Bionic Limbs: The Artificial Limbs That Live!

In the George Lucas classic, Star Wars, hero Luke Skywalker's arm is severed and amputated during a sweet lightsaber fight and he is then fitted with a bionic arm that he can use as if it were his own limb. At the time the script was written, such a remedy was pure science fiction; however, the ability to manufacture bionic arms that have the function and even feel of a real limb is becoming very real. Already, primates have been trained to feed themselves using a robotic arm just by thinking about it, while brain sensors have been picking up their brain-signal patterns since 2003. The time has come for using this technology on paralysed human patients and amputees.

For decades, scientists have been interested in developing a technique for interpreting brain activity to motor output — in other words, decipher the brain's electric patterns and convert them into action. The movement of any body part is controlled by the cortex in the brain, aided by the nervous system and the nerve cells called motor neurons. The ‘will’ to move a body part comes from in the cortex in the form of electrical currents, which are conveyed through the neurons to the body part. The body part then moves as a result of the electrical current getting converted into motion by the contraction and relaxing of the muscles of that body part. So how can you move a limb that isn’t connected to the brain with nerves?

With the help of a BMI. Lately, this technology has been developed and has been implemented in many new technologies from computer games to artificial limbs. This technology is called a BMI or Brain-Machine Interface. BMI, is a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device, using sensors and signal recievors.

This new phenomenon called BMI and the new artificial limb called the bionic limb will give an opportunity to people with damaged or dysfunctional sensory and motor neurons, to use their brain to control artificial body parts and restore lost ability. These bionic limbs are so close to the real deal, that they even have even the feel, besides functionality, of a natural limb. The good news is not only for amputees but also patients of incurable ailments like the motor neuron Alzheimer’s disease. Besides this, the new invention moves outside just limb movements to accommodate victims of stroke and other paralytic disorders. This is a great innovation for our time and is giving life back to those who lost it in amputation and disease.

Today, thousands are using the aid of a bionic limb to go about everyday life and with newer and newer technology being developed in the field; we are soon reaching improvement of mobility and strength of that of flesh and bone. Stronger, faster, and better limbs than natural ones will soon be developed for the use of amputees. There might, in the far future, be a situation where people would trade their healthy natural limbs for stronger, synergist, pain-enduring and multi-tasking bionic limbs. I’d be down for that.

Sources:

thefutureofthings.com

ezinearticles.com

engadget.com

howtosplitanatom.com

finalsense.com

Artificial Selection: Making The World A Better Place

This is natrual selection......

Notice how most of them are leaning toward impeding doom!

and this is artificial selection......

Well not quite...

but it is wonderful what the principle of selection by man, that is the picking out of individuals with any desired quality, and breeding from them, and again picking out, can do. Man now can adapt living beings to his wants, making life easier without having to worry about disease killing the crops, or the cows not producing enough milk. This is one of our greatest innovations, started thousands of years ago and perfected today.

Ever since the appearance of the first life forms on our planet, organisms have influenced each other in their evolution and adaptations. They compete for sunlight, food, shelter, and mates, with the most successful passing down the knowledge of their genes to the next generation. Although relative latecomers to this scene, humans driven by their increasing need for food, shelter, clothing, beauty, and amusement, have had a very dramatic effect on the evolution of some species. Many thousands of years of evolution, combined with our current understanding of natural selection coupled with advances in biotechnology have provided us with extraordinary power to create new and useful organisms and molecules.

This could also be benificial to the enviroment. Negative selection is where negative, rather than positive, traits of a species are selected for evolutionary continuance. It is generally not desirable, but may be caused by man-made conditions such as bad management, such as when humans eat the best plants or animals they have, leading to worse and worse stock. A good example of this are regulations on fish, where fish below a certain size had to be released, leading to undersized fish populations. In the 1970’s a 500 pound marlin was not uncommon, but due to the keep of large specimens and the release of smaller fish, they have bred to small sizes, they average less than 50% of their original size today. Through artificial selection we could breed large specimens together to increase the size, making it a angler favorite again and restoring the ecosystem.

I think though, that the best use for artificial selection is in the field of medicine. Stem cell research is one area where artificial selection has applications. Stem cells are able to become any cells of the body and are a perfect match to each individual. Artificial selection allows researches to select only the best stem cells from their Petri dish. Once these stem cells are allowed to differentiate into organs, the best organs can be selected so the recipient receives the best possible benefit.

