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Microsoft 'Patents Human Skin'

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_999310.html?menu=news.technology

Microsoft has reportedly succeeded in patenting human skin as a new kind of network.

InSourced claims recently awarded US Patent No. 6,754, 472 is a 'method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body'.

The patent, it says, is part of a new plan to link together several devices using skin as a connector.

As an example, Microsoft says it would be possible to have just one speaker for a person's watch, PDA, and portable radio, if they were all connected to that speaker through skin.

It adds that different devices could be powered from a single power source strapped to the skin.

Each would be driven by multiple power supply signals working at different frequencies, and data and audio signals could also be transmitted over that same power signal.

The power source and devices would be connected to the body via electrodes.

Evolution's Next Stage?
Transhumanists explore ways to overcome the physical and psychological limitations of the body
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1090707008589&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467

Thousands of years ago a primitive man or woman, huddled in a squalid cave, struck sparks from a stone and created fire. The result was so successful that manipulating the environment to meet human needs became the norm, turning night into day with artificial lighting, taming the inhospitable effects of weather, and creating devices that reduced daily drudgery to mere minutes of work.

But now, experts say, another scientific quantum leap has transported us from the human to the transhuman era — a time when humankind itself is being manipulated and enhanced, leading to an unknown future where man, machine and technology will merge with startling results.

"What's happening in the 21st century is a natural progression of the invention of fire," says James Hughes, secretary of the World Transhumanist Association. "Human tool use has always extended the capability of doing what we weren't biologically intended to do. But now the possibilities are infinite, and they're making some people feel scared."

Next month, Hughes, a bioethicist at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., will take part in an international conference at the University of Toronto, titled ``TransVision 2004: Art and Life in the Posthuman Era.'' Sponsored by the transhumanist association and the Texas-based Extropy Institute, the four-day event opens Aug. 8.

For many people the very concept of transhumanism is vague, unsettling or downright off-putting, suggestive of sci-fi films such as I, Robot, in which a new generation of homicidal androids swarms Chicago in an anti-human hatefest.

That, advocates say, is the very opposite of what transhumanism means: rather than a potentially destructive force, it is "a nascent approach to bioethics, futurism, art and culture whose adherents affirm the use of technology to overcome the limitations of the human body."

And, they point out, "transhumanism as both a philosophical and cultural phenomenon has experienced exponential growth worldwide in recent years."

Toronto author and academic Christopher Dewdney, in his book Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era, describes our time, for better or worse, as the dawn of a radically new era for humankind: until now, life on earth has experienced two major transformations, from the reproduction of the first complex molecules that gave rise to human evolution, to the beginning of human consciousness.

Now, he says, "we are on the verge of the next stage in life's evolution, the stage where, by human agency, life takes control of itself and guides its own destiny. Never before has human life been able to change itself, to reach into its own genetic structure and rearrange its molecular basis: now it can."

And, Dewdney adds, "the goal of transhumanism is to surpass our current biological limitations, be it our lifespan or the capabilities of our brain."

Although many people point to cloning, cybernetics and the new science of extreme miniaturization called nanotechnology as the heralds of the transhuman future, scientists are quick to point out that the future has already arrived, and it began centuries ago.

"In the 1870s, hygiene improved immeasurably, when sterilization saved thousands of lives," says Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. "That was a century ago, and it was accepted as a tremendous advance. There was no debate about whether it should have been discovered."

Improving on the mental and physical capacities of human beings has a history that goes back to the earliest documented times.

By 3000 B.C., simple tools such as the wheel, the pulley, the wedge and the plow allowed people to travel farther, carry more goods, grow larger crops and build houses in ways the early cavemen could only dream of.

Writing, invented around the same time in Mesopotamia, allowed scholars to pass on their theories, and the development of science followed quickly. The discovery of the solar system in 5th century B.C. led to today's quest for space travel. New weapons of war based on explosives, invented around 800 A.D. in China, led to improved ways of killing that allowed soldiers to fight enemies beyond their own range and muscle-power, and paved the way for large-scale conquests.

In the arts, increasingly sophisticated musical instruments transformed the sounds of the human voice into symphonies and full-scale operas, while the printing press from 15th-century Germany allowed once obscure music, literature, religious and political texts to reach an international public.

Medical advances, from 18th-century invention of vaccination, to sterilization, antiseptics, anaesthetics and antibiotics developed alongside eyeglasses, hearing aids, false teeth, artificial limbs and joint replacements. Blood transfusions, hormone therapy and organ transplants altered the ingredients of the human body while extending its life.

