Cyborgs - they do exist.

Is that Ozone from Breakin'

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A cyborg dances to Pumped Up Kicks beast track remixed by "butch clancy"

Van Damme Friday - Long Lost Version Of Cyborg Found

Submitted by Bleeding Cool Staff Writer

Josh Hylton writes for Bleeding Cool

Fans of cheesy, old school martial arts films rejoice! A long lost cut of the Jean Claude Van Damme film Cyborg has been found and it’s available for all to see.

Editor’s note: Some of you seem to have read this as it being FREE. That’s not the case. They are charging. Just like with any DVD, of course.

First, the story behind the discovery…

Back in the late 80′s, Cannon Films, a now defunct distribution company, was readying itself to release two major movies, a sequel to Masters of the Universe and a live action Spider-Man. After spending a couple million dollars in pre-production on those films, they realized they had no more and had to pull the plug on both. To make up for their losses, they rushed out Cyborg.

After its 24 day shoot, the director of the project, Albert Pyun, left due to disputes between him and the other parties, namely Cannon and JCVD. After his departure, Cyborg was cut down to get an R rating and the darker musical score by Jim Saad and Tony Riparetti was replaced by a lighter score by Kevin Bassinson.

That X-rated version with the original score intact is what has just been found. Sure, it’s not exactly a treasured discovery (Metropolis this isn’t), but it’s worth checking out all the same. Pyun is making and shipping the DVD’s himself, so if you’re interested, apparently all you have to do is shoot an e-mail to curnanpictures@gmail.com to get a copy. Enjoy.

Editor’s second note: Oh… now I see why you thought it was free. Ambiguous wording… Well, it’s not free. But that’s not the point. It’s a very interesting, unusual, long-lost piece of Pyun-ana.

Robotic Kit Lets You Control c**kroaches, WTF!

treehugger.com

by Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California

Image via YouTube video



Um, PETA? You might have a problem with this. It's a DIY kit that turns the average cockroach into a remote controlled toy. No kidding. Remember that whole flying cyborg beetle thing we told you about a couple years ago? Well, apparently the technology (er, sort of) is making its way into bug-infested living rooms.



I don't have anything against cockroaches -- I think they're amazing creatures. So to see one being remote controlled like this was actually a bit disturbing. So you can only imagine how the most serious animal activists among us might feel.



The kit comes from Backyard Brains, and it's a fairly simple set-up. The armor you put on the bug sends electrical pulses to the antennae nerves of the roach, which tells it to turn either left of right.
Apparently it only works on about 25% of roaches -- they must be smarter than we think. Once Backyard Brains get this kink worked out, they'll launch the device into beta mode. That is, unless PETA says something about it first.

USB Finger: When reality meets product concepts

Yanko Design's You-SB concept:

Jerry's real prosthetic USB finger storage:

The story behind this is that Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB "finger drive" to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution and the Freddy Got Fingered movie as part of his hand.

Yanko Design's concept via Gizmodo.

Contact Lens Kinda Makes You Cyborgy

This one’s kinda hard to swallow so take a deep breath, open your minds, and pretend it’s 2100. I CONTACT is essentially a mouse fitted to your eyeball. The lens is inserted like any other normal contact lens except it’s laced with sensors to track eye movement, relaying that position to a receiver connected to your computer. Theoretically that should give you full control over a mouse cursor. I’d imagine holding a blink correlates to mouse clicks.

The idea was originally created for people with disabilities but anyone could use it. Those of us too lazy to use a mouse now have a free hand to do whatever it is people do when they sit at the computer for endless hours. I love the idea but there is a caveat. How is the lens powered? Perhaps in the future, electrical power can be harnessed from the human body, just not in a Matrix creepy-like way.

Designers: Eun-Gyeong Gwon & Eun-Jae Lee

SmartHand: Cyborg Limbs Will Feel Like User's Own

| posted by Kit Eaton

SmartHand is a European collaborative project to develop a next-generation robotic prosthetic limb, and as part of the project Swedish researchers have successfully demonstrated a neat psychological trick that makes wearers feel like an artificial limb is actually part of their body.

A report published by the team at the Karolinska Institutet and Malmö University Hospital shows success in what's known as the "rubber hand" illusion. Amputees' brains can be fooled into thinking that a fake hand is actually wired into their nervous systems, despite the fact that the hand has no sensory inputs whatsoever.

It's a similar effect to the solution discovered by V.S. Ramachandran to alleviating phantom limb pain: In his work the brain is fooled into thinking it's getting sensory inputs from a missing limb by an optical illusion with a mirror, and the mental side-effects of this relieve pain. The work challenged the existing medical thinking that damaged severed nerve endings were the cause of the pain.

In the Swedish case, Prosthetic limb users were subjected to a different visual trick: Someone visibly touched the artificial hand while out of the patient's sight their arm stump was being stimulated. Apparently the illusion is very convincing, and the deep psychological basis for the effect was further demonstrated by subconsciously-induced sweating when the "rubber" hand was pricked by a needle. The results suggest that the artificial hand has been completely adopted into the user's body image at a neurological level.

The research team sees this as evidence for a possible new way of connecting up future prosthetic limbs sensor-equipped hands to a patient, and it's potentially a much simpler solution than having to directly couple electronics into the nervous system surgically. And since the illusion is similar to Ramachandran's study, there's a possibility that phantom limb pain may also be reduced.

The research into the more mechanical aspects of SmartHand have produced an amazing thought-controlled product that's ever-evolving, with the goal of totally replacing a missing forelimb with a sophisticated robot. But it's not alone: in the US there's Dean Kamen's robotic limb project.

This device is already so sci-fi-ishly sophisticated it's been dubbed the "Luke arm" after the artificial limb given to Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies. Kamen's project is concentrating on developing the motorized engineering and nerve-input interface--it's directly wired into patient's nerves to control its motors--but has already shown remarkable results. Famously one test subject felt so much at ease operating the arm that he was able to rest a mug on a nearby table without watching, and carrying on a conversation at the same time.

Kamen's work was initially aimed at replacing limbs lost by soldiers on duty, but the Luke arm and SmartHand suggest that limb-loss victims of all types, through accidents and as civilian war casualties, have amazing artificial limbs to look forward to in the future. They'll work just like the real thing, maybe even being stronger, and they just might feel like they're a natural part of the body. But the costs will have to be driven down from multi-million-dollar levels.

[via Medgadget]