suggestive tools were used to trick the volunteers into believing they had been administered a potent analgesic during the manipulation and test phase of the experiment. The suggestions involved the use of color coding for the fake creams and verbal suggestions relating to the anticipation of pain including the introduction of extreme heat on the forearm of the volunteers.

An MRI was utilized to scan the dorsal horn region of the spinal cord during the test phase of the experiment. In analyzing the findings, the Eippert team of scientists caution the size of experimental group may have influenced the study. However, the physical manifestations of the deceptive suggestions including “fake” creams, packaging and verbal suggestions could be detected on the fMRI as reducing pain.

In Between Mind-Body Split: Chronic Pain Relief

God Damn it’s awesome to F****** swear! Didn’t need a scientific study to know that, but this is interesting nonetheless.

In fact, so good that he wondered whether there might be something to the power of profanity—a curiosity that only increased when his wife, while participating in the miracle that is childbirth, swore like a drunken sailor.

So Stevens looked into it. And he discovered that uttering profanity may actually make one better able to withstand pain. In a study published in this month’s issue of NeuroReport, he and his colleagues put that theory to the test. They asked participants to submerge their nondominant hand in ice-cold water for as long as possible (or for a maximum of 10 minutes) while either repeating a swear word or a neutral word (one that describes a table). The volume and pace used for swear words and neutral words were kept similar. Then, the researchers compared those who swore and those who didn’t to determine the effect on the length of time that participants were able to keep their hands submerged.

Subjects who swore managed an average of 40 seconds, or about a third longer than those who didn’t—evidence that a few well-placed word bombs of your choosing actually has a protective effect.

Dirty Words, Filthy Kids, and Other Surprisingly Good-for-You Vices

…yes, it’s as complicated as it sounds.

Still, the field is real and holds interesting promise for humanity. We tread ever closer to becoming biomancers, masters of our own biology. No sickness, no pain, finely-tuned brains…the future looks promising.

In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.

One of the students flipped a switch and intense blue light shone through the cable into the mouse’s brain, illuminating it with an eerie glow. Instantly, the mouse began running in counterclockwise circles as though hell-bent on winning a murine Olympics.

Then the light went off, and the mouse stopped. Sniffed. Stood up on its hind legs and looked directly at the students as if to ask, “Why the hell did I just do that?” And the students whooped and cheered like this was the most important thing they’d ever seen.

Because it was the most important thing they’d ever seen. They’d shown that a beam of light could control brain activity with great precision. The mouse didn’t lose its memory, have a seizure, or die. It ran in a circle. Specifically, a counterclockwise circle.

Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again

…even if you don’t read the article in the link, click it to watch the vid. Amazing stuff.

Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly rotating background causes prominent and motionless visual stimuli to disappear and reappear, as demonstrated in the video below. Fixate on the flashing green spot in the centre, and you’ll notice that the surrounding yellow spots begin to disappear and reappear after about ten seconds. Then replay the clip and focus on any of the yellow spots; you’ll see that it is a visual disappearance illusion. Exactly how it works is unclear; according to one hypothesis it is due to the properties of neurons in area V1 of the visual cortex.

The rest is here.

…makes you smarter.

Well, it correlates to better decision-making. Why is this not taught in our schools?

In the present study we provide the first empirical evidence that viscero-sensory feedback from an internal organ is associated with decision-making processes. Participants with accurate vs. poor perception of their heart activity were compared with regard to their performance in the Iowa Gambling Task. During this task, participants have to choose between four card decks. Decks A and B yield high gains and high losses, and if played continuously, result in net loss. In contrast, decks C and D yield small gains and also small losses, but result in net profit if they are selected continuously. Accordingly, participants have to learn to avoid the net loss options in favor of the net gain options. In our study, participants with good cardiac perception chose significantly more of the net gain and fewer of the net loss options. Our findings document the substantial role of visceral feedback in decision-making processes in complex situations.

Read the whole thing here.

…being a conformist sheep will destroy the world!

Quick! Call the anarchists!

The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago.

Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning — imitating and emulating what the majority are doing — may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic¹.

The rest is here.