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"Silicon womb" trials to begin in UK

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henna-pregnancy No, it’s not a reproductive upgrade for your uber-1337 gaming PC. Instead, it’s a way of increasing the odds of success for in-vitro fertilization:

“The new device allows embryos created in the lab to be incubated inside a perforated silicon container inserted into a woman’s own womb. After a few days, the capsule is recovered and some embryos are selected for implantation in the womb.

Embryos incubated in the lab must have their growth medium changed every few hours to provide new nutrients and get rid of waste. The new device provides a more natural environment.”

So, while technology is an adjunct to biology in matters reproductive, the body still knows best. I wonder if we’ll ever be able to simulate biological processes that are effectively identical to the real thing ? Perhaps some new form of Sir Arthur C Clarke’s aphorism comes into effect – “any sufficiently advanced biotechnology is indistinguishable from life” … [image by aturkus]

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The Energy Island

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Combining multiple methods of alternative power generationThe Oil Drum Australia has a great post this week about tidal power construction all across the world, including the attractive ‘Energy Island’ concept pictured. The article talks about tidal, ocean current and wave projects from the UK, US, New Zealand, Taiwan and Canada, amongst many others. The UK could potentially derive 25% of its power just from wave energy, not to mention its huge resources of tidal power in the Severn Estuary and on the coasts of Scotland. Also discussed is OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), which creates power from the heat differential between warm surface water and cold deep water.

In other news, Oil has never been higher priced in history than it is today, at $102.08 a barrel. Looks like we’re going to need a lot of this alternative energy supply. One of the projects mentioned at the bottom of the Oil Drum article is for floating islands of power generation producing hydrogen to fuel passing ships. Neat.

[via The Oil Drum]

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Mice? Where we’re going, we don’t need mice.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve adapted well to the standard keyboard/mouse computer interface. I started as a child with DOS and Win 3.1. Touch-typing on various-languages’ keyboards are no problem and my twitch response works well in Team Fortress 2.

Unfortunately, this ability honed over decades may soon be obsolete, what with some new technologies on demonstration at the Game Developer’s Conference recently. Specifically, eye-tracking hardware from EyeTech that is currently available (for several thousand dollars) allows the disabled to simply look at a place on the screen and the cursor goes there. It’s a rather expensive way to reduce repetitive stress injury, but according to the journalist trying it out, it makes games almost too easy.

We’ve written before about touchless interfaces, and there’s a promising brainwave-powered interface on the horizon too. The future’s bright for new ways to handle digital interactions. Check out the rest of the Ars Technica piece for some other interesting ways to interface reality and digital gaming.

(photo from flickr user F1RSTBORN)

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The importance of infrastructure

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electricity-pylon-sunset It’s easy to forget how reliant we are on our technologies … until we are unexpectedly deprived of the means to use them, that is.

Deprived by … oooh, let’s say, an electricity grid fault that leads to an automatic shutdown at a nuclear power station and leaves a big chunk of Florida completely blacked out for an evening? [image by dogfrog]

[As a side note, I never knew that nuclear reactors could just be switched off. Disconnected from the grid, sure, but switched off?]

And that’s just one little hardware failure, hence quickly fixed. But imagine for a moment another highly electricity-dependent country, like the UK for example, being hit by some sort of environmental disaster to which it isn’t accustomed, which causes a large number of grid hardware problems which are hard to trace and fix in the absence of the electricity they provide …

… I think we have a potential cookie-cutter techno-thriller movie plot, folks! Now, who shall we cast as the plucky Prime Minister?

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Developing the hospital bed of the future

Mary_Mallon_(Typhoid_Mary)_in_hospital A European Union-funded project led by Philips Electronics aims to develop a hospital bed that can passively assess a patient’s heart rate, sleep quality, temperature and other criteria without the need to wire up the patient directly. (Via MedGadget.)

According to a BBC story:

The bed would include, not only an electronic weight scale and blood pressure monitor, but also sensors which measure heart rate, breathing rate and body movement while sleeping.

In addition, the patient could wear a vest with woven-in electrodes to provide a full electro-cardiogram reading.

All this information would be analysed on a PDA and the results sent via a telephone line or broadband connection to doctors.

The device, it is claimed, could even provide clues to interrupted sleep by measuring sleep phase patterns.

No word on whether it would have a big monitor over the bed with flashing lights and a cool beeping noises, a la Dr. McCoy’s sick-bay beds on Star Trek.

An interesting caveat from Dr. Nick Robinson of the Royal Society of Medicine’s Telehealth forum:

“We are used to making decisions based on taking a blood pressure reading on an occasional basis – and all the evidence we have for intervening is based on this. The real challenge for this technology is not taking the measurements, but working out what to do with it, so that we are not constantly getting false alarms.”

Can too much information about a patient’s condition actually be a bad thing?

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]medicine,hospitals,technology,Star Trek[/tags]

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