Slashdot Mirror
Cyborg Cells Sense Humidity
Gadgetizer writes "Mark Peplow over at Nature.com published this story on 'Cellborg Technology' yesterday: "Living bacteria have been incorporated into an electronic circuit to produce a sensitive humidity gauge. The device unites microbe and machine, taking advantage of the properties of both to make for a supersensitive sensor. "As far as we know, this is the first report of using microorganisms to make an electronic device," says Ravi Saraf, a chemist from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, who developed the 'cellborg' with his student Vikas Berry."
...how the original Borg came about. It all starts with harmless Cellborgs, then you link them to a massive interconnected network, and then they start thinking on their own. And then they take over.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
In the comics and movies, the cyborgs had super strength, could run fast, maybe shoot lasers out of their frickin' eyes, and so on.
Science fiction has failed us yet again. It's clear that the real cyborgs will simply have great skill at predicting the weather.
Go figure.
Now at bookstores:
Quality-Control In Microbial Manufacturing
Chapter 1: Maintaining a dirty-room enivronment
Chapter 2: Preventing evolution
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
No one's ever come up with a way to gauge humidity before. This'll surely be more cost effective than all current alternatives.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
In any event, it does suggest an approach to more sensitive humidity detectors using gold-coated hydrophilic particles. Replacing the bacteria with some other polymer capsules could lead to a more repeatable sensor with ultra-high sensitivity.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In the comics and movies, the cyborgs had super strength, could run fast, maybe shoot lasers out of their frickin' eyes, and so on.
Well, currently, even the best artificial limbs are a poor substitute for the genuine article. People get artificial limbs because they have lost their natural limbs, and have no other choice -- we do not hate or shun these people any more than we hate or shun people with any other disability. However, if artificial limbs become far superior to natural limbs, people will be able to choose whether they want their (perfectly healthy) natural limbs removed in favor of mechanical ones. At that point you will certainly have fear and loathing between the people who undergo the procedure (the superior beings) and the people who don't (the all-natural people).
I have a friend who would qualify as a "cyborg". He's hearing-impaired and has a Cochlear Implant. Social-wise, it's kind of a mixed bag. On one side of the coin, people in general are fascinated by the prospect of restoring hearing that was lost and the very idea of having a biological implant in his head. On the other side, however, the Deaf community generally shuns them as their equivalent of "tools of Satan."
I think that you're always going to have people that favor the "natural" over the man-made, even to the point where they're completely separated from society (think about how we talk about the Amish)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
There are farms, Neo, vast farms where bacteria are grown, to turn a germ into... THIS. [HOLDS UP HUMIDITY SENSOR]
This also marks the first time that a student and prof got equal billing when their research was announced. That's a more significant step than the sensor itself!