Monday, February 26, 2007

NEWRON vol I issue III (2-23-07)

Edited by: Natan Davidovics



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020101623.html

New Technique Allows 'Feeling' in Artificial Arm

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Thursday, February 1, 2007; 12:00 AM

An innovative method of nerve regrowth now allows a patient with a prosthetic arm to feel its movements.





http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11179-haptic-glove-to-touch-on-vi%20%20rtual-fabrics.html

Haptic glove to touch on virtual fabrics

  • 18:28 13 February 2007
  • NewScientist.com news service
  • Tom Simonite
"Virtual fabric" that feels just like the real thing is being developed by a group of European researchers. Detailed models of the way fabrics behave are combined with new touch stimulating hardware to realistically simulate a texture's physical properties.



(No link for the next one, article attached below)

We'll all be cyborgs someday, scientist says

British professor foresees day when most people will be implanted with computer chips.

By Don Melvin
INTERNATIONAL STAFF
Saturday, December 23, 2006
READING, England — In "Casino Royale," the latest James Bond movie, Bond is implanted with a microchip that allows headquarters to track his whereabouts and monitor his vital signs.
If a British cybernetics expert is right, the day will come when most people are implanted with chips — and the real-life chips will do a lot more than Bond's does.
Rodica Socolov photos
FOR COX NEWSPAPERS
British professor Kevin Warwick was able to make a robotic hand move using signals transmitted from his brain through a chip implanted by doctors in 2002. He had a less sophisticated implant in 1998.
Robot Morgui can combine input from several sensory receptors to understand its environment.
Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, has firsthand knowledge. In 1998, he had a chip surgically inserted into his left arm, becoming, he thinks, the first human ever implanted with a computer chip.
Since then, he's had a more sophisticated chip connected directly to his nervous system. He is still working toward his grandest experiment: having a chip implanted in his brain.
"I want to become a cyborg," he said with an infectious grin. "I can see the advantages."
A cyborg is a mixture of man and machine. And cybernetics is the study of communication and control between humans and computers.
Warwick, 52, presides excitedly over the apparent chaos at the university's MAD lab. (The name stands not for madness but for Mobile Autonomous Devices.)
Cables and machine parts litter workbenches. On the floor, two robots the size of model cars race around, mapping their environment and learning how not to bump into things. Nearby, a robot with a skull for a head works on combining the input from his various senses — audio, video, ultrasonics, radar and infrared — to interpret what's going on around it.
In another lab on campus, computers are being controlled by living tissue taken from the brains of rats.
But Warwick's most daring experiments have been on himself. On Aug. 24, 1998, as the British Broadcasting Corp. filmed, doctors made a small incision in Warwick's left arm, slid in a thin inchlong glass capsule, and stitched him up.
The capsule contained silicon microchips that announced Warwick's presence to computers. His office doors swung open as he approached. Lights flicked on as he entered. His computer said hello and told him how many e-mails were waiting.
That chip stayed in for a couple of weeks. It's now on display at the Science Museum in London.
In 2002, doctors sliced open Warwick's left wrist and implanted a much smaller and more sophisticated device. For three months, its 100 electrodes were connected to his median nerves, linking his nervous system to a computer.
"I moved my hand, and my neural signals were sent over the Internet to open and close a robot hand," he said.
Not only that: The robotic hand had sensors. As it grasped a sponge or a glasses case, it sent information back to Warwick.
"It was tremendously exciting," Warwick said. "I experienced it as signals in my brain, which my brain was quite happy to recognize as feedback from the robot hand fingertips."
The research has significant medical implications.
Paralyzed people might regain some movement if one chip was implanted above the break in the nerves and another was implanted below to receive the impulses, Warwick said.
More intelligent chips in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease might sense when tremors were on the way and signal the brain to stop them.
"It's like a computer brain out-thinking a human brain," he said.
Warwick's biggest experiment, in which he will have a chip implanted in his brain, is seven or eight years away. He will attempt thought communication — "literally the first brain-to-brain communication," he said.
"That excites me beyond all proportion," he said. "Nothing is going to stop me from doing that."
Not everyone approves of Warwick's research. From time to time, he receives missives from people he calls religious extremists, telling him he is tampering with God's work.
And in an opinion piece this month in the Toronto Star, Kevin Haggerty, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Alberta, called Warwick part of the "advance guard" trying to expand chip technology as much as possible. The day will come, Haggerty warned, when all people will be implanted with computer chips and government will be able to track them all the time, recording their smallest behavioral traits.
Warwick acknowledges that the technology raises ethical questions. In the hands of a malign government, he said, it could be used to horrendous effect. But it can be used to good effect as well, he said.
"Ethically, the technology is there," he said. "I show people what it can do."
Despite differing over the desirability of implantation, Warwick and Haggerty agree on a great deal.
For one thing, the procedure, unheard of until recently, is becoming more common.
More pet owners are taking advantage of chip implants in dogs and cats that transmit identification to veterinarians and animal shelters.
Patrons of the Baja Beach Clubs in Barcelona, Spain, and Rotterdam, Netherlands, can have a microchip injected into their arms to get access to VIP lounges and pay for drinks without waiting in line.
For another, one early use of chips to track humans might involve sex offenders. Haggerty views this as a way to get the public used to human tracking. Warwick can envision officers trying to solve a crime pressing a button and seeing instantly the locations of all known sex offenders in a certain area.
And both men foresee a time when most people will be implanted with chips. For Warwick, that is because the advantages will be so obvious — increased memory, better ability to analyze and compare, the ability to think in more dimensions, the possibility of sensing the world in different ways.
But there will be, he said, important questions to answer.
"Is it OK to upgrade? What about the people who don't upgrade?" he asked. "If they don't upgrade, they could become some sort of subspecies."

posted by Nasir Bhanpuri at 9:15 PM

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