Writing here has been highly rewarding, and I hope to continue maintaining a blog for a long time to come while doing a better job of posting regularly. That said, I’m moving to a new domain for a couple of reasons. First of all and most importantly, the name HumanPlus is too close for comfort to the organization Humanity+ and the magazine H+, both of which serve extremely valuable roles within the transhumanist community and for which I have a lot of respect. I didn’t really think this would be something that would bother me when I registered the domain, since “H+” is a common term for “transhumanist.” However, it was something I became less at ease with as time went on.

Second, the .US domain is very much a second tier domain. While I still like the idea of incorporating a domain extension into a domain name, it can be a bit confusing when telling people how to get to your blog. However, people around the world are familiar with .COM, which hopefully will lead to more people coming to check out the site.

That said, I’ll be retiring the Humanpl.us domain and transferring all posts (eventually) and future posting (immediately) to the new domain, Transhumanistic.com. Come visit and thanks for reading!

Robots are good at a number of automated tasks, but deboning meat isn’t one of them. This work has traditionally required human workers who are able to discern and work around bone placement and variations in size and shape of the meat. An easy task for humans, but not so for a robot.

That said, the HAMDAS-R robot, manufactured by Japanese company Mayekawa Electric, represents a major step forward in how robots can be used to automate working on irregularly shaped objects. This automatic deboning system for ham is capable of achieving a higher yield than humans. As a result, with a HAMDAS-R installed, the work that would normally take a team of 20 humans now only requires ten.

In addition to increasing productivity and efficiency in the processing plant, HAMDAS-R also minimizes the number of humans touching meat, which provides a more sanitary environment.

(Via Neatorama)

Artist Wafaa Bilal underwent a “very hard” surgical operation to implant a digital camera mount on the back of his head, upon which a “third eye” will snap photos every minute for a full year, uploading them automatically to a website and a museum in Qatar.

“I’m interested in these corners of our life we don’t pay attention to,” says Bilal. “To me, it’s like, that’s part of the project. That’s part of the mundane image.”

The camera will go live beginning December 15, 2010.

Research has shown that the length of telomeres, which form a “cap” on the end of chromosomes, play a major role in aging. Shortened telomeres are a hallmark of many “premature aging” diseases. Several studies have shown exercise can preserve telomere length in humans, particularly as humans get older, and thus theoretically slow the aging process. Slowing aging is very different than actually reversing aging, however, but a recent study at Harvard has shown aging can indeed be reversed – in mice.

At Harvard, they bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter. Without the enzyme, the mice aged prematurely and suffered ailments, including a poor sense of smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. But when DePinho gave the mice injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of ageing.

“These were severely aged animals, but after a month of treatment they showed a substantial restoration, including the growth of new neurons in their brains,” said DePinho.

You may be asking yourself, “If telomerase reverses aging, why aren’t we all taking regular telomerase injections?” While telomerase is very active in embryonic and infant humans, leading to rapid cell division, telomerase becomes less active in most cells as humans get older. As a result, the activation of telomerase in adults can cause these cells to become cancerous and lead to tumor growth. Mice, on the other hand, who continue to produce telomerase throughout their lifetimes, don’t appear to be subject to increased cancer risk.

The next steps for this study will measure whether the newly rejuvenated mice will live longer, healthier lives when compared with their control group brethren. Ultimately, while this study provides fascinating insights into one of the causes of aging, scientists have a long way to go before they might apply these findings toward practical anti-aging therapies for humans.

You predict we’ll reach a point with artificial intelligence that you call the singularity. How will that affect us?

By the time we get to the 2040s, we’ll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that’s singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter. We’ll be online all the time. Search engines won’t wait to be asked.

Probably nothing new here for those well-versed in Kurzweil’s ideas, but it’s still neat to see transhumanist ideas being published in a magazine with as wide a circulation as TIME.

When Microsoft recently released its Xbox 360 peripheral, called Kinect, they intended it to be primarily used for gaming. However, a number of enterprising hardware hackers have re-purposed Kinect for a variety of non-gaming uses, ranging from robotic telepresence to augmented reality shadow puppets. Earlier this week, the wizards at Evoluce, who design and create multi-touch and gesture based displays, released video of their work with the Kinect. While we still have a way to go on the holographic display piece, they’ve made significant progress on creating a workable interface that responds to gestures. They’re not too far off from what was imagined in Minority Report, particularly when it comes to navigating a 3D map or sorting a series of images.

(Via Engadget)

The Japanese Ministry of Defense recently unveiled this new flying surveillance drone, which it says will be deployed to disaster areas such as volcanic eruptions and landslides.

While my Japanese is shaky (and by that, I mean non-existent), judging from the translation of the caption at YouTube, it looks like operators can program this robot with a pre-determined altitude and route via GPS where it can operate for up to 30 minutes, transmitting images back to a computer all the while.

(Via Crave)

iRobot, a company perhaps best known for their line of Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, also produces several military robots that are used for activities ranging from simple surveillance to bomb disposal.

The biggest and baddest military bot, the 710 Warrior, is not only rugged and strong (capable of carrying up to 150 pounds), but also shows a remarkable degree of mobility.

In the above video, iRobot crew is able to easily coax the machine up a steep 60-degree flight of stairs, down what looks to be about a one-foot drop, and then back up. It looks like the operator’s ability to cleverly shift its payload and change its center of balance is crucial to the Warrior’s ability to get around.

(Via @BotJunkie)

While physicians have been using robotics to assist with surgery for years, a Canadian man is the first in the world to undergo successful surgery in which the entire procedure was performed by robots – from administering anesthesia via a robot nicknamed “McSleepy” to operating with a DaVinci surgical robot:

Specialists at the McGill University Health Centre at the hospital said the all-robotic surgery could deliver the most modern and accurate patient care.

Dr A Aprikian from MUHC, said: ‘The DaVinci allows us to work from a workstation operating surgical instruments with delicate movements of our fingers with a precision that cannot be provided by humans alone.’

He and his team of surgeons operated the robotic arms that can rotate 360 degrees from a dedicated workstation via video control with 3D high definition image quality.

They removed part of the patient’s prostate gland, which sits at the neck of the urethra and produces the fluid part of semen.

(Via Engadget)

As electronics shrink and approach microscopic sizes, they’ll need a way to store power, which is why DARPA is funding the development of tiny batteries:

“We’re trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller,” says (UCLA engineer Jane) Chang.

To reach this goal, Chang is thinking in three dimensions in collaboration with Bruce Dunn other researchers at UCLA. She’s coating well-ordered micro-pillars or nano-wires — fabricated to maximize the surface-to-volume ratio, and thus the potential energy density — with electrolyte, the conductive material that allows current to flow in a battery.

Using atomic layer deposition — a slow but precise process that allows layers of material only an atom thick to be sprayed on a surface — she has successfully applied the solid electrolyte lithium aluminosilicate to these nanomaterials.

The article notes researchers have made significant progress on creating the individual components of a microbattery, but that development is ongoing.