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Hydrogel implants could be a fiber optic network for your body
The biggest problem with wetware is the “ware” part. Enormous metal implants like those seen in The Matrix or Elysium look cool and all, but any real-world interface of metal and flesh is precarious; surface implants are often rejected by the body, leading to infection and even death. Technology has gotten smaller, more efficient, and able to better communicate wirelessly, but for all the nifty implants we can build, actually implanting them has proven difficult, and controlling them even more so. Now, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital claim that a special hydrogel could change all that.
A hydrogel is an extremely absorbent type of gel, a network of simple polymers that can contain up to 99.9% water, by weight. While life has had little time to make friends with aluminum or sterile plastic, water-heavy polymer networks are its bread and butter, and this research found that mice have no trouble accepting implants made out of this flexible, non-toxic substance.
This study made use of a flexible, bio-safe hydrogel that exhibits total internal reflection.
To understand why that matters, consider a fiber optic cable. Like the walls of this transparent hydrogel, the material lining the interior of an optical fiber is clear, but tuned to produce a phenomenon called total internal reflection. This means that light moving at certain angles from the cable’s core material to its lining will be entirely reflected, as though by a mirror. By tuning their hydrogel to create the same effect, they created a form of bio-compatible optical cable — the researchers call it a “light guiding hydrogel.”
Getting light into the body is important for a number of reasons. In the most basic sense, pulses of light are information, and having a hard-wired line of communication to implanted technology will be important for their development; wireless tech is still too unreliable for most people to bet their lives on, and it’s also notoriously hard on power consumption. This hydrogel implant stretched four centimeters into the mouse’s body, giving the scientists a hard-wire to both read and control the mouse’s internal states.
This study opted to test a more advanced possible use for the hydrogel, however: optogenetics. If that word seems foreign, it’s because the field is actually only a few years old. Cutting edge techniques in genetic manipulation let scientists create light-sensitive neurons that fire when exposed to blue light — so-called “on demand” neural control. Quickly enough the logic was reversed, so colonies of cells can now light up to signal the presence of some toxin or other chemical trigger. Light-sensitive proteins can now even turn specific cellular processes on and off at will.
And yet, just as we saw with mechanical implants, putting all this wonderful technology to use in the real world proves problematic. Light control was usually only skin deep, or required implants too invasive for use in humans. This hydrogel provides a literal path for such light signals to follow, ferrying light signals either from surface to cells or from cells to surface.
As their proof of concept, the researchers used their hydrogel implant as a scaffold for small colonies that produce the protein GLP-1 in response to blue light. GLP-1 is an important protein for glucose metabolism, helping to stimulate the secretion of insulin, so the researchers here have demonstrated a very broad possible mechanism for treating certain types of diabetes. Implanted, diabetic mice exposed to the blue light signal showed a markedly better response to glucose than implanted diabetic mice that received no light.
This is the first time anybody has been able to speak optically with cells deep inside the body, and the sheer number of possible applications is dizzying. Monitor cells could sit happily for years near a problem site until they light up in response to a worrying chemical symptom — imagine if your wristwatch could alert you to allergens in your system, prompting you to pop an antihistamine. Hunter-killer immune cells could flood the blood stream in response to a blue-light signal, a sort of endogenous antibiotic under your doctor’s control. Such uses are totally plausible, given a mechanism of communication between internal cells and the outside world.
The next step for the team is to improve its results; how can the hydrogel be refined or reshaped to provide better light propagation? How can we improve or specifically control the gel’s lifetime within the body? Could a light emitter in one part of the body speak directly to a receiver elsewhere, without ever interacting with the surface? Such questions in bio-networking are quickly becoming relevant.
Now read: Body hacker uses subdermal RFID hand implant as wireless storage
Research paper: doi:10.1038/nphoton.2013.278 – “Light-guiding hydrogels for cell-based sensing and optogenetic synthesis in vivo“
Source: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/169823-hydrogel-implants-could-be-optical-cables-for-your-body
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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