Duke University researchers have developed an ultrasound endoscope that will give surgeons a 3-D view of the brain during and after an operation. If it proves safe and effective in animal and human tests, the 3-D probe could provide a cheaper, more effective alternative to the two-dimensional scans currently in use. The probe has been used to image dogs’ brains and will need to undergo clinical trials before it can be used in the operating room. more>>>

From EETimes.com:

R. Colin Johnson
(06/27/2007 10:12 AM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=200000966

PORTLAND, Ore. — Researchers at the Max Planck Institute (Munich, Germany) have developed a cell-transistor interface that they believe will usher in a new era of bioelectronics, allowing cells to be manipulated and studied without destroying them in the process.

In a demonstration prepared by institute biochemist Peter Fromherz, living cells were grown atop an array of transistors, thereby enabling the silicon chip to monitor the cell activity directly. The chip was used to test the effect of new drugs on the living cells. The results were then read out instantly from the chip, in an application that the researchers said could hasten drug development.

“We study the electrical interfacing of semiconductors and living cells,” Fromherz said. “This basic research provides the basis for future applications in biosensors, medical prosthetics, brain research and neurocomputation.”

Traditionally, living cells must be destroyed in order to study their inner workings. For instance, studying the effect of various drugs on serotonin levels in a cell has required application of a patch-clamp electrode to enable readout of the ion stream into and out of the cell. That technique slowly kills the cell, limiting the sample’s usefulness to a few hours of tests.

I have been filming a documentary about two brothers who are trying to get their car to run the quarter mile drag in under ten seconds.

What do I love about it? Well, if you read THIS post then you know I think that when a human is operating a car, the line between man and machine is blurred and in essence becomes a cyborg. Because even though it is crude…it IS the merger of Man & Machine.

When these boys work on their car, they’re giving their car a work out. As they work on it, it becomes stronger, leaner.

That is a crude comparison but we’ve come a long way and computer/brain implants are right around the corner so I don’t think I’m too far off here. In any case, here is a little trailer I made for the film, titled “Racing Heart” which isn’t due for release till sometime 2008:

Racing Heart

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Filming is going well. So far it has taken me to St. Louis, Witchita, and next week I will travel to California with the Brothers. Then it’s back to Witchita before lastly heading to Chicago! It’s a lot of fun and a LOT of work, but it’s worth it. I think I have a story to tell. Look for me to post more often after I’m finished shooting this summer. Thank you everybody for your support!

That is the question…and I want to hear YOUR thoughts! Click on the comment link below to voice YOUR opinion!

Talk of the Nation, July 17, 2006 · Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses his op-ed in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Kurzweil explains how the pace of technological change is accelerating. In the next 25 years, he argues, computers and communications devices will be implanted within the body. listen to audio>>>

From NPR:
MIT Researchers Transmit Wireless Electricity
by Nell Boyce

Morning Edition, June 8, 2007 · Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have figured out a way to transmit electric power over the air, meaning one day your cell phone could recharge itself without your having to plug it in. They’re calling it Wi-tricity — short for “wireless electricity.” listen to audio>>>

Hat tip to Kurzweil AI for this tidbit:

From Technology Review
published by MIT

Thursday, June 14, 2007
Nanotube Circuits Made Practical
Software can predict the best designs for fabricating logic gates from disorganized carbon nanotubes.
By Kate Greene

Many experts believe that carbon nanotubes could eventually replace silicon in microelectronics because of their potential for superior speed and reduced power consumption. And over the past several years, researchers have made transistors out of carbon nanotubes. However, it’s still difficult to make reliable circuits out of them. One problem is that the nanotubes, used for transistors that make up the circuits, tend to be fabricated in different directions, making it impossible to know which nanotube form which transistor. And such a chaotic arrangement can lead to electrical malfunctions. But now researchers at Stanford University have written a program that finds a working circuit layout, no matter how disorganized or misaligned the nanotubes.

