Friday, January 15, 2021

Cyborgs Among Us


Next-generation brain implants with more than a thousand electrodes can survive for more than six years
Apr 2020, phys.org

Get it straight - they're growing glass to implant into the brain.
Researchers have demonstrated the ability to implant an ultrathin, flexible neural interface with thousands of electrodes into the brain with a projected lifetime of more than six years.

25 micrometers thick with 360 electrodes.

Thermally grown layer of silicon dioxide less than a micrometer thick can ward off the hostile environment within the brain, degrading at a rate of only 0.46 nanometers per day

Because this form of glass is biocompatible, any trace amount that dissolves into the body should not create any problems of its own.

Next-gen organoids grow and function like real tissues
Sep 2020, phys.org

Read the whole article and watch the video. Jeez.

Intestinal organoids. They're bio-engineered miniature intestines using a an artificial gut-shaped microchannel. Mini-guts.

They make the substrate out of proteins already found in the gut, cross-linking them into a hydrogel and forming it from a laser printer-cutter. The substrate, or scaffold, is then seeded with intestinal stem cells, that know how to do nothing else but make an intestine. And they do.

Homeostatic mini-intestines through scaffold-guided organoid morphogenesis, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2724-8


A lab that reads—and writes—our dreams
Apr 2020, phys.org

Dormio is a glovelike device that allows researchers to communicate with sleeping subjects as they slip into hypnogogia - a fleeting semi-conscious state between wakefulness and sleep, by tracking heart rate, muscle tone and skin conductance, as well as playing a word or other audio sound as subjects drift into the transitional sleep stage.

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