El Dr. Canavero asegura tener listo el primer trasplante de cabeza

Quo
Juan Scaliter

Donante

Se realizan incisiones profundas en los cuellos de ambos pacientes, separando cuidadosamente todas las estructuras anatómicas.

Quedan al descubierto las venas carótidas y yugulares, y la columna.

El cuerpo del donante respira y transmite sangre a los tejidos por medio de diferentes equipos

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

¿Sabes de quienes he recibido más cartas y llamadas solicitando información?”, me pregunta desde Italia, Sergio Canavero. “De transexuales.” Y suena lógico. Este neurocientífico, director del Grupo de Neuromodulación Avanzado de Turín, ha asegurado en un trabajo publicado en Surgical Neurological International que ya contamos con la tecnología para realizar un trasplante de cabeza completo. Y propone hacer el primero en menos de tres años.

La investigación en trasplantes de cabeza, que en realidad debería llamarse donación de cuerpo, ya que es la cabeza la que “recibe” un cuerpo nuevo, comenzó en la década de 1940. En aquellos tiempos, el científico ruso Vladimir Demikhov experimentaba con perros construyendo falsas quimeras, como sus canes de dos cabezas. En total, Demikhov realizó más de 20 intervenciones de este tipo, con las que creó un terrorífico ejército de animales bicéfalos. Hoy, estos experimentos se consideran una aberración; pero gracias a ellos se comenzó a investigar en las técnicas de trasplantes. Este científico ruso, muerto en 1988, fue quien logró llevar a cabo el primer trasplante de corazón en un perro, en 1946, el pionero en trasplantar un pulmón en cualquier mamífero, un año más tarde, y en 1953 realizó el primer bypass coronario.

El mono con dos cabezas

Todo ello permitió que en 1967 el cirujano sudafricano Christiaan Barnard realizara por primera vez un trasplante de corazón en un ser humano. El propio Barnard reconocía que “si existe un padre de los trasplantes de corazón y pulmón, ese título lo ostenta, sin duda, Demikhov”. Y no fue el único que le consideró un pionero. En los años 70 el doctor Robert White, inspirado por los experimentos de Demikhov, realizó el primer intercambio de cabezas en primates, trasplantando con éxito la cabeza de un mono Rhesus al cuerpo de otro. El pequeño simio sobrevivió durante varios días, pero al no poder conectar la médula espinal a la cabeza, falleció. El doctor Jerry Silver, de la Universidad Case Western Reserve, estuvo presente y sus memorias no son agradables. “Recuerdo que la cabeza se despertó”, asegura Silver, “y su expresión facial era de un dolor terrible. No me olvido tampoco de la ansiedad y la confusión que se podía ver en su rostro. Cuando los médicos intentaron alimentar al animal, la comida cayó al suelo. Fue terrible. La cabeza siguió viva, pero por poco tiempo”.

“Los científicos estamos preparados para un debate como este. Es la sociedad la que no lo está todavía”, asegura el neurocientífico José Aguilera

El dolor que experimentó el mono es algo en lo que Cavanero ya ha investigado. “Se produce cuando se secciona la médula espinal”, explica, “y se llama dolor central. Es algo que no deberías desearle ni a tu peor enemigo”.

Por eso, este obstáculo, la reconexión de la médula, es la piedra angular en la que se basa el trabajo de Canavero: “Cuando leí los papeles de White, me pregunté si lograría hacer un trasplante. Y comencé a interesarme en la regeneración neuronal. En 1986, George Bittner, del Departamento de Zoología de la Universidad de Texas, demostró que se podía restablecer la conexión entre las partes seccionadas de la médula utilizando polietilenglicol (PEG), un polímero que actúa como adhesivo. Me resultó interesante, pero durante treinta años nadie escribió sobre eso”. Lo extraño es que en 2013 el antes mencionado doctor Silver reconectó la médula de una rata gracias a este pegamento. Así que, ¿obstáculo salvado? En absoluto. Para el propio Silver: “Aún estamos a años luz de poder realizar una intervención similar en humanos. Falta mucho para que consigamos unir todas las piezas de modo que el sujeto recupere finalmente la movilidad completa”.