“Just having a single [carbon nanotube] transistor isn’t going to do it,” says Subhasish Mitra, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford. It may not be possible to synthesize precisely organized nanotubes anytime soon, so Mitra and his team, which includes Stanford electrical-engineering professor H.-S. Philip Wong, University of Southern California chemistry professor Chongwu Zhou, graduate student Nishant Patil, and Jie Deng of Stanford electrical engineering, have turned to algorithms to make sense out of the nanotubes mess. more>>>

Click here to watch the BBC’s documentary about the Singualrity: HUMAN 2.0: CREATING GODS PART I

and of course, part II

be sure to watch part III, IV, V, VI

Building a genome from scratch to produce a free-living organism capable of being genetically programmed…sounds like the stuff of science fiction. It’s not. Read on:

News Release
ETC Group
7 June 2007
www.etcgroup.org

Patenting Pandora’s Bug

Goodbye, Dolly…Hello, Synthia!
J. Craig Venter Institute Seeks Monopoly Patents on the World’s First-Ever Human-Made Life Form

ETC Group Will Challenge Patents on “Synthia” – Original Syn Organism Created in Laboratory

Ten years after Dolly the cloned sheep made her stunning debut, the J. Craig Venter Institute is applying for a patent on a new biological bombshell – the world’s first-ever human-made species. The novel bacterium is made entirely with synthetic DNA in the laboratory.

The Venter Institute – named for its founder and CEO, J. Craig Venter, the scientist who led the private sector race to map the Human Genome – is applying for worldwide patents on what they refer to as “Mycoplasma laboratorium.” In the tradition of ‘Dolly,’ ETC has nicknamed this synthetic organism (or ‘syn’) ‘Synthia.’
“Synthia may not be as cuddly as a cloned lamb, but we believe this is a much bigger deal,” explains Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a civil society organization that is calling on the world’s patent offices to reject the applications. “These monopoly claims signal the start of a high-stakes commercial race to synthesize and privatize synthetic life forms. Will Venter’s company become the ‘Microbesoft’ of synthetic biology?” asks Jim Thomas.

“For the first time, God has competition,” adds Pat Mooney of ETC Group. “Venter and his colleagues have breached a societal boundary, and the public hasn’t even had a chance to debate the far-reaching social, ethical and environmental implications of synthetic life,” said Mooney.

Amazing things are happening everyday to move us closer toward the Singularity.

From Scientific American.com:

June 06, 2007
A Step Toward a Living, Learning Memory Chip
Israeli scientists imprint multiple, persistent memories on a culture of neurons, paving the way to cyborg-type machines
By Nikhil Swaminathan

Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel have demonstrated that neurons cultured outside the brain can be imprinted with multiple rudimentary memories that persist for days without interfering with or wiping out others.

According to Eshel Ben-Jacob, previous attempts to trigger the cells to create a repeating pattern of signals sent from neuron to neuron in a population–which neuroscientists believe constitutes the formation of a memory in the context of performing a task–focused on excitatory neurons. These experiments were flawed because they resulted in randomly escalated activity that does not mimic what occurs when new information is learned.

This time, Ben-Jacob and graduate student Itay Baruchi, who led the study, targeted inhibitory neurons to try to bring some order to their neural network.

From the New York Times:

June 1, 2007
Google Zooms In Too Close for Some
By MIGUEL HELFT

OAKLAND, Calif., May 31 — For Mary Kalin-Casey, it was never about her cat.

Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.

“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”

Her husband quickly added, “It’s like peeping.”

Ms. Kalin-Casey first shared her concerns about the service in an e-mail message to the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday. Since then, the Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of Street View — with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the “Best Urban Images” that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, “Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?”

Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” the company said. “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Google said that it had consulted with public service organizations and considered their feedback in developing the service, which allows users to request that a photo be removed for privacy reasons. A Google spokeswoman said the company had received few such requests.

For instance, Google worked with the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which represents shelters for victims of domestic violence nationwide, to remove pictures of those shelters. “They reached out in advance to us so we could reach out to our network,” said Cindy Southworth, founder and director of the organization.

Not everyone believes the service raises serious privacy concerns.

