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PVAF SEARCH FOR TRUTH.....Today's story of bionics created by humans to repair and/or replace Natural functions of Creations...and humans aspiring to Posted by Vishva News Reporter on November 15, 2010 |
.....HYPERLINKING WORDS TO
INTERNET KNOWELDGE SOURCES...... |
PVAF in its continual search for
knowledge and more knowledge to find the
TRUTH
of our existence from epistemological aspect of our existence...has now
been hyperlinking all its publishing on this website to internet
knowledge sources...Please click on the hyperlinked words to enlighten
and educate yourself to whatever depth you wish...Please be aware that
many internet knowledge sources are not only evolving in its
comprehensiveness plus accuracy and may only convey knowledge as defined
by the word "verisimilitude"
meaning to a degree of truth/false...we urge knowledge seekers to keep
on searching for Truth.... |
......AND NOW
BIONICS IS BECOMING PROGRESSIVLEY REAL.....
....BY HUMANS TO HELP HUMANS AND ALL CREATIONS
TO REPAIR AND/OR REPLACE WITH
HUMAN DESIGNED AND CREATED BIONICS
THE
LOSS OF PARTS AND/OR FUNCTIONS
DESIGNED AND CREATED BY NATURE..... |
......And then as Humans always wishes for mastery of Nature...
Humans wants their bionics knowledge
to even enhance the normal vision and muscle powers given by Nature... |
Please click on the next line to enlighten yourself with the
detailed Truth about the above synopsis of today's PVAF news-life
knowledge sharing...... |
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TODAY'S LIFE-KNOWLEDGE SHARING
ABOUT
HOW HUMANS ARE WALKING THE PATH OF
COPYING CREATION BY THE CREATOR....
.....and good news is that Creator has
never patented anything Created...
....it is just a matter of time that the lawyers
will figure out how to protect the patents of the Creator
as they will say for the Creator....
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Photograph by: Getty Images, Sunday
Telegraph
Stuart Hill, project manager, at Touch Bionics, holds the highly
functional bionic i-Limb hand in a July 2007 photo. The hand, which has
been tested by amputees, including Iraq war veterans, is controlled by
the patient's mind and muscles.
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.....We have the technology:
.....A bionic man is becoming reality.....
.....Human beings can now be rebuilt from
top to toe with artificial parts.....
(From:
Edmonton Journal:
Alberta, Canada: Sunday Reader: November 14, 2010: By Richard Gray,
Sunday Telegraph:
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal)
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For the first time in more than a decade, Miikka Terho was able to
glance at a clock and read the time. It was a simple task, but one he
had been unable to do since he was robbed of his sight by disease.
Terho,
46, a financial consultant from Finland, was one of three patients who
had their eye sight temporarily restored using artificial light sensors and
microchips placed on the retina at the back of their eyes by doctors in
Germany.
This extraordinary melding of man and machine proves that
we finally
have the technology to create real-life
bionic humans.
In the 1970s TV
series, The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors' character had his body
rebuilt using bionic technology, leaving him "better, stronger, faster."
Now, cutting-edge research is producing synthetic body parts to replace
damaged tissues, limbs, organs and senses. In most cases it is used to
improve a patient's quality of life, but in others it is saving lives.
Here we examine how science can potentially kit out a human being from
head to toe to create a real bionic man.
BRAIN
BBy far the most important, and also the most complex, organ in the body
is the brain. It controls our movements and our breathing, makes sense
of the world and stores the memories that help form our personalities.
Damage to the brain from accidents or illnesses such as strokes can be
catastrophic, ranging from paralysis to memory loss. But some scientists
believe they may have found a way to repair this damage --
a
prosthetic brain.
Theodore Berger, from the University of Southern California, has been
developing a device that can be implanted into the brain to restore
memory functions, modelling the complex neural activity that takes place
in the hippocampus, which is responsible for forming new memories.
The device -- a
microchip that encodes memories for storing elsewhere in
the brain -- has been tested using tissue from rats' brains, and
researchers are planning trials on live animals.
They hope it will
provide a way of restoring memory function in patients who have suffered
damage to their hippocampus from a stroke, an accident or from
Alzheimer's disease.
EYES
Millions of people suffer from two of the most common forms of
blindness:
macular degeneration and
retinitis pigmentosa. But doctors in
Germany recently restored sight to three blind patients by implanting
microchips lined with electronic sensors -- similar to those found in digital
cameras -- into the back of their
eyes.
When light hits these sensors,
they produce electrical impulses that pass into the optical nerve behind
the eye and into the brain. The patients reported being able to
distinguish objects such as fruit and cutlery, and even read their own
names.
Miikka Terho was one of the first to have the implant and saw his life
transformed over the three-month trial, before the implant was removed.
He went from being completely blind to being able to make out fuzzy
black-and-white shapes that allowed him to read the time.
"When I first got the implant I could tell I was seeing something, but I
couldn't really make out what it was -- it was like my sight was a
muscle that I hadn't used in a long time and it needed training to get
used to recognizing things again," he says. br />
"Later I was able to see people and tell if someone lifted their arm or
if someone was taller than someone else. They were too fuzzy to
distinguish faces, but being able to see like that would help me to be
more independent and walk in unfamiliar surroundings -- to live a more
normal life."
