Twelve‑year‑old Kai Pollnitz from Georgetown received a life‑changing surprise when YouTube creator MrBeast gifted him a custom Open Bionics Hero PRO robotic hand. Kai, who was born with a congenit…
Category: cyborgs
Synthetic ‘muscle’ with microfluidic blood vessels shows promise for soft robotics
Researchers are continuing to make progress on developing a new synthetic material that behaves like biological muscle, an advancement that could provide a path to soft robotics, prosthetic devices and advanced human-machine interfaces. Their research, recently published in Advanced Functional Materials, demonstrates a hydrogel-based actuator system that combines movement, control and fuel delivery in a single integrated platform.
Biological muscle is one of nature’s marvels, said Stephen Morin, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. It can generate impressive force, move quickly and adapt to many different tasks. It is also remarkable in its flexibility in terms of energy use and can draw on sugars, fats and other chemical stores, converting them into usable energy exactly when and where they are needed to make muscles move.
A synthetic version of muscle is one of the Holy Grails of material science.
Bionic LiDAR system achieves beyond-retinal resolution through adaptive focusing
In a recent study, researchers from China have developed a chip-scale LiDAR system that mimics the human eye’s foveation by dynamically concentrating high-resolution sensing on regions of interest (ROIs) while maintaining broad awareness across the full field of view.
The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
LiDAR systems power machine vision in self-driving cars, drones, and robots by firing laser beams to map 3D scenes with millimeter precision. The eye packs its densest sensors in the fovea (sharp central vision spot) and shifts gaze to what’s important. By contrast, most LiDARs use rigid parallel beams or scans that spread uniform (often coarse) resolution everywhere. Boosting detail means adding more channels uniformly, which explodes costs, power, and complexity.
Humans Will Become Cyborgs Within 200 Years, Says Professor
Within the next 200 years, humans will have become so merged with technology that we’ll have evolved into “God-like cyborgs”, according to Yuval Noah Harari, an historian and author from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Mike’s food channel: / strictlydumpling.
Robots That Feel Pain: Scientists Develop Human-Like Artificial Skin With Instant Reflexes
This technology is quite different from the workings of most robots used today. Many robots lack the ability to sense touch at all, and those that do can usually only detect simple pressure. Such robots lack self-protective reflexes.
In these systems, touch information first travels to the software, where it is analysed step-by-step before a response is determined. This process might be acceptable for robots working within safety enclosures in factories, but it’s insufficient for humanoid robots working in close proximity to humans.
Unlike humans, robots cannot heal themselves. However, scientists say the best alternative is quick and easy repair. According to them, the new skin converts touch signals into neural-like pulses and activates protective reflexes upon detecting pain. The skin can also detect damage, and thanks to its modular design, damaged sections can be quickly replaced.
Passengers’ brain signals may help self-driving cars make safer choices
Cars from companies like Tesla already promise hands-free driving, but recent crashes show that today’s self-driving systems can still struggle in risky, fast-changing situations.
Now, researchers say the next safety upgrade may come from an unexpected source: The brains of the people riding inside those cars.
In a new study appearing in Cyborg and Bionic Systems, Chinese researchers tested whether monitoring passengers’ brain activity could help self-driving systems make safer decisions in risky situations.
Robot-Assisted Exercise May Improve Mobility in Advanced Heart Failure
Adults with chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) who wore a lightweight exosuit during exercise showed significant improvements in the 6-minute walk distance and daily step counts, which were not statistically significant in those who received nonassisted conventional exercise training.
Robot-assisted training with a lightweight exosuit may help patients with advanced heart failure walk more and help them stay engaged in rehabilitation, a study finds.
Soft ‘cyborg’ cardiac patches could improve stem cell heart repair
Heart muscle cells grown from patient stem cells—known as human induced pluripotent stem cell–derived cardiomyocytes, or hiPSC-CMs—are a promising way to repair hearts damaged by heart attacks and heart failure. But transplanted hiPSC-CMs often have trouble syncing to the rhythm of native heart cells, which can cause dangerous arrhythmias after transplantation.
For years, stem cell biologists and cardiac researchers have been looking for ways to improve how implanted hiPSC-CMs mature and integrate into the heart. The challenge is that once the hiPSC-CMs are implanted in vivo, it’s hard to monitor how they integrate.
Now, Harvard University researchers have developed the first platform capable of continuously monitoring how transplanted cells mature, communicate, and synchronize with native tissue inside the body. Using this system, the researchers identified a self-assembling peptide that accelerated the maturation of hiPSC-CMs and improved the electrical coupling of the transplanted cardiac organoids. The research is published in Science.
Iron-on electronic patches enable easy integration of circuits into fabrics
Iron-on patches can repair clothing or add personal flair to backpacks and hats. And now they could power wearable tech, too. Researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have combined liquid metal and a heat-activated adhesive to create an electrically conductive patch that bonds to fabric when heated with a hot iron. In demonstrations, circuits ironed onto a square of fabric lit up LEDs and attached an iron-on microphone to a button-up shirt.
“E-textiles and wearable electronics can enable diverse applications from health care and environmental monitoring to robotics and human-machine interfaces. Our work advances this exciting area by creating iron-on soft electronics that can be rapidly and robustly integrated into a wide range of fabrics,” says Michael D. Bartlett, a researcher at Virginia Tech and corresponding author on the study.