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Anonymous Coward writes "Bringing us one step closer to becoming centrally-controlled meatbots, Japanese scientists have developed a device that produces power from the glucose in human blood. Theoretically, this technology (aka "Dracucell") could produce 100W of power. Of course, it can't produce that much power in practice since your body stupidly wastes glucose in maintaining homeostasis. The scientists propose that this devices could be used to power implanted devices. Now how many of you Slashdotters would it take to power my laptop? I'll buy the cola!"
Overclock Your Body NOW! Drink UBER-BLOOD(TM) XP!!
fp btw.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
Two cows:
JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowikimon and market them worldwide.
"'Cause I'm as freeee aaaaasssssss aaaaaaaaaa biiiiiiirrrrrrrrr nnnnnn." -Klick!
Callously, he eyeballs the passanger next to him. He thinks, "Kinda short, but chubby... About 11 Pints."
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
This actually is kinda neat. If it can run on glucose it probably can run on fructose/sucrose/lactose and a lot of other sugars..
This of course brings back bad memories of Biology and the "Citric acid Cycle" and ATP..
Dr Kazuo Eda, heading the research, said: "It is like the metabolism of food. Human bodies can process glucose and obtain energy. When glucose is oxidised, electrons can be obtained."
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but if the process our bodies use is different from how this devices creates electricity, isn't there a different waste product? Or can our bodies still use rusty glucose? Or is oxidized glucose harmless waste?
I guess we just need to combine this technology with a form of fusion, and we're really in for it. Now drink your power aid.
Mirror
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Fight Spammers!
Want to burn calories while sitting in front of your computer at work? How about shedding those extra pounds while powering your TV at the same time?
This way people will get an increased metabolism (since some of your sugars are being converted into energy for non-local entities), and they will be able to reduce the number of batteries and other power sources needed.
Just wait till the come out with some nano-bots that run off this process and will scrub the plaque off your arterial walls. That would be the killer app.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
My homo-status is NONE of your business.
Give me an implant that uses electricity to create glucose, so that I can plug myself into the wall and not have to stop to eat during those long coding sessions.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Would the morbidly obese qualify for US Department of Energy rebates?
You know, some fly-by-night internet "entrepreneur" is going to spin a tale about how this pioneering new technology can help you increase the size of your penis. You watch.
Well, all the Matrix jokes aside, this does have some potentially excellent applications. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about pacemakers and how the batteries in them wear out. I asked the obvious question, "How do they replace them?"
It involves surgery. YIKES! Granted, it is probably minor surgery compared to getting the thing put in there to begin with, but knowing it was powered by your own blood would surely be a welcome change to these folks.
I mean if you think replacing the battery on your motherboard is a pain, think of doing it on an outpatient basis.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
There was an interesting article on genetic algorithms in popular science or popular mechanics a few years ago (circa 1998 or so I think).
Anyway, the specific application being developed was designing an FPGA circuit to detect whether or not a tone (of a specific frequency) was being played. Genetic algorithms were being used to "evolve" circuit designs on a computer, then upload them to the FPGA.
It ended up being the case that the final design used far less gates than any human could reasonably design. And, none of the human EE's could understand how it was done at first.
After analysis, it was shown that the evolved design was using subtle interplay between different parts, and that analog effects from gates next to each other were affecting the results, etc... - all things that an engineer would not consider. (In fact, not even a good thing to consider because it wouldn't work on other FPGAs, even of the same model number, because of the subtleties of the analog interaction).
But, the point is that the problem was solved by a computer program, in a much more efficient (and certainly, "creative" and "outside the box") way than humans would.
Also, note that the humans couldn't understand at first (and took quite some time to understand) a relatively uncomplex system (a few handfuls of logic gates)...
If we assemble systems with orders of magnitude more complexity (millions of gates), operating in similiar ways, there is no way a human will understand it. At this point, it will "come up with" solutions to problems, and there will be no way for a human to understand how it is coming up with these.
At that point, how could you argue that the systems (computer vs human mind) were different, or that one were better than the other, if they were each solving obscure problems, and we didn't understand either?
"Ahhh, Gordon, good to see you. We've found a way to keep your HEV charged, but you'll find you need the cola machines more."
www.eFax.com are spammers
There are those who mod thier cases and those who mod their bodies... but the lines are blurring. Soon people will be buying LED's and Dracucells to implant under their skin. Just think... You could implant a matrix of LED's in your back to operate like an animated billboard! Who will be the first beach-bum to add a cellular uplink so they can sell ad-space online?
You talk about intelligence, and being as smart as humans.