Artificial selection also offers hope to many of those with genetic conditions, like cystic fibrosis. Basically DNA therapy, in which a 'normal' (i.e. unmutated or 'wild-type') gene is placed into a virus genome (genetic makeup), and that virus introduced into the affected human after being rendered harmless. These viruses are then able to integrate the normal human DNA into the expression profile of human cells so that the missing or abnormal protein can be replaced by the correct version. Basically, they can selectively breed the best viruses that are able to make the good protein and introduce these viruses into a person so that they can function normally. DNA vaccines also work similary, where the virus makes a protein that helps to resist infection. The technology and widespread use is still in the future, but artificial selection will surely play an important role in the health of the world soon.

Drug production can also benefit from artificial selection. Some medications are made by genetically modified bacteria, as described above. Selection technology can allow laboratories to breed viruses that are able to make the compounds at the fastest rate, improving the efficiency of medicine production.

With these and many other potential applications, artificial selection is sure to increase in importance in medicine in the future. Once stem cell research and artificial selection become commonplace, the floodgates will open to a world of medical advancement and improvement in the health of thousands, if not millions, worldwide.

Sources

www.understandingevolution.com
www.blackwellpublishing.com
www.medscape.com
www.4truth.net
www.google.ca

Do the Chickens have Large Talons?

What Came First: The Chicken or the Dinosaur?
A Look at Reverse Evolution.

Napoleon Dynamite: Do the chickens have large talons?

Farmer: Do they have what?

Napoleon Dynamite: Large talons.

Farmer: I don't understand a word you just said.

Actually, one day they might, along with teeth, claws, scales and long reptilian tails. Well, then they wouldn’t be chickens anymore, they would be dinosaurs!


If dinosaurs are the ancestors of chickens, could genetic engineers turn the clock back on chicken DNA and recreate a dinosaur? A Canadian researcher thinks it's possible, and has begun experiments to do just that.

Montreal's McGill University has claimed they will attempt to reverse-engineer a dinosaur from a chicken by altering chicken genes that have evolved since the Cretaceous. Their quest to build a dinosaur is taking them millions of years into the past, and forward again to the cutting edge of science technology. If all goes according to plan, we will have dinosaurs within five years’ time.

“Reverse evolution” has been successfully performed in mice and flies, but those experiments were re-introducing just a few bygone traits. The dinochicken project instead has the goal of bringing back multiple dinosaur characteristics, such as a tail, teeth and forearms, by changing the levels of proteins that have evolved to suppress these traits in birds. The only reason there using chickens, instead of some other bird, is that the chicken genome has been mapped, and chickens have already been thoroughly studied.

McGill University paleontologist Hans Larsson is working to make it happen. Larsson is experimenting with chicken embryos to create the creature he describes: a “chickenosaurus,” they call it. If he succeeds, Larsson will have made an animal with clawed hands, teeth, a long, dinosaurian tail and ancestral feathers.

Three years ago, evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin found one of the biggest fossil finds of the century: Tiktaalik, a 375-million-year-old fish with a neck, elbows, shoulders, and wrists. An almost perfect link between fish and land vertebrates, Tiktaalik (unearthed in Nunavut) is our own distant cousin. Just as Larsson looks to dinosaur bones to understand his embryos, Shubin used the fossil to design an experiment with modern-day paddlefish. He found that, even before limbed animals evolved about 365 million years ago, fish had the genes necessary to grow arms and legs. “Evolution doesn’t always rely on the development of new genes,” Shubin explains. “It’s redeploying old genes in new ways: changing their switches, or their time of activity.” By using the right genetic switches at the right time, then, Larsson should be able to build a dinosaur inside a chicken egg.

What they have accomplished so far is a chicken embryo, less than half as big as your thumb, the specimen is almost unrecognizable, and not just because of its sharp hands and feet, or its two wide, empty eyes. The embryo’s delicate spine continues well past its backside, creating a thick and pointed tail. Fully developed chickens, of course, don’t have tails.

As we know, an embryo develops from just a few cells into a fully formed creature. The chicken embryo sprouts five fingers with clawlike tips, a hint of teeth, and a tail (up to 22 vertebrae, roughly 15 more than in a developed chicken). Suddenly, a genetic switch flips: the teeth disappear, the tail is destroyed, and the five fingers become three. It looks much more like a bird. Why would an embryo build extra fingers, teeth or a tail, only to have them disintegrate? Evolutionary change is like tuning a car while the engine’s running,. You can’t just junk one part and put something else in; in the meantime, it wouldn’t work. Those pre-existing programs are often the foundation for something new. The trick is to override them.

He has no doubt that within five years we will have dinosaur-like creatures running around in enclosures, and after that they will experiment with larger specimens, such as making a dinosaur out of an emu. Does this sound like a terrible Jurassic Park mistake, because the humans lost in that movie, then again the dinos are predicted to be a bit larger than an average chicken, not exactly a killing machine like the velociraptor or T-rex. According to Larsson, there is no danger of the proposed dinochicken escaping and populating the world with dinosaurs, since only the chicken’s development, and not its genome, would have been affected. If the creature did somehow escape and could mate, the result would just be a regular chicken. No fear of Jurassic Park 4 I guess.