By the 20th century, new discoveries were so fast and furious that one revolutionary "age" followed another with mind-boggling speed: the electronic age, the atomic age, the space age, the computer age and the information age. All opened up immense possibilities for humans to extend their physical and mental prowess, to build or destroy, even venturing into other worlds.

At the same time, the cult of self-enhancement grew, with an explosion of drugs and herbal preparations promising bigger muscles, better co-ordination, healthier organs, more attractive face and figure, sharper memory, uplifted mood and sexual potency into old age. Cosmetic surgery followed cosmetics in the quest for physical perfection. By the dawn of the 21st century, an affluent 70-something could expect to live as vigorously and youthfully as a 40-year-old two centuries earlier.

Until recently, most enhancement was done through external means. But in the transhuman era, the very stuff of life is altered to create new varieties of human beings who may, in the future, have little in common with the cavemen and women of our dim beginnings.

Since the discovery of the structure of DNA, known as the double helix, half a century ago, the mechanisms that lead to the creation of life have been decoded and analyzed in minute detail. That has opened the way to genetic manipulation that offers the possibility of vast changes in human life and the way it is lived. While some fear the results, many others are eager to join the revolution.

"Visionary scientists are blueprinting the impossible," says Dewdney, "and their visions — human immortality, nanotechnology, populating the universe — no longer have the stigma of quackery they once had."

What we're facing, says Hughes, is no less than a future as "radically redesigned humans."
"A lot of our DNA is evolutionary baggage," he insists. "We don't need it and it's doing us no good. Eventually we'll be able to streamline and improve on it in radical ways that will make today's ordinary biological reproduction difficult. In time redesigned people may no longer be able to breed with ordinary humans. That will mean we've surpassed the classical definition of a species: that it reproduces with others of the same species."

University of Toronto engineering professor Steve Mann already embraces mechanical merger. In his autobiographical book, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer, Mann recounts his 20-year experiment as a pioneer cyborg — a person whose everyday life is dependent on a mechanical or electronic device.

Mann, said to be the first person living in total and constant contact with a computer, wears a plastic frame that contains a video camera eyepiece which "mediates reality" by filtering out undesirable elements of everyday life such as advertising, and gives him a 180-degree view of what is happening around him.

"The wearable computer allows me to explore my humanity, alter my consciousness, shift my perspectives so that I can choose — any given time — to see the world in very different, often quite liberating ways," he writes.

For some people, turning oneself into a cyborg is still a leap too far. And, says Hughes, more startling things are ahead: "The most radical challenge to understanding future citizenship will be machine minds. We'll have to cope with intelligence based on something other than the `organic wet-ware' of our brains. "

While some transhumanists focus on extending the mind, others are determined to extend life itself, even to the point of immortality.

"If we can extend life by 30 years, we'll have done more or less all we need to do," says de Grey, who is a co-founder of the Cambridge-based Methuselah Foundation. "People have been brainwashed to come to terms with the ghastly inevitability of aging. It's just a matter of waking them up."

De Grey believes that aging is the result of seven processes that undermine the human body and mind, and are ultimately curable. To produce an immortal human, scientists would have to find a way for the body to manufacture more new cells, delete old harmful cells, stop deadly mutations in the cell nucleus and the energy-generating mitochondria, and clear out the waste materials that gradually accumulate in the body over time.

De Grey's first step to longevity is building a better mouse, that is one whose normal three-year lifespan can be extended to five years. And, he says, the main stumbling block is not public qualms but lack of funds. For every naysayer who worries about overpopulation, economic collapse and dangerous inequality of the very poor and the indestructible rich if life were dramatically extended, he argues, there are many others who would support it if given the chance.

Some experts take a dimmer view. The posthuman future, says State University of New York doctoral candidate Joshua Kunken, may be a brave new world in the Orwellian sense. Genetic modification could open the way to new kinds of terror attacks, and conflicts between the "normals" and the genetically enhanced could lead to catastrophic wars. At the very least, competition in sports, jobs and education would be fierce and bitter.

"Will the benefits of being more human than human outweigh the drawbacks of living in a society that is not yet tolerant of people with substantial differences?" Kunken asks in an article on the website Transhumanism.com.

