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Nanobatteries Power Artificial Eyes
Roland Piquepaille writes "A new U.S. research center, the National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors, has been opened to promote new ideas in the field of nanomedicine. For example, a team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) is developing a nano-size battery to be implanted in the eye to power artificial retina. But this center will also design and build 'nanomedical devices based on natural and synthetic ion transporters -- proteins that control ion motion across the membranes of every living cell.'"
I wonder if this kind of technology will make it possible for people who have working nerves and brain center for sight, but whose eyes have been destroyed by illness or damage to the retina? Would macular degeneration, which according to http://www.macular.org/disease.html affects over 10 million Americans alone, be one of the blindnesses treatable by nanobatteries?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
There is nothing worse than running out of battery powered sight when you're looking at something important like a model's breasts.
What sort of damage, and of what severity, could occur if this battery were to leak?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Sure, everytime you want to get more money, just trot out a hot babe like Susan Rempe in your press release... oh, wait, maybe I need an artificial retina! Anyway, doesn't SNL really stand for "Saturday Night Live"?!?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's like they are building artificial mitochondria. It's ironic that these nano devices are being created by a woman with a tera nose. As if elephants designed finger splints for mice.
You know, the picking on Piquepaille cliche is growing old. Yes it's a Slashdot [nay, Internet cliche] to complain about cliches growing old, but consider that Slashdot used to be so funny and interesting. What's more interesting than Natalie Portman naked and petrified after all?
Where's the creativity? Why not suggest that Terri Hatcher uses Nanobatteries in her personal massager, or that you're thinking of Roland naked and petrified?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
So... uh, back to where you were.
That thing must be a total pain in the ass to replace..
... with Picture-in-Picture.
Yep, keep developing that high technology for my disabled countrymen, because sooner or later the technology will become common place and I'll finally be able to go get my retinas replaced. Why would I want to replace my healthy retinas with electronic ones? Well, for a start, I'm red/green color blind, and I don't think gene therapy is going to be available sooner than this stuff. Irrespective of that, when this technology is capable of delivering sharper images to my brain than the retinas I was born with what have I got to lose? Then there's the added benefit of interfacing my shiny new retinas with computer systems.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Oh alright. I'll have them move it down to the artificial penis. If it leaks, then nothing of consequence will have been lost.
I'll take a set of the glowing blue LED eyes
short and simple answer is that the battery should be nearly harmless. If it breaks down it might be a bit of a drag on the local metabolism. And assuming that the protien isnt some sort of prion precursor (unlikely for a membrane protien) it should be safe.
Storm
Why not implant something like they use in self-winding watches?
If they're going to use nano-batteries, then we're talking mili-volts or less.
The mechanisms that power self-winding watches don't actually require that much movement to recharge themselves.
Just walking around a bit should give enough power to keep things running all day. And it doesn't need replacing.
Just my 2 pence. Feel free to tell me why it's a bad idea
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm sorry, I'm sure it's important but I'm just trying to picture the poor phillipino-immigrant cleaner calling home to their dirt-poor parents.
"Hi mum! I'm going to be able to send money home now, I got a job cleaning at this building"
"That's great news son, where are you working?"
"The National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors"
"..."
Has sci-fi overly stimulated designers, or is it the other way around?
What we focus on creates our future.
Better outlaw thinking before some one comes up with dangerous ideas.
Only the rich will be able to afford this tech for the next 10-20 years.
After that, maybe the middle class will be able to afford it. In any event, it's not something the lower class would get.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors
Next thing you know the world will be ravaged by a rogue band of T-2000's, made of perfectly disguised, indestructable biomimetic nanoconducting polyalloy!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Can this be used for other non-biological things that need small batteries? For instance, laptops/pdas, while less important than artifical eyes, could benefit from any sort of watt-hour/area increase. Also, you could design an ultralight car that runs on a battery, right?
In the case of breast enhancements, the body forms scar tissue around the silicone implants.
In the case of artifical hearts, the patients faces the serious risk of blood clotting. The blood clots can flow into the brain and cause a stroke.
Advances in science are great, but we've "just gotta know its limitations".
