Earlier this week on Better All the Time I took a look at the tremendous progress that is being made in producing artificial limbs, concluding with this cheerful prediction: How progress will play out in the realm of artificial limbs is not difficult to imagine. Before long, Matthew and others will have access to replacement […]

I, for one, welcome our new monkey overlords with their thought-controlled robotic henchmen. Of course, the real point of this research is that if monkey’s can do it, so can humans. So the serious question about the future that we all have to face is whether we will go with straight-up thought-controlled robotic henchmen, or […]

How cool is this? Can cyborg moths bring down terrorists? A moth which has a computer chip implanted in it while in the cocoon will enable soldiers to spy on insurgents, the US military hopes. … At some point in the not too distant future, a moth will take flight in the hills of northern […]

Thomas DeMarse of the biomedical engineering department at the University of Florida has developed a “living computational device” from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat embryo. Then he taught it to fly a jet fighter. The F-22 to be precise. The 25,000 neurons were suspended in a specialized liquid to keep them alive and then […]

Last August I wrote briefly about a small company by the name of Correlogic. The Wheeling Intelligencer brought me up to date with an article published last week. Correlogic has developed a method to glean information from the data generated from a mass spectrometer. A mass spectrometer is a machine that can ionize the molecules […]

A team led by scientists at Sangamo Biosciences in Richmond, California has reported in the journal Nature that they have developed a sophisticated new process for editing DNA without bombarding the genome with foreign genetic material. They treated the cells in test tubes with the company’s proprietary type of “zinc finger nucleases” (ZFNs)… ZFNs are […]

My friend Paul has been one for years. As has Stephen’s father-in-law. And over the weekend, the Blogfather announced that his wife would be joining the ranks of the early-stage human/machine hybrids. Glenn comments on the cyborgization of America: Soon, probably within a decade or two, we’ll see such devices becoming common, and multipurpose, and […]