When you talk about intelligence, you are really refering to _human_ intellegence.
Do you not understand that what is considered to be intelligent behaviour is relative to your environment.
Do you understard that it would be very stupid for
- a cow in its native environment to behave as if its a hippopotamus.
- a human in its native environment to behave as if it were a bird.
- a computer in its native environment to behave as if it were a human.
Why would a computer think like a human, its not a human. It doesnt have a human body, or a human mind, neither does a cow, a bird or a monkey, but it doesnt mean they dont possess intellegence.
We shouldnt be so arrogant to only percieve inteligence as behaviour that mimicks ours.
If we fully understood the human brain, if we could predict behaviour based on the brains current knowledge and its environmental stimulus then would you still consider humans to be inteligent ?
Any technology sufficiently advanced appears like magic, thats what our brain is.
Just because we are masters of our computers doesnt mean computers are incapable of intellegence.
Just because we dont understand our brain doesnt mean it has a magic quality, a soul.
1. Have some sort of actual device sticking out of the body. This is bad, because it breaches the skin, our natural defensive screen, and such things tend to become very easily infected.
2. Surgery to replace cells. Again, any surgery at all is going to be both expensive and risk prone.
More recently, a third option has become available: having fully implanted power system that can be recharged wirelessly, via em radiation of some kind (you can google for it). This is a big gain, because it allows devices that are more power hungry while still maintaining the benefits of not breaching the skin and not needing frequent operations. But it still requires people to remember and have access to the appropriate charging device consistantly. If for any reason some one forgets or can't recharge, the device may shut down, sometimes with fatal results. So having a way to remove one more step for powering these things should really help improve the quality of life for a lot of people today.
Of course, personally I find this to be a very exciting development for future things as well. When we get to the point of having more optional implants, for things like boosting hearing or vision, a way to power them will be necessary, and if the power requirements are low, then this system would be perfect. Ultimately, widespread adoption of anything, from an OS to a vehicle, is all about making it as easy and intuitive for end users as possible. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on for advanced things like brain-computer interfaces, and people who are interested should look around, as the state of the art has advanced a great deal in the past 5 years. Here are a few links for the curious, and much more can be found with google, of course:
Graz University of Technology
Standford/DVA Neural Interface Project
Beyond the Big Barrier(lighter, intro type stuff)
News Group:
sci.med.psychobiology
Have you ever heard of Cybernetic Poet? Or any of the music composing artificial intelligences? They regularly produce art which human judges mistake for man-made. Sure, it's not 100% indistiguishable yet, but it appears that with more processing power comes more 'correct' output. You are showing your carbon-bias. Your brain is really no more than a neural net itself (ok, it might have some quantum computing ability,but that is far from accepted fact). It just happens to be more powerful than artificial neural nets we can put together now. And, did you know (speaking of souls) that there is an area of the brain, that when stimulated electrically, causes the person in question to feel like they are having a religious experience? This goes a long way to say that artificial intelligences might well be able to experience the same things we do, if made sufficiently complicated.
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Crudely Drawn Games
I don't know about you, but I don't consider the maintenance of homeostasis in my body to be a waste of glucose.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
when Uncle Fester was able to light that incandescent bulb in his mouth!
Too many I suspect until geek hygiene improves dramatically.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
In other words, on a 2000 kilocalories/day diet...
1 kilowatthour = 860 kilocalories.
2000/860 = 2.3 kilowatt hours
2300 watts-hours/24hours = 96 watts.
Pretty amazing that we humans only run on 96 watts of power.
AccountKiller
the efficiency of conversion of biomass to energy by the human metabolism is very, very, poor. It's not that the oxidation of glucose is so inefficient, it's that there's so much energy spent digesting food to glucose in the first place.
Chickens and rabbits do much better. But then, what kind of a movie would it be if Keanu Reeves was trying to free acres and acres of penned hens? I know, it's about his speed. He'd probably get an Oscar for best supporting actor.
Er, as I was saying, the human body is not a very efficient producer of energy, and the amount of fossil fuels used to produce our food is staggering.
What would be more useful, in terms of the worlds energy demands, is if these guys could *reverse* the process... By putting energy IN to the metabolism, synthesise glucose from H20 and C02. Ideally, the energy source would be good old solar insolation on exposed skin.
So, lay around in the backyard naked for a few hours and save the money you would have had to spend on doughnuts.
This isn't too incredibly speculative, plenty of organisms do this already. The downside is, you'd probably be green, but if everyone was green, it wouldn't be so bad.