1. They haven't developed the eyes any further than otherwise reported some time ago.
2. The batteries don't exist yet, really.
3. The batteries that don't yet exist are being designed for artificial eyes that don't yet exist.
I'm all for this technology to mature -- I have two blind relatives and it seems likely that others in my family will also have problems as they age. The kinds of work they're doing should help them if it matures. This article, however, doesn't actually show much advancement other than a new lab is working on a new thing, that could power a new device -- when they all get it figured out.
I wish
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
If we could ignore for a moment the trolls and knuckle draggers who must comment on Susan Rempe's appearance, this advance will be important to those of us who are losing eyesight to RP or AMD.
Most of the current clinical trials for artificial retinas (http://www.optobionics.com/ excluded) rely on some sort of external component partially due to the lack of a sufficiently small, dense, permanent, biocompatible power source. This then requires some sort of link to the retinal surface, either via micro-lasers or implanted ultra-thin wires. As much as enjoy watching ST:TNG, I for one would happily trade the Geordi LaForge look for a strictly internal prosthetic.
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
Why not suggest that Terri Hatcher uses Nanobatteries in her personal massager, or that you're thinking of Roland naked and petrified?
Actually, I was envisioning a ménage à trois involving ScuttleMonkey, CmdrTaco, and TVs David Letterman. You were spot on about the nonobattery powered personal massager and Ms. Hatcher though. High five.
hi mom!
I am glad to know that if my eyes get plucked out by a Centauri guard, replacements will be available!
I wonder if you can take them out to look other places?
In the Soviet Union, Roland Piquepaille complained about you!
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face. It was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vatgrown sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist.
Remember, though, that these artificial retinas will have some sort of computer control and some kind of programming. Lets sure hope that these things don't have a live-update feature for the software because that would mean a non-local connection. That'd lead to vulnerabilities. Just imagine your vision not only lagging and causing you pain, but it being used to carry out a spam attack. Lets hope M$ doesnt make any software for these things. I don't want to load "critical updates" into my eyes.
Surely solar powered retinas are the way to go?
...'cause I read "ninja batteries". >_<
1. They haven't developed the eyes any further than otherwise reported some time ago.
2. The batteries don't exist yet, really.
3. The batteries that don't yet exist are being designed for artificial eyes that don't yet exist.
And here I thought Microsoft was bad when it came to vaorware!
My blog
Oh great, now I have to buy a firewall and anti-virus for each of my nano-implants! ...and I thought medical bills were expensive before.
3. The batteries that don't yet exist are being designed for artificial eyes that don't yet exist.
/.) from last May's Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting about six previously completely blind patients have successfully used the referenced retinas to detect light.
RTFA: "starting with an artificial retina that has already been developed at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California".
And with a little research, you can find reports (here and here, and even on
Anm
Personally, I'm waiting for models with zoom and nightvision before I trade in my weak organic meatballs.
I will begin to care when:
1) It is cheap
2) I mean really cheap
3) Can give me vision better than [insert animal with outstanding vision here]
Ref - your comment to my third point about eyes not yet existing was to point out previous articles about the eyes. In fact, statement was specifically that the article does not actually represent advancement beyond what we've already seen printed about the science of artificial eyes.
Its INCREADIBLY cool what they've done -- however this article doesn't actually show advances in those technologies. Just the promise of smaller batteries based on some magic that doesn't really scale yet for eyes that aren't quiet there yet either.
Its a long way from a 16x16 matrix of pixels that allows general shape identification or the "zoom" identification of letters one at a time, to a working and functional eye at a resolution sufficient to be considered "vision" better than that which would be considered "legally blind".
As I said in my initial comment -- I watch and read and hope for a wearable eye replacement. Retinitus Pigmentosa and Macular Degeneration run in my wife's family and my step mother suffers another kind of blindness related to deterioration of the eye itself while the optic nerve remains undamaged. In the latter case, she's proven to be an excellent surgical patient and is young enough to be a good candidate for a workable implant if one can be developed in the next ten years.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Tachikoma: "Mr. Bato! Where are you going?"
Bato: "I can't see a damn thing! All I see is this blue screen with some stupid message asking me to press enter."
Kusanagi: "Is that why you are in the ladies rest room?"
Aramaki: "What the hell are you all stand around and blathering about?!"
