Are Animal-Human Hybrids Really a Menace?

I got a big bump in page-views and reader comments back in 2007 when I wrote this blog post about then-President George W. Bush's call for Congress to outlaw animal-human hybrids, which made him sound worried that some real-life version of H.G. Wells' fictional Dr. Moreau might create a freakish race of furry, cloven-footed parahumans.  Actually, Bush, who banned the harvesting of stem cells from leftover embryos at fertility clinics for medical research, didn't want scientists to get around his prohibition by inserting human genes into animal egs to create human-like embryos. But the President's terminology was so tortured that it inspired a ROFL-fest across the web-o-sphere, including a Cafe Press vendor who quickly began offering t-shirts and coffee cups emblazoned with a knuckle-walking man-monkey. And indeed, British opponens of stem-cell research apparently took this idea seriously. They actually proposed requiring stem-cell researchers to implant any human-animal embryos they created into women, so they could be carried to term and born, presumably to wreak revenge upon the evil madmen who spawned them. Alas, that didn't come to pass, because it would have made a great premise for a reality TV show.  And society certainly needs more of those.

Would You Want a Robot to Give You a Sponge Bath?

If you think healthcare is too impersonal and bureaucratic already, I'm guessing that you may not be too enthusiastic about a future in which intelligent machines take over much of the patient care, from changing the linens on your hospital bed to performing surgical procedures. Forget about Obamacare--we're talking Robocare, and it's probably inevitable, due to an aging population that in the future will have more patients and fewer workers.

 "We are just not going to have enough human hands to do all the work,"  as Donald Jones, a managing director at robotics company Draper Triangle Ventures explained to the Wall Street Journal last year. Already, according to the WSJ, there are about 1,000 robots in use in the nation's hospitals, and Jones predicts that in five years, there will be five to 10 times as many.

Self-Aiming Sniper Rifles?

You've probably heard about the brouhaha surrounding Defense Distributed's development of a mostly-plastic gun that can be produced using a 3D printer and plans that are downloadable from the Web. Or, rather, they were downloadable, until the Department of Defense demanded that DD take down the files, claiming that they might violate U.S. laws that control international arms trafficking. DD's founder, an anarchist law student named Cody Wilson, told Forbes that his goal is to show that technology can make it possible to circumvent and negate government authority. "This is about enabling individuals to create their own sovereign space," he explained. "The government will increasingly be on the sidelines, saying ‘hey, wait.' It’s about creating the new order in the crumbling shell of the old order."

Making Transplant Organs in a Lab

Organ transplants save lives, but due to a lack of donations and the difficulty of obtaining a suitable match, a lot of people still die while waiting for a transplant. Worldwide, the shortage has grown so dire that in Australia, the government actually has begun offering to pay potential kidney donors an upfront fee of around $3,800, just for promising to provide an organ if called upon.

That's why a lot of people are excited about the news coming out of Boston. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston say that they've successfully transplanted kidneys grown in a lab into actual rats, and that those kidneys successfully have filtered the recipients' blood and made urine, just like the rats' natural kidneys.

Submit Your Questions: Google+ Hangout on Asteroids

This Friday, an asteroid one and a half miles long will pass by our planet. Officially titled Asteroid 1998 QE2 (named after the oversized ocean liner), the asteroid will stay a comfortable 3.6 million miles from Earth but will be close enough to give astronomers a good look at its surface.

To mark this event, the White House is hosting a Google+ Hangout to talk about asteroids as part of its We the Geeks discussion series. Participants include Lori Garver, Bill Nye, Ed Lu, Peter Diamandis, and Jose Luis Galache, and the event will be moderated by White House staffer Cristin Dorgelo. The discussion kicks off on Friday, May 31st at 2PM EDT and will cover a range of topics, including asteroid identification, characterization, resource utilization, and hazard mitigation.

Do you have a question about asteroids? Now is your chance to ask experts! After the meteor shower in Russia and the 2012 DA14 asteroid fly-by, we all have an increased awareness of these objects. If you have a question for the experts, leave your question in the comments below. Make sure to check out the Hangout on Friday at 2PM EDT to watch the discussion live!

Would you want to go to Mars, if you couldn't come back?

Fortunately, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who were the first humans to land on the Moon in 1969, made it back to Earth alive. That spared us the horror of listening to the speech that then-President Richard Nixon was prepared to deliver, in the event that the Lunar Module had failed to lift off from the lunar surface--a catastrophe for which NASA had no rescue plan. 

