Tag: CYBORG

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a strange cyborg rat that they hope will help them develop a brain-machine interface (BMI) for controlling motorized wheelchairs. The so-called RatCar is a motorized vehicle that suspends a rat below it and is hooked up via electrodes inserted in the rodent's motor cortex. The rats were then trained to move the cart simply by thinking about ...

When will it end, DARPA? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has cursed the earth with unmanned missile systems, all-terrain robots and machines that feast upon -- and then fuel themselves with -- human flesh. The group, which works directly for the U.S. Department of Defense, now hopes to turn actual humans into controllable, mindless and murderous cyborgs. The organization has ...

Ah, human progress. It's long been possible to get drunk with your friends and make a permanent mistake on your body on spring break in Mexico, but soon you'll be able to do it electronically, too. That's right, we are entering the era of the LED tattoo. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have been developing micro-thin, flexible, silicon electronics that have already been ...

German artist Matthias Männer's angular, geometric installations are born of the refuse of the technological landscape. Using both hard lines and sinewy bundles of cables, Männer's sculptures evoke strange deep sea creatures from a dystopian future. His works embody the tension between both our organic and manufactured worlds -- at once malevolent in their scale and graceful in their ...

The military and researchers across the country have been working on putting tiny bots in the air for quite some time. They've talked robotic spy-bats, dreamed up cyborg crickets, dragonflies, and all matter of other bug-sized bots. In fact, they've successfully implanted electrodes into the brains of crickets, moths, and beetles to exercise some control over their movements -- they even got a ...

Using animals as sentinels is nothing new, such as when miners used canaries to detect carbon monoxide and methane in coal mines. As the New Scientist reports, the Pentagon plans to use cyborg crickets for very much the same purpose, only for detecting chemical and biological agents on the battlefield. By equipping the crickets with small electronics to control their muscle movements, and hence ...

It's going to happen. Eventually, me, you, and all the rest of the people on this planet are going to become relics of a bygone era. We'll be obsolete in a world overrun with technology that would have spun the head of someone trying to comprehend it a century prior. So how do we deal with a world in which we are no longer the dominant life form? By making fun of it and using filthy language, of ...

One Canadian filmmaker is striving to transform his false eye into a working video camera, according to a Reuters report at FoxNews.com. Having lost an eye in a childhood shotgun accident, Rob Spence, 36, has called upon the kindness, and ingenuity, of strangers to help him in his self-proclaimed EyeBorg Project. With the help of engineering wunderkind Kosta Grammatis, inventor Dr. Steve Mann, ...

There are quite a few eerie similarities between Rob Spence and Tanya Vlach. For starters, they're both artists, and secondly, they both currently have one prosthetic eye. The real kicker? Each of 'em wants a camera stuck in there instead. In what we can only hope is (or isn't?) a freakishly growing trend, Mr. Spence has reportedly sought consultation from the University of Toronto's Steve ...

Tanya Vlach, a San Francisco-based artist, lost her eye in a 2005 car accident, and now keeps a blog chronicling the "monocular life." She's got a real-enough looking prosthetic peeper, but Tanya's a self-described "sci-fi geek," and, with the approval of her doctor, she's put out a call for engineers to build her a camera... for her fake eye. \ Likening her possible future self (the one with ...

It seems that reality trumps classic science fiction as new research takes the bionic arms of the Six Million Dollar Man from fantasy to feasibility. Scientists from the United States have developed an artificial hand and a groundbreaking surgical technique that work in tandem and promise to restore the sense of touch to amputees. According to the Daily Mail, two patients have successfully ...