Canavero no está de acuerdo: “Desde hace 50 años sabemos que no es necesario reconectar todo el circuito nervioso para tener motricidad completa; basta solamente entre un 10 y un 30%. Nosotros creo que podemos reconectar hasta un 60%”.

Otros avances parecían imposibles y...

Las afirmaciones de Canavero han generado, obviamente, mucho revuelo. Algunos, como el propio Silver, aseguran que es imposible. Otros, como Anthony Warrens, de la Sociedad Británica de Trasplantes, señalan que “conectar una cabeza a un cuerpo es un sinsentido hoy en día. Toda la idea es muy extraña”. Mientras tanto, aquí, en España, las opiniones están muy divididas. Manuel Martín Loeches, profesor de Neurociencia Cognitiva de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, asegura: “No lo veo nada descabellado, y en realidad el único dilema sería el de quién es el “titular” de lo que salga: ¿el dueño original de la cabeza o el del cuerpo? Voto por el de la cabeza, es lo único que vale de verdad para que haya un ‘yo’. Tengo mis dudas respecto a cómo enlazar el sistema nervioso central (cerebro y médula espinal) con todos los nervios periféricos, pero tampoco lo creo imposible, hoy día, pues se ha hecho con los de las manos. Resumiendo: lo creo factible, me caben pocas dudas”.

Por su parte, José Aguilera, director del Instituto de Neurociencias de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, es ambiguo. Al principio, asegura: “Difícilmente se podría llevar a cabo una intervención así. La médula espinal es muy compleja y el resultado podría no ser bueno”. Después lo piensa más despacio: “Pero la verdad es que no lo podemos considerar inverosímil. Habría que ver el tema del rechazo de tejidos y cómo afectaría hormonalmente al comportamiento del nuevo cuerpo el cerebro”.

Son muchos los científicos que ponen en tela de juicio que de verdad contemos con la tecnología para realizar este tipo de operación, que claman que es algo imposible y que estamos jugando a Prometeo y Frankenstein. “Hace poco más de un siglo”, señala Canavero para explicarlo, “a los hermanos Wright les decían que una nave que fuera más pesada que el aire no podía levantar vuelo. La historia de la ciencia está plagada de ejemplos de imposibles que se convirtieron en realidad”.

Pero también de otros, como los coches voladores, los autobuses submarinos y los viajes en el tiempo, que apenas llegaron al cine.

Aguilera intenta aclarar esta cuestión: “Muchas veces estas ideas se lanzan para obtener notoriedad o para avanzar hacia el futuro. Es como cuando Barnard hizo el primer trasplante de corazón; quizá él avanzó demasiado deprisa. Aunque muchos científicos ya sabíamos que se podía hacer”.

La intervención completa (véase el paso a paso en la página anterior) requiere del trabajo de 100 profesionales médicos durante unas 36 horas y costaría unos 10 millones de euros. Aunque pueda sorprender, el tiempo necesario para reconectar cuerpo y cabeza es de apenas una hora. “Esto viene de conocimientos adquiridos por el doctor White en sus intervenciones”, señala Canavero. “Y pese a parecer increíble, es más que suficiente. Igual que los 20 minutos que nos llevará reunir ambas secciones de la médula. Claro, que es la parte más crítica de toda la intervención”. Según el neurocientífico italiano, tanto los costes como el tiempo se irán reduciendo a medida que progresemos en nuestro conocimiento. “Inicialmente, un trasplante de hígado”, confirma Canavero, “duraba unas 14 horas; ahora apenas 2”. Pero no es lo mismo un solo órgano que un cuerpo entero...

La pregunta es: ¿Deberíamos hacerlo?

