Engineers John Rogers and Todd Coleman have developed this tech. EES has electrodes capable of measuring brain, heart, and muscle activity, just like an EEG. It can then transmit this data wirelessly. The circuits stick to skin because they are extremely thin, and will adhere thanks to molecular forces. These circuits have been integrated without any pain, suffering or surgery, which is pretty cool. The circuits are applied just like a temporary tattoo. The wires of the circuits are elastic, so they can move about without breaking.

Soon, you will be able to integrate transistors, LEDs, photodetectors, RFID tags, capacitors and more onto your skin. Once these circuits get sophisticated enough, it could make interfacing with computers and our other electronic gadgets a lot different than how we do today.

[io9 via DVice]

Vlach lost her left eye in an accident back in 2005. Ever since then, she’s been asking for help and looking into possible ways of regaining her sight. She now has a tentative design for a digital cam-equipped prosthetic eye, which she hopes will be able to take 720p video at best, has a wireless transmitter, 3x optical zoom and MPEG-4/H.264 recording, among other things.

But becoming a cyborg costs money, and that’s where you come in. Whereas Spence fitted his eye socket with a glowing LED to gain publicity (and thus help), Vlach chose a more current route: Kickstarter.

Vlach is hoping to raise $15,000 (USD) by August 3.  As always, backers will get freebies depending on the amount they pledge. Visit her Kickstarter page and pledge if you want to be part of her groundbreaking project.

I’m not sure if Spence has already succeeded with his project, but if not it would be awesome if he and Vlach could team up and form a superhero team share information and promote their common goal as one. Mr. & Ms. Eyeborg – imagine the publicity that would generate!

[via Engadget]

The Hybrid Assisted Limb (HAL) robo-suit was designed by Tsukuba University professor Yoshiyuki Sankai. It’s supposed to increase the wearer’s strength tenfold. A disabled man named Seiji Uchida (not pictured above) will be carried up Mont Saint Michel by someone wearing the HAL robo-suit. Uchiba will be placed in the back of the suit in a pannier. It has always been his dream to climb this mountain in Normandy, France, and he hasn’t been able to do so due to his physical challenges.

The robo-suit has been designed to bear a load of 176 lbs, so should be able to carry Uchiba without too much trouble. The suit is battery-powered and detects muscle impulses to anticipate and support movements. It was originally designed to help the elderly and to lift patients in hospitals.

[Daily Mail via Ubergizmo]

PossessedHand consists of a pair of wrist bands that deliver mild electrical stimuli directly into the muscles that control your fingers, which is something that is usually done by your own brain.

The project initially started as a learning tool for people who want to play string instruments, but it could also help stroke victims regain some control of their affected limbs.

I’m betting Sony will put this to some use as a fancy game controller, where the game controls you. While many people think that Microsoft Kinect will do just fine, Sony still needs to figure out their own unique slant on things.

[via PhysOrg via DVice]

The only problem is the nearly $5,000 price tag! This Dalek replica stands 5’3″ in height, and it will be hand built to your color specifications using molds from the BBC Props Department. Your Dalek will be made in the exact same way as the Daleks are built on Doctor Who. Naturally, this replica features a plunger arm that can extend, a dome that will rotate 360 degrees, as well as wheels so that it can actually move around.

The company who has licensed this mentions that this isn’t a toy, so you can’t really play with it, but that won’t stop anyone from screaming “Exterminate! Exterminate!” while they wheel around! You can order the Dalek Replica for £3,000 (~$4,920 USD) over at Firebox.

[via Geek Alerts]

Patrick, a 24-year old Austrian, had lost the use of his hand. Now, thanks to his bionic hand, he can move his fingers once more. The prosthetics are called bionic since use the signals from the patients’ brain and nerves to enact movement. Through the miracle of modern science, Patrick can tie his own shoelaces and open a bottle. Another patient, called “Milo” lost his hand in a motorcycle accident and will soon be fitted with a bionic hand after a voluntary amputation of his right hand.

This stuff seems like it’s out of science fiction, but it’s real. It’s amazing what they can do with these bionic limbs. It won’t take long before people will have all sorts of bionic implants, from feet to eyes. Be sure to check out the videos over at the BBC.

