http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/audio-video/mediaspinal.html
This is interesting…
It’s only an amount of time before we see Cyborgs walking around. Cool stuff if you ask me!
It sure is. My hope is that once this stuff gets rolling, they’re really begin to decode these signals well and progress will move quickly. It all depends on how complex these signals are, I suppose.
I work with computer signalling, and that’s pretty straightforward but can still be a big pain in the nuts! I doubt the biological signals will be anything but much more complex, though.
Pretty cool. Thanks for posting it.
This is one of the reasons I majored in biomedical engineering. Lots of people complain that all our technology is going towards military/weapons/killing people, and that engineers have no morals. They strive only to make the better gun, the more efficient killing machine. Well, to all of them: lick my balls!
Here is one of the best examples of our technology being put to good use. Letting someone walk again, or Hell, maybe even letting someone walk for the first time, is such an amazing possibility that I wish I was on one of those teams right now. My senior design project was a device to strengthen a heart tissue construct that my professor was researching to cure dead heart tissue as a result of heart attacks. If all goes well, then in a few years, he might have a sample ready for actual trials. The fact that I was able to participate in this is really cool. Maybe in ten of fifteeen years, someone’s life might get saved as an indirect result of my project.
Oh, and slightly off topic: this is another reason I really despise some animal rights activists. No benefit to animal tests? No reason to use animals in laboratories? These people are just uneducated idiots when it comes to this. If not for animal testing, most medical breakthroughs in the past fifty to 100 years would not have existed, or would have come about much slower. But, in the interest of saving that poor eel, I guess no paralyzed person shuld be able to walk again, right? And in that vein, to save all the poor little rats, pigs, dogs, cats, rabbits ,etc… we should no longer research new pacemakers, dialysis machines, medicine, etc…
Sorry for the hijack, but yay for medical technology! 