Good luck to the team at McGill University and I look forward to the completion of their project, it will be a huge leap forward in bioengineering science.

Sources

http://www.macleans.ca/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

http://www.discoverychannel.ca/

http://www.thaindian.com/

http://www.popsci.com/

Sources for Previous Post

www.glfc.org/lampcon.php

www.seagrant.umn.edu/ais/sealamprey_battle

www.great-lakes.net/envt/flora-fauna/invasive/lamprey.html

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720163734.htm

www.umesc.usgs.gov/invasive_species/sea_lamprey.html

Humans at War with Alien Invasion: But Who Is the Real Fish Killer?

Humans are destroying our planet. One of the most devastating and unknown ways is through invasive species. I chose an example to demonstrate this close to home, in our very own Lake Ontario.

We still don’t know where they came from. If they were introduced through the Erie Canal in 1825 or from the Welland Canal in 1919. What we do know is it wasn’t a problem before we started to build canals connecting bodies of water all around Canada and the U.S. Before we knew it though, it had spread like a virus through Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, Michigan, Huron and Superior. Killing our local fish populations and creating a very large unbalance in our ecosystem that has impacted our natural ecosystem and Canadians for many years to come. I am talking about one of the most famous invasive species in Canada, the Sea Lamprey.


How did they get here? They were first discovered in the 1830s, where they were native to the inland Finger Lakes and Lake Champlain in New York and Vermont. It was through the expansion of human cities and the need to transport goods across the border that compelled us to connect bodies of water that nature never intended to. This is what led to the spread of this species that was previosly unfamiliar to the waters of Canada. The sea lamprey is not evil, no plant or animal is evil, it was merely trying to survive and grow and we presented it with a whole new habitat that it was not natrtually supposed to thrive in. So, it isn’t the lampreys fault, it’s ours, we are the most invasive species on this planet.

So what so bad about it? So what, theres a new fish in our waters, how can it hurt other fish? It has killed more fish than any other invasive species in Canada, actually. Sea lampreys don’t eat other fish whole like most predatory fish, they eat only the blood and flesh. Whether the fish is big or small, as long as is can get its mouth on it it will latch on for days, even weeks, eating away at the fish, resulting in a slow death. The lamprey uses its suction-cup like mouth to attach itself to the skin of a fish and rasps away tissue with its sharp probing tongue and teeth. Secretions in the lamprey's mouth prevent the victim's blood from clotting. Victims typically die from excessive blood loss and/or infection. They can be up to a metere in length and they are very persistant and vicious fish.



How has this impacted our ecosystem? It has decimated our natrual fish population in the 1930s and 1940s. They have created a problem with their aggressive parasitism on other predator species and game fish, such as lake trout, lake whitefish, chub, salmon and lake herring. Elimination of these predators allowed the alewife, another type of invasive species, a kind of herring introduced by us as a cheap fishing bait, to explode in population, having adverse effects on many native fish species. Also in this time there was also a major over fishing problem and we almost made the lake trout an extinct species. The life cycle of sea lampreys is anadromous, like that of salmon.The young are born in inland rivers, live in the ocean as adults, and return to the rivers to breed. This also caused a problem with the salmon, the salmon that survied the sea lampreys in the lakes also had to compete with them for breeding space. Reports have said that sometimes the rivers were so full of lampreys the salmon coudn’t get through to breed.

What have we done to help? There has been a lot of control attempts for this problem. Some of the more effective ones are electrical barriers and the dumping chemicals in the rivers to kill them. They may work in killing the lampreys, but imagine how many other species they kill, and when they die of chemical poisoning, many other fish are living with the effects such as birth defects, sickness and weak immune system. However, we are however working on a more enviromentaly friendly way of ridding our waters of this invasion. Genetic researchers have begun mapping the sea lamprey's genetics in the hope of finding out more about its evolution; scientists and conservationalists trying to eliminate the Great Lakes problem are working with these genetic scientists, hoping to find out more about its immune system. It is a massive research effort into developing synthesized pheromones. These are believed to have big influences on the sea lamprey behavior. One pheromone can be a migratory function in that odor emitted from larva are thought to lure maturing adults into streams with suitable spawning habitat; the other, a sex pheromone, is emitted from males and is capable of luring females long distances to very specific. Effort is being made to determine the function of each pheromone, each part of each pheromone, and if they can be used in a targeted effort at environmentally friendly lamprey control.