AFTER buttoning up a lab coat, snapping on surgical gloves and spraying them with alcohol, I am deemed sanitary enough to view a robot’s control system up close. Without such precautions, any fungal spores on my skin could infect it. “We’ve had that happen. They just stop working and die off,” says Mark Hammond, the system’s creator.
The human brain could become a battlefield in future wars, a new report predicts, including ‘pharmacological land mines’ and drones directed by mind control
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/13/military.neuroscience
As neural research and digital technology converge, many scientists envision a so-called singularity event in which humans and computers become inseparable.
What makes people gay? Biologists may never get a complete answer to that question, but researchers in Sweden have found one more sign that the answer lies in the structure of the brain.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1815538,00.html
“Most people think that when you’re sleep-deprived, what happens to the brain is that it becomes sleepy and less active,” says Matthew Walker, assistant professor of psychology at Berkeley and a former Harvard sleep researcher. But Walker says the imaging study published in today’s issue of Current Biology found that the brain’s emotional centers become “60% more reactive.”
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2007-10-22-sleep-deprivation-brain_N.htm
With jam-packed schedules and a video feed to Earth, astronauts enjoy precious little privacy as it is. Soon, doctors might peek into an astronaut’s last bastion of solitude, thanks to a portable brain scanner that could one day go into orbit.
This is separate from what usually interests me. However, imagine this technology beneath the skin… -Blayne
Wearable technology may sometimes come off as little more than a gimmick (consider the video belt buckle). But for some people, it can mean something entirely different–regaining abilities lost to injury or illness.
Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just technology as in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world’s poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness, and so on. Technology we don’t notice because it’s blended in with the fabric of the world, but would immediately take note of its absence if it became unavailable. (Ever tried to travel to another country on foot?) Technology needn’t be expensive - indeed, if a technology is truly effective it will pay for itself many times over.
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2007/07/top-10-transhumanist-technologies/
Humans are fundamentally social animals. Our social nature means that we interact with each other in positive, friendly ways, and it also means we know how to manipulate others in a very negative way.
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