[via Make:]

It’s called the x-Ar from Equipois and it won’t make you superhuman, but it will help make lifting heavy things easier. It’s designed for people who always have to lift stuff with their arms, like assembly-line and construction workers.

The x-Ar is designed to make your arm and whatever it is lifting feel like it weighs next to nothing. It attaches to your shoulders and torso, and redistributes the weight away from your arm. The clever device uses technology inspired from steadicams to help you lift more without getting fatigued. Personally, I’m most amazed by the exoskeletons that allow people in wheelchairs to walk again.

[via CrunchGear]

Patients with glaucoma get excess pressure in their eyeball, which can damage the optic nerve, leading to blindness. This needs to be monitored on a regular basis, and this could be much easier with this little device. It’s being described as the first millimeter-scale computer and it’s just one cubic-millimeter in size. Incredibly, it only consumes 5.3 nanowatts.

The computer is charged up by solar power and is able to transmit the data wirelessly. This little computer could have many different applications, meaning that we should have flea-size cyborgs sometime soon.

[via Ubergizmo]

This has to be one of the more unusual tattoos I’ve seen in a while. Is this girl really a steampunk cyborg, or does she just have a really good tattoo artist?

I can’t imagine how painful it was to have all those mechanical components installed – or to have a tattoo that large drawn on her body.

[via Digitalyn]

The Plantas Nomadas robot plant is part robot, part plant. I guess that’s kind of obvious from the name. It’s nomadic and it can walk about, slurping water from contaminated rivers to keep itself going. Thanks to a microbial fuel cell, the elements of the contaminated water are decomposed and turned into energy, that will feed the “brain” behind this robot.

It’s definitely an interesting concept. I wonder why they don’t make thousands of these and release them into the wild to help clean up the environment.

If you’d like to check it out in person (and happen to live in Spain), you can see Plantas Nomadas at Laboral, Gijón (Spain) through June, 7, 2010.

[via We Make Money Not Art via Good]

The human test subject was a soldier, who was blinded in Iraq. The system consists of a small video camera attached to a pair of sunglasses. This is then connected to a device which is placed on the user’s tongue.

BrainPort converts visual signals into electrical impulses which are sent to the tongue. The intensity of the signal allows the user to figure out how close obstacles are in his or her path. I was actually trying to imagine how a tongue could “see”. It turns out that there’s a lot more to this technology than just sending jolts to your tongue…

“With the current system (arrays containing 100 to 600+ electrodes), study participants have been able to recognize high-contrast objects, their location, movement, and some aspects of perspective and depth. Trained blind participants use information from the tongue display to augment understanding of the environment. Our ongoing research with the BrainPort vision device demonstrates the great potential of tactile vision augmentation and we believe that these findings warrant further exploration. As a result, we are currently working on improvements to the tongue display hardware, software, and usability,  and on overall device miniaturization.”

[via Ubergizmo]

A lot of people lose limbs in warfare, disasters and accidents. The need for these cybernetic or prosthetic parts is real. Designed by engineers are the University of Michigan, these new feet are actually powered and can return some of the impact energy that we generate while walking. This makes it easier for the patient to walk.

The design is said to be 30% more efficient compared to traditional prosthetic feet. Check out this high-speed video of the bionic foot in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[R&D Mag via Make:]

I’m sure there are lots of things that he knows that we common folks don’t. But to support his claims, Kurzweil, whose future self sent the picture below, also mentions recent breakthroughs in biotechnology, such as artificial pancreases for diabetics and neural implants for Parkinson’s patients.

Kurzweil – whose future future self sent the picture below, I don’t know how or why - also pulled the ol’ computer analogy: “Our phones now perform tasks we wouldn’t have dreamed possible 20 years ago. When I was a student in 1965, my university’s only computer cost £7 million and was huge.  Today your mobile phone is a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion times more capable for the same price.”

Using the Law of Accelerating Returns – which btw is his own theory – Kurzweil estimates that “we will experience another billion-fold increase in technological capability for the same cost in the next 25 years.” Dammit. I wasn’t planning to buy a new laptop till 2030! How expensive will a Core Quadrillion MacBook be by then? Kurzweil, whose future future future self drew the picture below, also mentions a bit of NSFW stuff that I’d rather not share with you.