But the arguments for human perfectibility, both pro and con, run very deep in the human psyche. Since earliest times, humankind has flirted with a godlike status that inspires both horror and envy. From the ancient Greek legend of Icarus, who died for the folly of rising above the mortal world, to the German classic story of Faust, who sold his soul to the devil in return for paradise on earth, the perils and wonders of perfection are embedded in our culture.

"The argument for the perfectibility of mankind rests on a logical fallacy," writes Margaret Atwood, in the New York Review of Books. "Thus man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition imperfect. And imperfect beings cannot make perfect decisions."

Under-the-Skin ID Chips Move toward U.S. Hospitals

http://news.com.com/Under-the-skin+ID+chips+move+toward+U.S.+hospitals/2100-7337_3-5285815.html?tag=nefd.top

VeriChip, the company that makes radio frequency identification--RFID--tags for humans, has moved one step closer to getting its technology into hospitals.

The Federal Drug Administration issued a ruling Tuesday that essentially begins a final review process that will determine whether hospitals can use RFID systems from the Palm Beach, Fla.-based company to identify patients and/or permit relevant hospital staff to access medical records, said Angela Fulcher, vice president of marketing and sales at VeriChip.

VeriChip sells 11-millimeter RFID tags that get implanted in the fatty tissue below the right tricep. When near one of Verichip's scanners, the chip wakes up and radios an ID number to the scanner. If the number matches an ID number in a database, a person with the chip under his or her skin can enter a secured room or complete a financial transaction.

"It is used instead of other biometric applications," such as fingerprints, Fulcher said.

The approval process does not center on health risks or implications, Fulcher said. VeriChip can already sell implantable RFID chips in the United States for standard security applications and the financial market. The company's basic technology has also been used in animals for years.

Instead, the FDA may mostly examine privacy issues, Fulcher indicated. In other words, the agency will look at whether the technology will lead to situations where confidential information can get improperly disclosed.

Technically, the FDA on Tuesday issued a letter stating that there were no equivalent products on the market. This allowed VeriChip to then seek a de novo, or additional, review. The application process started in October 2003.

The Italian Ministry of Health kicked off a six-month trial of the chips for hospitals in April.

VeriChip, a division of Applied Digital Solutions, generated headlines worldwide recently with the announcement that the Attorney General of Mexico implanted one of the small company's RFID tags in his arm.

Fulcher said the basic technology has been around for a while. For 15 years, Digital Angel, a sister company under the Applied corporate umbrella, has sold thousands of tags for identifying animals. The U.S. Department of Energy employs Digital Angel's technology to monitor salmon migration. Several implants have been placed in household pets and livestock.

"We believe the tags can last 20 years," Fulcher said.

The idea for employing the tags to identify humans came after the horror of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Fulcher said. Richard Seelig, vice president of medical applications at Applied, saw on TV how firemen were writing their badge numbers on their arm with pen so they could be identified in the event of a disaster.

He inserted Digital Angel tags in his body and told the CEO that they worked. VeriChip was born. In June, the company hired Next Level and Motorola alum Kevin Wiley as CEO.

About 7,000 VeriChip tags have been sold, and approximately 1,000 have been inserted in humans. The chips only work with VeriChip's scanners. Along with scanners, VeriChip also sells complementary security systems for opening or shutting doors after the identification process.

So far, most of the sales have been outside the United States. Along with its attorney general's implant, Mexico has evaluated the chips as a way to better identify children in the event of a kidnapping. The Baja Beach Club in Spain has used them as electronic wallets to buy drinks. Sales have also taken place in Russia, Switzerland, Venezuela and Colombia.

"The applications that have taken hold at this point have been international so far," Fulcher said.

But FN Manufacturing, a South Carolina gun maker, is evaluating the technology for "smart guns," which contain sensor-activated grips so that only their owners can fire them.

The chips themselves are inserted into humans and animals with a syringe. When emerging from the syringe, the chips get coated with a substance called BioBond, which insulates the chip from the body and allows it to adhere to local tissue. If removed, it becomes inactive.

Privacy has been an issue for the company, but the complaints have actually begun to die down. "The pushback is less and less," Fulcher said.

The chip is an ID tag, Fulcher emphasized. When a person with an embedded chip passes near a scanner, the dormant chip simply wakes up and issues an ID number. The administrator of the security systems and databases determines how the information is used. A person has to stand within a few feet of a scanner for the tag to wake up. Thus, the tags can be used to follow someone's steps only when they are near scanners. The company's hand scanners can ping chips about 12 inches away, although the devices for counting salmon are 10 to 12 feet away from the fish.