Pese a que el objetivo de este trasplante es restablecer las funciones motoras en pacientes con condiciones médicas muy graves, como distrofia muscular progresiva, cáncer o tetrapléjicos con fallos orgánicos múltiples, Canavero señala que podría abrir las puertas a profundos dilemas éticos. “Hay mucha gente que sufre de enfermedades ahora incurables... Pero muchos pueden utilizarlo como una forma de esquivar la muerte por medio de un cuerpo más joven. El problema será regular un procedimiento que tiene el poder de dividir a la sociedad”.

Desde el Comité Español de Bioética, el Dr. Manuel de los Reyes, uno de sus miembros más reconocidos, se niega a opinar porque, asegura, no tiene suficiente información al respecto.

Por suerte, José Aguilera da en el clavo: “Los científicos estamos preparados para este tipo de debates. La sociedad no lo está. En el mundo hay miles de científicos experimentando con sustancias peligrosas y no ocurre nada. Yo he trabajado con un neurotóxico que podría haber matado a toda la población de Barcelona. Eso no significa que lo usemos. Pero la sociedad necesita participar de este tipo de dilemas”. Y a la luz de la velocidad a la que se puede acercar este logro, no queda duda de esa necesidad.

Cavanero reconoce que aún no ha progresado más debido a la falta de fondos. Pero esto se podría resolver muy pronto, confiesa, ya que el Proyecto 2045 ha contactado con él. Esta iniciativa del millonario ruso Dmitry Itskov pretende crear tecnologías que nos permitan transferir nuestra personalidad a entidades no biológicas y volvernos eternos. “Me han invitado a Moscú a exponer mis ideas”, señala Canavero, “para hablar de la posibilidad de darme fondos y poder continuar la investigación”. La primera etapa del proyecto 2045 concluye el año que viene. Quizá entonces ya sepamos si los trasplantes de cabeza son una realidad o un recurso más para la ciencia ficción.

Should Terminally Ill Children Have The Right to Ask For Their Own Deaths?

TIME

Bodily maps of emotions

Bodily topography of basic (Upper) and nonbasic (Lower) emotions associated with words. The body maps show regions whose activation increased (warm colors) or decreased (cool colors) when feeling each emotion. (Credit: Lauri Nummenmaa et al./PNAS)

Read on KurzweilAI >>

Robots superan a los Humanos en el trafico de Internet

microsiervos

La gente de Incapsula publicó esta curiosa infografía acerca del Tráfico de robots en Internet durante 2013. El resultado: que entre pitos y flautas los no-humanos ya superan claramente a los seres humanos en cuanto a tráfico; concretamente 61,5% vs. 38,5%. Comparativamente el año pasado prácticamente había un empate (49% vs. 51%).

Los tipos de bots más maliciosos: scrapers que «roban» el contenido (para duplicarlo, analizar a la competencia, etcétera); software malicioso para robot datos de tarjetas de crédito, distribuir malware, modificar contenidos, etc; spammers para publicar contenido publicitario irrelevante, publicar enlaces, crear granjas de enlaces…

En total examinaron unas 1.450 millones de visitas durante 3 meses en 20.000 sitios web distintos.

(Vía Cool Infographics.)
# Enlace Permanente

Newly-Discovered Fossilized Skull Could Prove Homo Erectus Sole Human Ancestor

breitbart

By William Bigelow 

AFP

A new discovery of an ancient skull from an ancestor of humans has scientists backtracking from their earlier claims that separate species in Africa were the progenitors of the human race.

The skull, found in the Georgian villiage of Dmanisi, is roughly two million years old and is the only intact human ancestor’s skull ever found that dates from the early Pleistocene Era. Dmanisi has yielded bones thought to be the remains of three males, one of them elderly, a young female, and a child whose sex is indeterminate.

Christoph Zollikofer, a professor at Zurich University's Anthropological Institute, said, "Nobody has ever seen such a well-preserved skull from this period. This is the first complete skull of an adult early Homo. They simply did not exist before.” His awe was echoed by Tim White, from the University of California, Berkeley, who said, "The significance is difficult to overstate. It is stunning in its completeness. This is going to be one of the real classics in paleoanthropology." The Dmanisi bones are believed to be remnants of Homo erectus, the first ancestor who resembled modern humans and originated in Africa.

