Lifeboat Foundation

Robotic augmentation is coming to a war zone near you. For now, the first stop bypasses the battlefield.

Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla plans to use a different alloy for the upcoming Cybertruck electric pickup.

When Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck last year, one of the most interesting features was the fact the vehicle isn’t going to be built using a traditional automotive body system but with an exoskeleton.

The automaker wrote about the exoskeleton:

I think so.

Will augs like in the video game Deus Ex ever be possible? Why or why not? If one day they are, what are the implications? We have a long way to go, and the more we try to control our system, the less we will have available to us in the future.

Continue reading “Are Robotic Human Augmentations Possible?” »

Some might say it’s for the birds.

But the latest creation from German robotics company Festo promises not only literal flights of fancy, but quite promising real-world applications down the road as well.

Continue reading “German firm creates bionic birds” »

Sable co-created the story with artist Kristian Donaldson (Unthinkable, The Guild) and Mey Rude, a transgender woman who served as a consulting editor on the project. Sable took some time to talk to SYFY WIRE about biohacking, transhumanism, and how science fiction often predicts the future.

The Dark, by screenwriter and playwright Mark Sable (Unthinkable, Godkillers), is a graphic novel about a world plunged into chaos when a biotech virus pulls everything offline. The plot twists around government conspiracies, techno warfare, biohacking, and the unlikely pair out to stop it before another world war breaks loose. To make it all the scarier, Sable bases his fiction on fact. As a futurist who has consulted with think tanks and The Art of Future Warfare Project, he is well versed in techno warfare scenarios.

The Dark begins in 2035 and follows Master Sergeant Robert Carter, a N.E.O. (Networked Exoskeleton Operator) Marine whose power armor links him to the world’s technology, and whose implants mentally connect him to his unit. He feels what they feel, which proves torturous when his unit is attacked. The Dark takes on a double meaning as the experience leaves him both physically and technologically blind as the world’s tech crashes.

Continue reading “Indie Comics Spotlight: Biohacking, transhumanism, and gender identity in ‘The Dark’” »

Research at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) has led to the revolutionary development of an artificial liquid retinal prosthesis to counteract the effects of diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration that cause the progressive degeneration of photoreceptors of the retina, resulting in blindness. The study has been published in Nature Nanotechnology.

The study represents the state of the art in retinal prosthetics and is an evolution of the planar artificial retinal model developed by the same team in 2017 and based on organic semiconductor materials (Nature Materials 2017, 16: 681–689).

The ‘second generation’ artificial retina is biomimetic, offers high spatial resolution and consists of an aqueous component in which photoactive polymeric nanoparticles (whose size is 350 nanometres, thus about 1/100 of the diameter of a hair) are suspended, and will replace damaged photoreceptors.

Vikki was born without her right hand and says her “life has changed forever” after receiving a Hero Arm. Vikki’s bionic arm was funded by generous donors, and there’s more funding available now for upper limb amputees from low-income families! Apply here: http://www.openbionics.com/sign-up 😍😍😍.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

The ability to restore sight to the blind is one of the most profound acts of healing medicine can achieve, in terms of the impact on the affected patient’s life — and one of the most difficult for modern medicine to achieve. We can restore vision in a limited number of scenarios and there are some early bionic eyes on the market that can restore limited vision in very specific scenarios. Researchers may have taken a dramatic step towards changing that in the future, with the results of a new experiment to design a bionic retina.

The research team in question has published a paper in Nature detailing the construction of a hemispherical retina built out of high-density nanowires. The spherical shape of the retina has historically been a major challenge for biomimetic devices.