Also, VeriChip is working on an implant that will contain a Global Positioning System. Such a device would allow an individual with a scanner to pinpoint someone's position on the globe.

The lab device, however, is relatively large right now, about the size of a pacemaker.

Get Ready for the Age of Consumer Monitoring
RFID tags, GPS devices, and cell phones can tell more about you than you might want anyone else to know.
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,672215,00.html

They'll track us through our cars and computers. They'll track us through our phones and TVs. They'll even track us through our clothes. I'm not talking about the government. This will be a more insidious form of surveillance. Whether it's by placing cookies on our computers, uploading our TV viewing habits, inserting radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips in every product we pick up from retailers' shelves, or installing GPS devices in our cars, corporate surveillance will become a bigger reality in our everyday lives. So get ready to be monitored.

Of course, we are already monitored every time we swipe a loyalty discount card at the local supermarket, make an airline reservation, or buy a book from Amazon (AMZN). But new wireless technologies, such as RFID and GPS chips, are increasingly making it possible for corporations to physically monitor consumers. Even most cell phones can now be used to pinpoint your location.

The motivation behind all of this tracking is simple. In business, not only is information power, but it is also profitable. The more detailed data a company can collect about its customers, the easier it is to sort through those customers and decide which ones to pamper and which ones to discard. Mass marketing is a brute-force approach that is gradually being replaced with ever finer market segmentations, sometimes even down to the individual. After all, the rise of the data warehouse in the 1990s was driven by the need to distinguish between the most profitable, loyal customers and the most expensive, demanding ones. But companies' ability to collect consumer-specific data stopped at the checkout counter or with the completion of each transaction.

Now cheap RFID and GPS chips, as well as cell phones, hold the promise of finding out what consumers do with a product or service after it is purchased. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The GPS chip, sensors, and cell phone in GM's (GM) OnStar car navigation computer calls an OnStar dispatcher whenever your airbags are deployed in a severe crash so an ambulance can be sent right away to the correct location. A European insurance company, Aviva, is piloting a service in the United Kingdom that charges customers based on their driving habits if they agree to put a GPS monitoring device in their cars. Aviva can track how often a customer drives, at what times, how far, where, and how fast. If you are a safe or infrequent driver, you pay less for insurance, and Aviva reduces the risk of shelling out cash for big claims.

RFID is a little further out. Wal-Mart (WMT) and other retailers are still struggling with getting RFID chips on pallets and boxes for inventory tracking, but eventually the chips could be as ubiquitous as the bar code. Once they are on every product, there is no technical reason those products couldn't continue to be tracked after they leave the store. As long as the chips are not deactivated at the checkout, they can be detected -- along with all the product information embedded in them -- by any RFID reader. Checkout deactivation should become the norm (just as antitheft tags are removed today once an item is paid for), but it is not difficult to imagine scenarios in which consumers will be offered incentives to keep the chips alive.

For instance, what if appliances like refrigerators, medicine cabinets, and garbage cans were equipped with RFID readers so that consumers could keep an inventory of all the stuff they buy, use, and discard? And what if that household inventory information could be sent back to Wal-Mart to generate shopping lists to replenish whatever was consumed? For that kind of convenience, people might not mind giving up their privacy.

Once these monitoring technologies are in place, however, they could lead to potential privacy abuses. Take the car-insurance GPS device. While the service is completely voluntary, as it becomes more widespread, insurers could force poorer consumers to accept it whether they like it or not. "There definitely is a coercive element here," agrees Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. "For many people, in order to save money on their insurance premium, they would have to allow their car to be outfitted."

And what if the police subpoenaed your GPS records to bust you for speeding or place your car near the scene of a crime? It wouldn't be the first time GPS tracking was used against consumers. Some car rental companies have relied on GPS monitors to levy steep fines on renters who take the vehicles out of a given state or who speed. In one sign of a backlash, a current bill in California proposes outlawing this sort of customer tracking.