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon in explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

I mention this, because thinking about that what-if still gives me the creeps. It's frightening to imagine being one of those astronauts, stranded on an alien orb with no chance of returning home.  Of course, they wouldn't have been the first brave explorers to set out on a mission and never return. Ferdinand de Magellan, who was hacked and stabbed to death in 1521 while trying to circumnavigate the globe, and Sir John Franklin, who failed to find a passageway through the Arctic ice and instead perished in 1847, are only two of the more grisly examples.

Robotic Insects?

Back in 2007, antiwar protesters in Washington, DC noticed they said appeared to be insect-sized drone surveillance aircraft hovering over them. As a Washington Post article reported:

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

The Post consulted various government agencies, none of which admitted to having deployed robotic insects.  The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, however, had actually tried to develop such a device back in the 1970s--the insectothopter robotic dragonfly, which contained a tiny gasoline engine that powered four flapping wings. Reportedly, the insectothopter actually managed to fly, but reported was scrapped because it could not handle crosswinds. Perhaps as a result, Pentagon researchers veered off in a different direction, and began looking at attaching micro-electrical mechanical systems, or MEMS, to insects to create swarms of tiny, remote-controlled cyborg secret agents, capable of flying or crawling into enemy territory. (Here's a blog post that I wrote on that idea, a few years back.)

The Future As We See It

For years, 3D displays have been used as a gimmick. Millions of the old red and blue 3D glasses were distributed for the 2009 Superbowl and Tupac's hologram appearance at Coachella was promised to be the next big thing. But there's always something off about current 3D implementations. Even RealD 3D movie displays cause headaches and nausea for some movie-goers -- a big enough problem that 2D Goggles were developed to counteract the 3D illusion. Why has technology continued to develop in two dimensions in our 3D world? And why is the Hollywood version of a hologram so hard to turn into reality?

As we move toward new and improved ways to interact with our 3D world new technologies will certainly change our daily lives. What are the implications on human interaction in the future? Check out the video below as Jonathan Strickland explains one possibility for the future of holograms.

Learn more about this series and catch more future-tech videos at the FW:Thinking website.

 

"Citizen Hearings" on UFOs

These days, allegations of conspiracies and coverups are pretty popular in on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by one Senator's recent 13-hour filibuster in order to obtain an assurance that the government isn't going to use robotic aerial assassins to execute U.S. citizens without trials. But that must make it all the more frustrating for UFOologists, who in many ways are the progenitors of the government conspiracy-coverup meme, because they're getting drowned out by all the noisy newcomers screaming that the Boston Marathon bombing was a "false-flag" operation or that the Pentagon is secretly modifying the weather.

The last time UFOologists succeeded in getting any attention from Congress was in the late 1960s, when then-House minority leader Gerald Ford pushed for hearings after a spate of UFO sightings. The future President chided the U.S. Air Force for keeping its Project Blue Book findings under wraps, and proclaimed that "the American people are becoming alarmed by the UFO stories." But good luck getting anyone in office to issue a similar clarion call today.

Should school children have tracking chips?

If conspiracy theorists on the web had been on target, by now we'd all have microchips implanted in our bodies that would give the federal government the ability to identify us and track our movements, thanks to a loophole created by an obscure provision of Obamacare that was supposed to kick in on March 23, 2013. That arbiter of Internet fact vs. fiction, Snopes.com, has refuted the meme--though not to the satisfaction of action movie star-turned-political activist Chuck Norris, who hinted in this 2012 commentary that the tracking chips were "a bit too close" to the "mark of the beast" mentioned in the Biblical Book of Revelation.

While I've written in the past about civil libertarians' concerns about RFID chips, I was tempted to poke fun at Norris for his conspiracy-minded alarmism, and question whether he'd been conked on the head a bit too hard while fighting a bear. That is, until I saw a recent article in the International Business Times, entitled "Invasion Of Privacy? RFID Tracking Kids On School Buses." The latter describes the Gordon Counta, Ga. school district's new pilot program to keep track of students on school buses through a system called StudentConnect, IBT reports that the technology combines Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology with a "passive" RFID chip--the sort that doesn't have its own power source and will only respond to a signal from a receiver device when it is nearby, rather than broadcasting a signal. (Here's a HowStuffWorks article on how RFID tagging works.)