Yes, but both of these simulations work using patterns that were derived by analysis of existing works, which by definition always happens after the real creation already took place. Therefore nothing the machines produce is remotely original, they were just programmed to produce something similar by humans, who used their real intelligence to identify patterns that could be codified into a form a machine could understand. People do this too, imitating musical styles of past composers, for example. So in this way machines can be made to be sort of like people, producing new outputs from a fixed set of inputs, creating examples of rules.
The real problem arises in simulating truly creative human activities - for example the creation of an entirely new method of composing music that did not previously exist. Maybe it is an extension of something that existed before, or a synthesis of disparate elements. How do people do things like this? Much of it is based on intuition, interpreting their sensory experiences, and then creating something new. All this is difficult to define in terms of a machine. Even worse is the question, why do people do this? What motivates them? You have to simulate both the how and the why to create a truly creative entity. The machine must be able to create new sets of rules for itself, and must do so not arbitrarily, but for a reason. Aha, you say. The ability and motivation to create new rules must be defined in a sort of meta-rule! Right, all you have to do is understand the operations of conscious thought. But there is a showstopper problem with that notion - you must understand conscious thought from within your own mind, in terms of your thoughts. I reason by analogy here, but isn't there a mathematical principle that says that many systems cannot be proved from within themselves?
Otherwise, you get 'creative' machines as they are now, clever, highly trained parrots. Nothing more.
I will proceed further from 'interesting' into 'making people angry', and inform you all that my opinion is that artificial intelligence that has the creative capacity of humans will never exist. This is because I believe humans were endowed with their creative capacity by their Creator, but not given enough analytical ability to understand their creative abilities well enough to truly replicate them. Maybe if you have the mind of God you can create the mind of a human, but how can you create the mind of God if you cannot even make the mind of a human? I guess this ties into the concept of a soul, the part of our experience that we are aware of, but unable to analyze from within our experience.
So "The Matrix" was a documentary??!?
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Karma: Excellent (In Soviet Russia, karma pimps YOU)
How many airplane pilots does it take to power a laptop?
None. The use of laptops and other portable electronic devices is strictly prohibited during take-off and landing, acording to FAA regulations.
How many MIT students does it take to power a laptop?
Ten. One to blood power it while the others project a more efficient system.
How many Peta members does it take to power a laptop?
Two. One to power it and another to make sure they're not using the blood of any animal.
How many quantum mechanicians does it take to power a laptop ?
They can't. If they know where the power cord is, they cannot locate the plug. (BTW, where in the body would a power plug fit?)
How many Heisenbergs does it take to power a laptop?
If you know the number, you don't know where the laptop is.
How many women does it take to power a laptop?
No way. It's a man's job.
How many amish people does it take to power a laptop?
None. Amish people don't believe in Laptops.
How many Sysadmins does it take to power a laptop?
I'm sorry, that's a hardware issue and we can't help you with it. You'll have to get a hardware tech to power it. Good luck.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
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'Nuff said.
"!"
There was an extensive article on this in the Feb 2003 issue of Scientific American. Very interesting stuff. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00073FC E-F36F-1E19-8B3B809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catI D=2
>The process the researchers have come up with probably uses the same effect to produce a current.
I wonder if this research can lead into the electricity in -> ATP/Glucose out.
People powering PDAs with a little blood or spit is cute, people running on electricity no farms, no food, no obesity, etc would be revolutionary.
Most importantly, the whole laptop thing is a joke, this is not intended to power a laptop people. If used inside the human body, this would be to power nanomachiens (almost no power drain) and medical implants (which don't draw huge amounts of power either).
Little Brother, watching the watchers
I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you plan to simulate the human brain, make sure you simulate the IO in a manner the simulation can access naturally. Nothing would suck more than being a fully functional simulation trapped in a deaf and dumb computer system.
"I think, therefore I am" doesn't mean much if nobody else knows...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I find that a wench and rack does it for me...
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But that's not how it's actually done: the battery and electronics forrm a single unit, with the only leads being the ones connecting the pacemaker to the heart itself. I'm not medically trained, but I guess there'd be two reasons for this. Firstly, there's not a lot of room in the body for lots of components spaced out all over the place, and not many convenient sites to put things; case-modding to give yourself more room is not an option. Currently, pacemakers are installed under a local anaesthetic through a small incision in the chest; your solution would likely require a more difficult procedure
Secondly, there's always the risk that the pacemaker leads could be dislodged through even normal body movement: patients are instructed not to engage in certain activities (not lifting their arm on the pacemaker's side of the body above the chest, just to name one). Having another wire connecting a string of components just compounds that problem.