Cyberpunk here we come! Synthetic skin

Synthetic, Self-Healing Skin That's Sensitive To The Touch

Human skin is a hard system to emulate, but that hasn't stopped Stanford scientists from producing a touch-sensitive material that can heal itself at room temperature.

By Clay DillowPosted 11.12.2012 at 12:01 pm0 Comments

Self-Healing, Touch-Sensitive Synthetic Skin Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

Before we can construct the realistic humanoid robots that populate our most vivid sci-fi-driven dreams, there are a lot of human systems that researchers are going to have to emulate synthetically. Not the least challenging is human skin; filled with nerve endings and able to heal itself over time, our skin serves as both a massive sensory system and a barrier between our innards and the outside world. Now, an interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers has created the first synthetic material that is both self-healing at room temperature and sensitive to touch--a breakthrough that could be the beginnings of a new kind of robot skin (and in the meantime enjoy much more practical applications like enhanced prosthetics).

The Stanford material is far from the first self-healing plastic or polymer, but it does enjoy some benefits that set it apart. For one, many self-healing materials require some kind of catalyst or special condition to heal up, things like exposure to high temperature or certain spectrums of light. Others can heal up at room temperature, but they generally can only do so once--the act of healing alters their chemical structure such that they cannot do it a second time, much less a third or fourth.

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Then, if an analog for skin is what you’re truly looking for, there’s the problem with touch sensitivity. Most plastics, polymers, and such--the primary materials used in self-healing research--are fantastic insulators. But to imbue a material with a sense of touch--and to make it interface with a larger digital system--you really want something conductive. That’s where the Stanford team has really broken new ground. Its material can repair cuts or tears in itself at room temperature multiple times, and it is conductive.

How did the researchers pull it off? They started with a plastic consisting of molecular chains joined by simple hydrogen bonds. This imparts the self-healing ability, as the bonds can be easily broken but also easily reconstituted by simply putting the broken chains back in contact with each other. In the lab, the researchers severed a piece of the material completely, creating two separate halves. After pressing the cut edge back together for just a few seconds, three-quarters of its prior strength had been restored. Within half an hour it returned to nearly 100 percent strength. After 50 such trials, the material still healed up nicely.

Then, to achieve conductivity, the researchers distributed nickel particles throughout their plastic. These nickel particles not only increase the material’s mechanical strength, but also serve as a means for electrons to move through the material, hopping from one particle to the next, creating an electric current. Bending, flexing, or otherwise warping the material changes the distance between the nickel particles, altering the material's resistance to the current. That electrical resistance can be measured to determine the shape of the skin and any pressure being exerted on it.

It’s easy to envision something like this being integrated into future prosthetics to help restore a sense of touch to those missing a limb. More immediately, such a material could be used to sheathe other electronics to give them a self-healing capacity. The findings were published in the November 11 issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

How to Steal Personal Data From Someone's Brain

The Future just got a little scarier.....

How to Steal Personal Data From Someone's Brain, Using a $300 Off-the-Shelf Brain Scanner

By Clay DillowPosted 08.27.2012 at 4:44 pm3 Comments

Emotiv's EPOC Brain Signal Reader via Emotiv

The Emotiv brain-computer interface was designed to let users control their computers with their thoughts alone, opening up a new avenue for hands-free computing as well as a potential means for those with disabilities to communicate through machines. So much for good intentions. Scientists at the University of California and the University of Oxford in Geneva have devised a way to steal a user’s sensitive information--account numbers, PIN numbers, etc.--via Emotiv’s off-the-shelf brain signal-reading technology.

The $300 Emotiv device works by sensing electrical signals in the brain and interpreting them as commands for a computer. But the researchers in this case were interested in another application that essentially boils down to mind-reading. Using the Emotiv, could they tap into signals that would reveal sensitive information?

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Specifically they were monitoring for the P300 signal in their test subjects, a brain signal that is associated with recognition--a tip-off that a particular word or image is meaningful to the user. The researchers placed their Emotiv-clad subjects in front of monitors displaying a series of random images of banks, numeric keypads, PIN numbers, and various people, looking for P300 signals that showed a flicker of recognition. They found that over time they could reduce the randomness of the imagery and focus in on what the user found relevant. Slowly, they were able to zero in on the images--and numbers, and banks--most relevant to the subjects.