A similar potential for abuse exists with RFID chips. A grocery store in Germany operated by the Metro Group embedded RFID chips in customer loyalty cards without disclosing that information. When customers found out, they picketed the store and the company had to issue new, chip-free cards. The fear here, says Katherine Albrecht, founder of consumer privacy group Caspian, is that stores could actively discriminate against their least profitable (and usually lower-income) shoppers. Once a chip is in a loyalty card, a store could link personal identity with shopping history. Add electronic shelf pricing displays to the mix, and there would be nothing to stop a store from raising the price of a jar of peanut butter, say, when a less desirable customer approaches, and lowering it when a more desirable one does. If the top 20 percent of a store's customers account for 80 percent of its profits, why even bother with the bottom 20 percent? "The industry refers to those people as bottom-feeders," Albrecht says. She contends that some unscrupulous retailers even try to discourage that bottom 20 percent from returning to the store with "higher prices or poor service."

A bigger concern, perhaps, is what happens to the products once they leave the store. Goodyear and Michelin, for instance, are introducing tires with RFID chips so they can be easily identified in case of a recall. That sounds sensible enough. But once the chips are in the tires, there's nothing to stop state troopers from setting up RFID readers on highways to catch speeders. (Arguably, they could do the same thing with EZ-Pass, which also uses RFID chips. But who cares about surveillance as long as you can get where you're going faster, right?) Or what if there were RFID chips embedded in everyone's clothes and then the police walked around with hidden RFID readers at antiwar rallies? If they could cross-reference those identity tags with those in the customer database of an obliging retailer or manufacturer, it would be almost as effective as implanting an RFID chip in every citizen.

Thankfully, most of these ugly scenarios are still hypothetical. But to avoid them in the future and still reap the benefits of these new technologies, corporations would be wise to adhere to some reasonable rules of the road. Here are a few to start with:

Avoid secret placement of monitoring hardware, tags, or tag readers.
Kill the tags at checkout as a default.
Obtain consumers' consent for any tags that will remain active beyond the checkout.
Tell consumers what data is being collected and stick to those limits.
Don't impose penalties, such as refusing a return or refund, for destroying tags.

Now all we need is a technology that will make sure these rules are followed.

British Project Protects Endangered DNA
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=753&e=2&u=/ap/20040727/ap_on_sc/frozen_ark

LONDON - Britain's Frozen Ark project aimed at safeguarding genetic material from a variety of species boarded its first endangered passengers Monday, including an Arabian oryx, a spotted sea horse and a British field cricket.

The Ark, a project by three British institutions, doesn't include any living animals, but hopes to collect frozen DNA and tissue specimens from thousands of endangered species.

Like Noah, the scientists harbor hopes of repopulating the Earth.
"I think it will be used for cloning eventually," said Professor Alan Cooper, director of the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Center at Oxford University.

"We're cautious about cloning because it gets so sexed up, but who knows what we're going to be using these specimens for in the future," said Cooper, a member of the Frozen Ark steering committee.

"I believe you can make a case for bringing animals like, say, the tiger, back. There would be a pretty strong argument for doing that versus letting them go extinct."

The principal collection will be set up in London at the Natural History Museum and the Institute of Zoology, and there are plans for duplicate collections elsewhere in the world to safeguard the survival of the samples.

With some 10,000 species listed as in danger of extinction, the ark will fill quickly. The project will be guided by the World Conservation Union's red list of threatened species.

Professor Bryan C. Clarke, a population geneticist at Nottingham University, said the project would not immediately save any species from extinction.

"The Frozen Ark is not a conservation measure but rather a back-up plan for when all best conservation efforts have failed," Clarke said.

"The recent progress in molecular biology has been so fast that we cannot predict with any certainty what may be possible using this genetic information within the next few decades. Without it nothing can be done."

Cooper added that there would be little point in trying to revive some species.
"It would be impossible to clone the dodo anyway, but even if you could, what would you do with it? There's no environment left for the dodo," Cooper said.

The first DNA samples included:
_ Scimitar-horned oryx, from North Africa, threatened by expanded deserts, over-hunting and war.
_ Socorro dove, unique to Socorro, one of the remote Revillagegido Islands off the west coast of Mexico.
_ Mountain chicken, actually a frog, found on the Caribbean islands of Montserrat and Dominica where it is eaten by humans.

_ Banggai cardinal, a fish about 1-2 inches long found on coral reefs around the Banggai islands of Indonesia.
_ Yellow sea horse, endangered by hunting for Chinese medicine, pets and souvenirs.
_ Seychelles Fregate beetle, found only on the Seychelles island of Fregate.
_ British field cricket, endangered by loss of grassland habitat.
_ Polynesian tree snails, include more than 100 species native to Pacific volcanic islands.

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