Kusanagi: "It's Bato. He's got the blue screen of death again."
Togusa: "Have you pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL?"
Saito: "What are you? Some kind of noobie? Run a diagonstic!"
Aramaki: "Go to the Start Menu!"
Tachikoma: "Call technical support!"
The other Tachikomas (pass through the hall): "What's going on?"
Tachikoma: "It's Mr. Bato! He can't see!"
Bato (bumps head against the wall accidently, then is embarrassed by the events that just occured): "If I don't show up for work tomarrow, don't call to wake me up."
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
The human heart creates a small amount of electricity when it beats, correct? (this is how the brain sends signals to the muscles and suchforth, yes?)
So, instead of making a super-small battery that still has to hold a huge charge, why not draw the excess electricity that would have been used for the eye (its excess because the eye is no longer there, which would be why you are getting an artificial one) and use that instead of a battery, or at the very least, send it to a small capacitator so it can charge enough to power your new techno-eye.
This does not solve the problem that the artificial eye would have to be SUPER power efficient, but the problem would be doubly so with a battery of limited life, however, when you use the heart as the power-source, the "battery life" is effectively unlimited for the lifetime of the device (your life, so if you die, it wouldnt need to stay powered, would it? unless you want a look inside a casket the hard way...)
OK, so my first thought, upon reading this...
The human body has been doing remarkably well at powering itself, without batteries, for millenia (with the one exception on Monday mornings).
Why do we need "nano" batteries? If we're down to the point of building things at an atomic level, shouldn't we be at the point where we a) build things with the same (or at least similar) efficiency as the body had in the first place and b) thus use the same power supply the part we're replacing used?
Whilst it's really cool we're building nano-batteries, it sounds more like a lab cashing in on the exciting buzz technology of the moment to solve a problem rather than looking at the problem that actually needs solving and finding the right solution for it.
It makes me wonder, did people 150 years ago try getting seed captial for equally ridiculous concepts involving the new buzz tech of steam? Actually, thinking about it, I know they did - and we laugh at the craziness of the inventors who anounced they were going to invent steam powered underpants or whatever back then. Makes me wonder how much the people of 150 years in the future will smack their heads and laugh at the ridiculous concepts for exploiting nano-tech we're coming up with now, when far more obvious solutions were staring us in the face.
Why Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in Hot Grits of course!
Learn your Slashdot Subculture and all about Slashdot Trolling Phenomena
Required reading for internet skeptics
The lab I'm working at is developing autonomous self-aware cryogenic nanites that use dark matter to power magic wands.
Why would such a thing be useful? Well, normally faire dust powers magic wands, but we need all the dust we can get to power our upcoming cyber-robotic AI pony spaceships. With shag carpeting on the inside.
More to the point:
These things are batteries. How often do they need to be changed?
More promising to my mind was the preliminary reports I heard of work on a fuel cell that could operate on glucose and oxygen extracted from the blood stream. (Which, admittedly, doesn't really exist yet either.)
OTOH, I've also read about implantable rechargeable batteries that can be charged via an rfid style antenna. That would be a good intermediate step.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hey Cyric, just a little question. Are you Polish? Judging by your last name, and some of the Eurocentric posts that I've seen from you, I am actually curious.
And just to get it out of the way, this is not meant to be a troll post. I have Polish Blood, and do not consider Polish to be an insult. I mean, what other nation has had conflict with Russia AND Germany for so long and managed to keep their essential culture intact? This is more of a mental game to see if I can identify people as well as my instincts think they can.
There are also some mannerism in your speach (typing? Whatever) that simply spark some intrigue... something familiar yet foreign to me.
I'm still waiting for the rich to fund profound things like treatments for malaria
You seem to have the "rich" confused with "instant social panacea".
Trickle-down refers to the idea that the rich very, very rarely horde all of their money in a mattress to never, ever spend any of it. Even if a "rich" person were, for some reason, to save 100% of his wealth and subsist off of dirt and grubs, this wealth would still trickle down.