Eberhart Zrenner, who led the research at the University of Tuebingen,
has already begun work on improving the detail that the patients can see
by changing the power supply -- currently the chip has an external
supply that must be transmitted through the skin via a magnetic link.
"We also want to have the implant do some intelligent processing that
can help to enhance the contrast and the graininess of the image," he
says.
AA larger trial of the device is now being planned, but it is by no means
the only approach being taken.
While most research is aimed at helping
patients who have lost their sight,
some scientists hope they may be
able to enhance the vision of healthy people, too.
Artificial lenses that have microscopic circuits fixed to them could be
used to produce wearable displays that beam maps, computer displays and
even zoom functions to the wearer.
EARS
The bionic ear has been around for more than 40 years, and many
thousands of patients are already wearing them.
Cochlear implants (bionic ear) turn
sound into electronic pulses that are transmitted to the brain, allowing
the wearer to "hear."
Unfortunately, the devices are unable to tune in
to specific sounds, so in noisy environments patients can struggle to
hear speech and find music hard to enjoy.However, scientists at La Trobe University, Australia, have, by studying
the way in which the ear transmits information to the brain, produced a
device that behaves far more like a human ear.
HEART
Artificial hearts, essentially miniaturized pumps, are often implanted
into patients to help their damaged organs pump blood around their
bodies while they are waiting for
heart transplants.
And last month doctors in
Italy gave a 15-year-old boy the first permanent artificial heart
implant.
One company in France,
Carmat, has developed a prototype for a
fully artificial heart that would replace the organ altogether.
Heart
specialist Alain Carpentier, the doctor behind the device, uses
hydraulic pumps to push blood around the body.
It works like a natural
heart, where blood is drawn into cavities inside the organ before being
pushed out to the arteries. Surgeons plan to perform the first implant
in humans in late 2011.
ARM
In July, Patrick Kane, a 13-year-old schoolboy from London, England, was
transformed into a bionic boy when he was fitted with a prosthetic
arm
by the Livingston-based firm Touch Bionics.
Their revolutionary iLimb
Pulse hand means Patrick, who lost his left hand after falling victim to
meningitis when he was nine months old, can even squash grapes between
his fingers.
"It's the little things that the hand allows me to do that
have really made the difference," says Patrick. "I can open bottles with
both hands now, hold my fork and tie my shoelaces."
His arm prosthesis works by using two electrodes that make contact with the
skin on his upper arm. When he tenses a muscle, tiny pulses of
electricity from the nerves beneath the electrodes cause the hand to
close; when he tenses another, the hand opens.
Researchers are working on prosthetic limbs that will allow wearers even
more control. By mapping how the neural networks are used to control
limb movements, they can learn how robotic arms can be controlled in the
same way as a real, natural arm.
Some approaches use electrodes
implanted beneath the skin; others use ones on top of the skin. By
picking up tiny signals from the brain when someone thinks about moving
their arm, the robotic prosthesis can be made to replicate the movement.
Hugh Gill, chief technical officer at Touch Bionics, says: "What we're
looking at is how you can map the signals from the brain so that you can
have discrete control of individual digits on a prosthetic hand and
rotate the wrist. The ideal situation is that when you go to reach for
an object, the hand responds in the way you would expect a real hand to.
"One of the other things a number of people are looking at, and again we
are interested in, is adaptive devices that fit around existing limbs
like an arm or a leg and provide additional power."
MUSCLES
Some researchers are attempting to find ways of replacing individual
muscles rather than whole limbs to provide bionic treatments for people
who have suffered serious sporting injuries or lost muscles in
accidents.
They are using synthetic
polymer gels that expand and
contract in response to small electrical currents to create synthetic
muscles for replacing heart valves, sphincter muscles and, eventually,
larger muscles.
Scientists at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are aiming to
develop an arm powered by bionic muscles made from these "electroactive
polymers"
that would be capable of winning an arm-wrestling contest.
Richard Baker, from the University of St Andrews, is also working with
polymer gels, but hopes to produce material that will contract and
expand in response to the kind of chemical signals that are found in the
body.
Scientists at the University of Texas have produced artificial muscles
that are more than 100 times more powerful than natural muscle, using an
elastic metal wire that bends when it is heated and returns to normal
when cooled down.
TENDONS
Researchers at Manchester University are developing artificial
tendons to help patients who have severed or injured their own.
Using finely
spun fibres of plastic material, the synthetic tendons behave just like
the natural tissue and can be implanted into a patient to restore
movement.
Professor Sandra Downes, from the school of materials at Manchester
University, says the implants would encourage the body to heal itself
and would gradually break down.
The team is about to start pre-clinical trials and hopes to have bionic
tendons on the market within five years.
TOUCH
Even with the most advanced prosthetics available, patients with robotic
arms still suffer from being unable to feel what they are
touching..
This
important sense allows us to enjoy sensuality, control how hard we grip
objects and even helps us form opinions about people we meet, for
instance from their handshake.
Scientists in Italy have been working on a
synthetic skin
that gives
robots a sense of touch.
Although this was initially developed for
robots, some researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology are
developing ways of feeding information back from the synthetic skin to
patients' nerve cells.. |
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