medicine

...researchers from the historically Transylvanian city of Romania, called Cluj-Napoca, announced the first-ever artificial blood that could be used without fearing life-threatening side effects of prior models. The new artificial blood relies not on hemoglobin, like typical artificial bloods, but hemerythrin — a protein extracted from sea worms that is then mixed with water and salts.

The Scanadu Scout reads out your heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen level, respiratory rate, blood pressure, stress and electrocardiography in 10 seconds.

Of all the transhumanist technologies coming in the near future, one stands out that both fascinates and perplexes people. It's called ectogenesis: raising a fetus outside the human body in an artificial womb.

It has the possibility to change one of the most fundamental acts that most humans experience: the way people go about having children. It also has the possibility to change the way we view the female body and the field of reproductive rights.

Naturally, it's a social and political minefield...

The most frequent philosophical issue brought up about ectogenesis is how it might change the way society views women. Will the feminine mystique be lost by such an artificial process replacing what's been long a mainstay of the female domain? My short answer is no; rather, ectogenesis could further unchain women from the home, spare them and extend the age at which women can have children.

Now one research group is reporting a major step toward a touchy-feely prosthetic. A team of researchers from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University performed a series of experiments that showed they could send electrical signals directly to the brains of rhesus macaques and that the macaques were able to interpret the signals as touches on different parts of their hands. Another series of experiments showed rhesus macaques could interpret different direct-to-brain signals as touches of varying pressure. A third explored whether direct-to-brain signals work quickly enough to be able to accurately tell macaques when a prosthetic is touching something and when it stops the touch.