As I'm sure you already know, it is common for people - be they rich or poor - to save their money in a bank. It is from these savings that banks are able to provide loans - i.e., what allows the non-rich to buy houses, cars, and other things. Or, more importantly, what provides entrepreneuers with the initial investment they need to create the next Big Thing, like this new-fangled blindness-cure-thingy. In other words, banks make the wealth hording of the rich both productive and useful to society, and help wealth to "trickle down."
Effects are more obvious if we assume that the rich spend some of their money - if it was spent, someone had to have received it. In my experience, very rarely do the rich buy only from the rich, who in turn buy only from the rich, who in turn buy only from the rich, and so forth - they eat at expensive restaurants where the waiters are most likely not rich, buy expensive cars made by blue-collar workers, and generally like to flaunt their worldly posessions - all to the benefit of the middle-class workers who actually produce the posessions being flaunted. Wealth diffuses from high concentrations to low concentrations - or "trickles down."
Another related point is that just because someone has more doesn't automatically mean someone else has less - wealth creation isn't a zero-sum game. There isn't a fixed amount of cash in the world that we all have to divvy up - wealth is actually created when an entrepreneur assembles the factors of production (like auto parts) into a finished good (like an auto). Although the sum of the parts may be worth x, the auto is worth more than x, for an auto is far more useful to the average consumer than the individual auto parts.
Long answer made short - "trickle down" is not some mystical process by which the rich will cure malaria. It's an economic concept explaining the distribution of wealth.
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Bill Gates is funding a large initiative against Malaria: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/05/05 31_wiremalaria.html
So the trickle down seems to work fairly well...
This deserves a +1 for humor & accurate sarcasm.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
It seems as this is one place a solar cell would be appropriate. Sure, first thing in the morning you might have to look at a light to boot your eyes but at least you don't have to worry about running out of juice when you need it.
prepare to be assimilated.
Ocular Implants are great, when do we get the cortical node with 20 kiloquads of memory storage?
How DO you recharge your eyeball, anyway?
You forgot to fix the subject line.
Your brain probably doesn't have separate circuits for red and green, considering the eyes weren't separating that data, and your wiring is just a bit fossilized by now. I'm not sure fixing the receptors would fix the perception issue at this point.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Always remember that the rich have done something that was good enough to convince a lot of people to give them money. That's why they're rich. Do you think that simply not working for a living is as great an achievement as inventing a new method to make steel, developing the nation's petroleum industry, or coming up with a better way to search the internet? The rich deserve their riches; the people gave them to them.
In an ideally capitalistic world, yes. However, you are completely missing some rather important factors in the real world, like inherited wealth, market externalities, corruption, coercion, theft, oligarchic market exploitation, and so on.
About all that you can actually say is that the rich have done something which caused them to possess a great deal of money, and as the amount of money in question increases, the odds of it having been acquired by means which an ordinary member of society would associate with 'work' decrease geometrically.
That, and the realization that money is a pretty screwed-up mechanism for giving people what they deserve...
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
There have been demonstratable projects which involved restoring the vision of a blind individual through electronic apparati. The big problems seem to have been that multiple components are used, which are big, bulky, and inconvenient. Well, that and the resolution is about on par with a cheap webcam.
However, these experiments (and I believe ones for hearing restoration as well) only worked on individuals who were either very young, or had lost vision/hearing at some point. For those who couldn't hear/see, even if all the rest of the "wiring" was there... they brain just couldn't interpret the data. Seems there is some point in youth where our brain learns to sort out those various signals. If you are 20-something and never had the ability, chances are your brain would have about as much chance of learning to use the data as it would a third arm.
Maybe one day science will be able to help our brains *learn* to use these enhancements though, it might be cool if we all had bluetooth-style transmitters wired into our neural network.
For those that are facing something such as loss of their vision (for many others, I'm assuming that reading slashdot might be a bit of a chore), what would you risk to get it back?
Not being able to see properly would suck, but not being alive or possibly fritzing my brain in some other way would suck more. I've considered getting laser-eye-surgery to correct my vision, but it's not bad enough that I'd really run with the risks. Maybe if my vision were worse, I would
But even given the possibility of malfunction with laser-eye-surgery... it's like a whole lot more tested/used than this. It must be one heck of a scary thing to have people hooking weird shit up in your head. Is anyone here vision impaired or facing vision impairment, and would you risk being a candidate to test this procedure?