“You don’t have a right to ‘privacy’ over what can be seen while driving the speed limit past your house,” wrote a Boing Boing reader, identified as Rich Gibson, in response to Ms. Kalin-Casey’s complaint. Others dismissed her as a crazy cat lady.

Edward A. Jurkevics, a principal at Chesapeake Analytics, a consulting firm specializing in mapping and imagery, said that courts have consistently ruled that people in public spaces can be photographed. “In terms of privacy, I doubt if there is much of a problem,” Mr. Jurkevics said.

Still, the issues raised by the service, thorny or merely funny, were perfect blog fodder. The hunt was on for quirky or potentially embarrassing images that could be found by wandering the virtual streets of the service.

There was the picture of a clearly identifiable man standing in front of an establishment offering lap dances and other entertainment in San Francisco. The site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

Others pointed to pictures of cars whose license plates were clearly readable. One pointed to images captured inside the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, a controversial location for photography in this high-security era. On Lombard Street in San Francisco, various tourists who had come to photograph the famously curvy street were photographed themselves.

Google said that the images had been captured by vehicles equipped with special cameras. The company took some of the photographs itself and purchased others from Immersive Media, a data provider.

“I think that this product illustrates a tension between our First Amendment right to document public spaces around us, and the privacy interests people have as they go about their day,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. Mr. Bankston said Google could have avoided privacy concerns by blurring people’s faces.

Back at her apartment, Ms. Kalin-Casey acknowledged that plenty of information about her — that she manages an apartment complex, that she was an editor at the film site Reel.com — is already easily accessible through Google and other search engines.

“People’s jobs are pretty public,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean they want a shot of their sofa on Google.” She has asked Google to remove the image of her building, which was still online as of Thursday evening.

When a reporter first arrived to interview her, Monty the cat was visible in the window.

From Science Daily:

Researchers at Harvard University and Princeton University have made a crucial step toward building biological computers, tiny implantable devices that can monitor the activities and characteristics of human cells. The information provided by these “molecular doctors,” constructed entirely of DNA, RNA, and proteins, could eventually revolutionize medicine by directing therapies only to diseased cells or tissues.

“Each human cell already has all of the tools required to build these biocomputers on its own,” says Harvard’s Yaakov (Kobi) Benenson, a Bauer Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Center for Systems Biology. “All that must be provided is a genetic blueprint of the machine and our own biology will do the rest. Your cells will literally build these biocomputers for you.”

Evaluating Boolean logic equations inside cells, these molecular automata will detect anything from the presence of a mutated gene to the activity of genes within the cell. The biocomputers’ “input” is RNA, proteins, and chemicals found in the cytoplasm; “output” molecules indicating the presence of the telltale signals are easily discernable with basic laboratory equipment.

“Currently we have no tools for reading cellular signals,” Benenson says. “These biocomputers can translate complex cellular signatures, such as activities of multiple genes, into a readily observed output. They can even be programmed to automatically translate that output into a concrete action, meaning they could either be used to label a cell for a clinician to treat or they could trigger therapeutic action themselves.”

Benenson and his colleagues demonstrate in their Nature Biotechnology paper that biocomputers can work in human kidney cells in culture. Research into the system’s ability to monitor and interact with intracellular cues such as mutations and abnormal gene levels is still in progress.

Benenson and colleagues including Ron Weiss, associate professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, have also developed a conceptual framework by which various phenotypes could be represented logically.

A biocomputer’s calculations, while mathematically simple, could allow researchers to build biosensors or medicine delivery systems capable of singling out very specific types or groups of cells in the human body. Molecular automata could allow doctors to specifically target only cancerous or diseased cells via a sophisticated integration of intracellular disease signals, leaving healthy cells completely unaffected.

Benenson and Weiss worked in collaboration with undergraduate Keller Rinaudo, postdoctoral researcher Leonidas Bleris, and summer intern Rohan Maddamsetti, all at Harvard, and with Sairam Subramanian, a graduate student at Princeton. Their research is supported by Harvard University and a center grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The results will be published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Harvard University.