What do you think of Krangzweil Kurzweil’s predictions? You can read his article here if you want. Our technological progress has really been exponential, so yeah, maybe he’s right.  But let’s not forget that despite all of our fancy gadgets and Gundam statues, we’re not really progressing a lot in other aspects: lots of people are still suffering in one way or another, and we still bicker and fight over lots of things.

If Kurzweil’s 2029 ever comes true, I hope it’s not just the rich or privileged who reap the advantage of this supposedly godlike technology. I’m telling you, as a Third World gamer and techie who spends most of his time browsing the net and reading about First World developments, sometimes it feels like you folks are already in the future, because I sure as hell don’t see or experience a lot of the things that I read about. Also, I’m finding it very hard to be dramatic and serious with Krangzweil around.

[via DVICE, Kurzminators via faceinhole]

Developed by a team of DARPA-funded engineers – led by Michael Maharbiz – at the University of Skynet California at Berkeley, the beetle Borg is assimilated at its pupal stage; as the beetle matures, the “neural electrodes” implanted into its nervous and muscular systems become one with its body. Awesome. I meant poor beetle. tsk tsk tsk.

A microcontroller and microbattery are then mounted on the adult beetle, allowing that disembodied hand controlling that laptop in the image below to control the movement of the beetle, as in “initiation, cessation, elevation and left/right turns of the beetle flight.” Note to self: Possible weakness: beetle cannot be told to go backwards. Must tweet this to the Resistance.

Insects are already capable of awesome things despite their size. For example, the beetle is strong enough to carry a “small payload”, such as a camera or a tiny tiny nuke, perhaps strong enough to cause an outbreak of zits at Ground Zero. Okay that last one was my idea. Still scary though.

The UC team are planning on working on more cyborg insects, such as cyborg butterflies for long-distance missions, cyborg dragonflies for high-speed missions, cyborg moths with a 10-inch wingspan for carrying cargo, and cyborg grasshoppas for awesome Kung-Fu lessons. I made that last one up but you never know. You never know.

[Discover Magazine via Neatorama]

Whatever his cause, Spence and his partners sure know how to gain mad publicity. By installing a red LED into his prosthetic eye, they not only proved that installing an electronic device and its power source into such a small space is feasible, now Spence also looks like one of the Borg, or a Terminator. He says that “this is every adult male’s fantasy.” To which I would have to say “Ummm…no.” But he really does look awesome.

The Canadian’s quest for a camera-eye has been widely publicized; however, the Eyeborg Project really don’t have much to show save for a prototype housing for the camera. This video from the Eyeborg Project introduces us to the people behind the team. It’s actually pretty crazy and funny; but of course we should expect nothing less from a guy who decides to pop in an LED into his eye socket.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Although personally I’m okay with my plain old unenhanced eyes, I really hope the project succeeds. You never know, someday blind people may have the option to install tiny video cameras into their bodies and have it wired to their brains so they can “see”. For more details – including an Ashton Kutcher tweet – check out the Eyeborg Project’s website and their blog.

[via ABC News]

I don’t know that much about it, just that Flickr user woundupladybug is the master behind this creation. She says she made it for her son after he expressed his extreme affection for Clone Wars. It’s stitched with glow-in-the-dark thread for extra nighttime niftiness.

Oh. 1 more thing. Also, I can tell you that it’s AWESOME. That’s a definite.

[via Craft:]

This seems like a great idea, since it seems the position of those controls is a highly individual preference. It’s especially handy if you’re used to playing on a particular console, and want to have the same feel when you’re playing on your PC. There’s also a nifty “reduced sensitivity” mode that lets you temporarily aim more precisely when targeting. The controller will retail for around $35 when it’s released later this year.

I’m hoping Saitek eventually releases a wireless version for use with the Xbox 360 and PS3 too, but I’m not holding my breath.

[via IGN via Everything USB]

Modeled after the recently updated version of the Cybermen in the long-running BBC series, this helmet not only makes you look quite silly, it makes your voice sound silly too. The $59.95 Cyberhead changes your voice and its LED “mouth” lights up as you speak.

[via Wists]