Of course, in order to execute this kind of fraud the user would have to be a willing participant. But should technologies like Emotiv’s interface proliferate, it would be easier and easier to perpetrate such a scheme. An unsuspecting user could be talked into playing “games” that result in their essentially being interrogated, the researchers say. And the information that the interrogators take off with would be nothing shy of the very information stored in a person’s memory.

In news that doesn’t foretell a dystopian future where our very minds are ripe for robbery, the paper in which the researchers published these results also nodded toward a more benign use of these procedures in law enforcement interrogation--not to steal specific thoughts but rather to tell if a suspect is withholding relevant information or lying about an incident much more accurately than today’s lie detectors can.

We, The "Borg"!!

Will People Alive Today Have the Opportunity to Upload Their Consciousness to a New Robotic Body?

A Russian mogul wants to make sure the answer is yes, and soon

By Clay DillowPosted 03.02.2012 at 11:22 am27 Comments

Bottled Consciousness? Gaetan Lee via Wikimedia

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host--within 30 years time.

Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied up in Itskov’s vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it’s already being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their lifetimes.

Which is terrifying and amazing and disconcerting all at the same time.

We’ve already started down the road toward shedding our corporeality.But is it even within the realm of possibility? Phase one--creating a robot controlled by a human brain--is already well within reach. In fact, DARPA is already working on it via a program called “Avatar” (which, incidentally, is also the name of Itskov’s project) through which the Pentagon hopes to create a brain-machine interface that will allow soldiers to control bipedal human surrogate machines remotely with their minds.

And of course there are all the ongoing medical prosthesis projects (DARPA is involved in a few of these as well) that have shown that the human nervous system can interface with prosthetic enhancements, manipulating them via thought. Itskov draws a clear arc from what we have now to the consciousness-containing holograms that he envisions. All we have to do is attack the technological obstacles in between, one at a time, until we get there.

If only it were that easy. But Itskov also makes a valid point. In the past decade alone we’ve witnessed brain-machine interfaces emerge from the realm of nascent, futuristic ideas tomechanisms firmly rooted in reality. There’s still so much we don’t know about the brain, but better technology (and an abundance of funding in this field spurred by the horrific neurological and extremity injuries inflicted on American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan) is expanding the envelope of possibility every year.

What Itskov is really saying--though in a very ambitious way--is that we’ve already started down the road toward shedding our corporeality via prostheses that interface with our nervous centers. If you can interface a brain with a hand, and then a brain with an entire arm, why not a brain with two arms? With two legs? With everything else? The question now is figuring out where the limitations lay--just how far down that road we can go.

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And what a hypothetical road it is. Theoretically, as long as one could keep his or her gray matter from decaying, he or she could continue to “live” indefinitely (at least if you buy into the idea that our consciousness lives in the wiring of our neurons). Phase three of Itskov’s plan--dispensing with the physical brain and uploading consciousness directly to a computer or robot--does away with the organic matter entirely, making your consciousness as permanent as that CD-ROM version of Myst that still lingers in the bottom of one of your desk drawers. People as programs--paging Kevin Flynn.

Of course, there are myriad reasons why uploading human consciousness to some kind of computer won’t work, not least of which being the fact that every attempt we’ve made at creating a computer that functions just like the brain has come up far short. And creating a hologram that also contains that consciousness? We’re not seeing it--not in thirty years, not in this century. Still, progress is being made in neural networks, microchips modeled on living brains, and entire computers set up to mimic the brain’s functionality. We’ve built synthetic analogs for all kinds of organs. The brain is the most complex of all, but following a certain line of reasoning--the line Itskov seems to be following--it’s only a matter of time and determination before we deliver a neurological analog as well.

All that is to say that Itskov’s vision, while overly-ambitious (and we like overly ambitious here), is not as completely far out as it sounds--at least not the earlier phases. People that are today firmly connected to their living bodies, consciousness all bound up in their craniums, may within their lifetimes be presented with a choice. Call it selective corporeality. In the future, questions about mechanical immortality--do we really want to live beyond our bodies as “conscious” machines? Is a robot or computer driven by a living brain a person, with all the rights and privileges inherent therein? Can i get jets implanted in my robo-hands and robo-feet so that I can fly like Iron Man?--could become, to some degree, actual questions that we have to consider, this time non-hypothetically.

It’s more than my non-mechanically enhanced consciousness can even start to think about.