Friday, March 09, 2007

I hear Cheney is interested

In whole body regeneration....

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Inhabiting shallow coastal waters, sea squirts form colonies of genetically identical individuals. Ram Reshef and Yuval Rinkevich of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and colleagues took fragments of blood vessels from the animals and watched under a microscope.

Out of 95 fragments they examined, 80 underwent whole body regeneration (WBR). Cells first grouped into hollow spheres, then cell layers in-folded and organs developed until after two weeks an adult sea squirt had grown, capable of sexual reproduction.

Or maybe he'll just go totally bionic:
A robotic salamander with an electric "spinal cord" that controls both its walking and swimming has been developed by Swiss and French researchers. It could be a forerunner of robots with movements coordinated by artificial nervous systems, they claim.
Of course, there are some who don't think of what this kind of invention would do for handicapped people or exploration or science ... they think of the military uses:
Robots that can both walk and swim could have clear value for the military, says Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US. "It would be great to have something that could transition smoothly from water to land," he says.
Update: Headline about soldiers of the future:

Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.



3 comments:

ellroon said...

Not if my brain takes a hike.

Steve Bates said...

Enhanced humans, eh? Haven't any of these people watched Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan? They seem to have watched every grade-Z war movie; couldn't they at least absorb the object lesson of the whole series of cautionary tales from Frankenstein forward?

Re: immortality... I watched my mother "die" years before her body stopped; she suffered Alzheimer's disease. I am hardly a suicidal sort, but I'd kill myself before I'd suffer that end.

ellroon said...

Alzheimer's is brutal and humiliating, I have a friend who lost her father that way. I'm so sorry, Steve.