I Contact: Contact lens mouse

I love this: The contact lens mouse:




Via Yanko Design:

This one’s kinda hard to swallow so take a deep breath, open your minds, and pretend it’s 2100. I CONTACT is essentially a mouse fitted to your eyeball. The lens is inserted like any other normal contact lens except it’s laced with sensors to track eye movement, relaying that position to a receiver connected to your computer. Theoretically that should give you full control over a mouse cursor. I’d imagine holding a blink correlates to mouse clicks.

The idea was originally created for people with disabilities but anyone could use it. Those of us too lazy to use a mouse now have a free hand to do whatever it is people do when they sit at the computer for endless hours. I love the idea but there is a caveat. How is the lens powered? Perhaps in the future, electrical power can be harnessed from the human body, just not in a Matrix creepy-like way.

Call 1-800-New-Organ, by 2020?

[Linda MacDonald Glenn is guest blogging this month]

Growing a set of new teeth, or new kidneys, or new eyes, or whatever it is you need, is something we could do as soon as 2020, according to a report that was issued by the Department of Health and Human Services a few years ago. In a follow-up to George's previous post, I'll be following and reporting on issues in regenerative medicine, with a focus on nano-scale materials and technology. The NIH uses the term 'regenerative medicine' interchangeably with 'tissue engineering' and defines it as "a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field involving the life, physical and engineering sciences that seeks to develop functional cell, tissue, and organ substitutes to repair, replace or enhance biological function that has been lost due to congenital abnormalities, injury, disease, or aging.” And researchers are doing amazing things: Gizmodo has posted videos from Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, about how lab grown tissues are benefiting patients now.

Regenerative nanomedicine will, understandably, likely be embraced for all the promise it holds -- but there have been concerns expressed about the ethical, legal, and social implications, particularity the nano part. Nanotechnology has the potential to have the greatest impact in three areas: energy, medicine, and environmental remediation. Of these three areas, nanotechnology in medicine is the most likely to be accepted by the public, starting with therapeutic treatments and then moving over to enhancements. But it does raise some interesting questions, such as can nanomedicine be considered separate and apart other nanotechnologies? And what does 'nanotechnology' encompass anyway? Pinning down a usable definition of nanotechnology has been harder than anticipated.

For a quick peek into some of the issues, you can check out the series of YouTube videos my colleague and I did at the Human Enhancement Conference in Kalamazoo earlier this year, which I'm hoping to post on Vimeo shortly. I'm also following Gizmodo's feature This Cyborg Life and am intrigued by the question, what is the enhancement that you would like to have the most? (and keep it decent, folks, comments are moderated here!) For the readers of Sentient Developments, I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours....

You can check out Linda's original blog at the Women's Bioethics Blogspot.

Transhumanist and artificial heart recipient Peter Houghton dies

Sad news in the transhumanist community today: Peter Houghton, the first man in the world to be fitted with a permanent artificial heart, has died at the age of 68.

Houghton, a devout Catholic, frequently talked about how his artificial heart gave him a second lease on life; without the prosthesis he would died seven years ago in 2000. He never blushed at the labels 'cyborg,' 'bionic,' or 'robotic.' For him, this was not some kind of trite science fiction whimsy -- it was a reality that was keeping him alive when he should have been dead.

To that end, he was an avid supporter of the World Transhumanist Association and an advisor to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Peter worked tirelessly on behalf of Britons with heart disease and those needing artificial organs.

We are grateful to Peter Houghton for his contributions over the years. He will be missed.

One way to become a cyborg

Now that's what I call a radical body modification.

Leis reviews NBC's Bionic Woman: "A disaster and an insult"

NBC's Bionic Woman sucks. Richard Leis, Jr. explains why:

Show creators apparently hate technology, especially when used to successfully save lives. At what price, they want to explore, do we do so? A character who suffers terrible trauma must continue to suffer long after they have transcended their human weaknesses and been relieved of their pain. The price, we learn, is generally too high, and it would have been better if the character had just died. Because they did not die, they now must spend the seasons performing altruistic acts, to give back to simple unenhanced humans who are owed some unexplained debt. The moment the transhuman start enjoying her powers, she will be taught a terrible lesson.

This bionic woman is a creation of nanotechnology and cybernetics, packaged in a beautiful and indistinguishable-from-human body. A simple bartender enriched by her involvement with a man of education and science must now pay the ultimate price for becoming transhuman. We do not learn in one episode, of course, exactly what price she will pay during her upcoming ordeals, but we can be sure it will be gratuitously gory and tearful.

Modern medicine is marvelous and technologies in labs and on the horizon suggest great things ahead. We know from experience that most people in pain, experiencing great suffering, or nearing death, will, no matter what their prior belief system, embrace relief. Relief is so obviously joyful that relief as horror as depicted in fiction simply rings false, yet writers go back to that same dark well over and over again.

Read the entire review here.

"You are the platform"

Journalist Quinn Norton recently gave a talk at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress which took place in Berlin during the first week of January 2007. Her presentation was titled, "Body hacking - Functional body modification. You are the platform."

From her presentation description,

How society is likely to react to enhancement technologies or enhanced humans? Early adopters face dangers including pain, disfigurement, and death- how will that shape progress? Technology and flesh are going to come together, but will they come together in you? Bring your own stories of modification, and you own ideas about what constitutes post human- and whether that's a good or bad thing.

A number of years ago Norton had a magnet implanted in the tip of one of her fingers -- an idea that was pioneered by the likes of Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth. She started to sense electro-magnetic fields, she could feel her laptop's hard drive spinning, she could could tell if an electrical cord was live, and feel running motors and security devices. The implant endowed her, for all intents and purposes, with a sixth sense.

For her lecture, Norton tackled a number of issues that touched upon the therapy versus enhancement debate. To reveal the arbitrariness of therapy v. enhancement, she noted such advancements as LASIK (laser eye surgery), stomach staples (to prevent obesity), Modafinil (sleep replacement pharma), and IUDs (intrauterine devices). Loooking forward, Quinn described the potential for such things as tooth phone implants and neural pacemakers.

As a pro-enhancement advocate, Norton also warned about the need for medical tourism and a rising black market. She is equally concerned that only the sick will receive treatment while soldiers get enhanced. Norton asks, " How do we create a non-medical human-market for altering ourselves?"

Read more here. Check out some of her slides here.