Zollikofer continued, "Everything that lived at the time of the Dmanisi was probably just Homo erectus. We are not saying that palaeoanthropologists did things wrong in Africa, but they didn't have the reference we have. Part of the community will like it, but for another part it will be shocking news."

The leader of the Dmanisi excavations, David Lordkipanidze, said, "If you found the Dmanisi skulls at isolated sites in Africa, some people would give them different species names. But one population can have all this variation. We are using five or six names, but they could all be from one lineage." Lordkipanidze theorized that the belief that Australopithecus sediba was a direct ancestor of humans was now probably wrong.

The consequences of the Dmanisi discovery could mean that species such as Homo rudolfensis, Homo gautengensis, Homo ergaster, and possibly Homo habilis would be dismissed.

White explained:

Some palaeontologists see minor differences in fossils and give them labels, and that has resulted in the family tree accumulating a lot of branches. The Dmanisi fossils give us a new yardstick, and when you apply that yardstick to the African fossils, a lot of that extra wood in the tree is dead wood. It's arm-waving.

But Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, took issue with the idea that Homo Erectus was solely responsible for the ancestry of humans, saying:

I think they will be proved right that some of those early African fossils can reasonably join a variable Homo erectus species. But Africa is a huge continent with a deep record of the earliest stages of human evolution, and there certainly seems to have been species-level diversity there prior to two million years ago. So I still doubt that all of the 'early Homo' fossils can reasonably be lumped into an evolving Homo erectus lineage. We need similarly complete African fossils from two to 2.5m years ago to test that idea properly.

Lee Berger, at the University of Witwatersrand, who discovered the species Australopithecus sediba, took issue with the conclusion drawn by the Dmanisis team. He said:

This is a fantastic and important discovery, but I don't think the evidence they have lives up to this broad claim they are making. They say this falsifies that Australopithecus sediba is the ancestor of Homo. The very simple response is, no it doesn't. What all this screams out for is more and better specimens. We need skeletons, more complete material, so we can look at them from head to toe. Any time a scientist says 'we've got this figured out' they are probably wrong. It's not the end of the story.

Human baby brains are wired to hear the call of the lemur

NBC News.com

Nidhi Subbaraman

Sebastien Bozon / AFP / Getty Images

When human babies are 3 months old, they pay attention to lemur calls as well as human voices - but the attentiveness to a lemur call fades away by the time they're 6 months old.

Infants respond to the voices of their doting parents — but it's not just human voices that hold them spellbound. In what may be a hallmark of our ancestry, human brains begin life hard-wired to hear the calls of non-human primates, an ability that fades away after just a few months. 

Past studies with infants have shown that deep cognitive wheels are set turning as they listen to human speech. Now researchers have found that sounds from the blue-eyed Madagascar lemur engage their attention, too, in ways that artificial sounds don't.

"The link is sufficiently broad to include the call of this adorable lemur," Sandra Waxman, professor of cognitive psychology at Northwestern University and a co-author on the new study, told NBC News. "The fact that there's this precocious link between language and thought ... it's just hands-down amazing."  

In the first months of childhood, "twin engines of development" — nature and nurture — are at work, Waxman explained. Babies are born sensitive to primate sounds, even from non-humans. When they grow older, they no longer pay attention to the non-human sounds. It's the human voices that stay relevant in their lives. 

'Candy to a baby's ears'Waxman and colleagues studied how 72 infants between the ages of 3 months and 6 months responded to human, lemur and artificial sounds. The babies listened to high-pitched baby talk — "It's like candy to a baby's ears," Waxman said — and similarly high-pitched lemur calls. They also heard human speech played backward, and mechanical tones. 

The difference was clear. "They were doing some much fancier cognitive dancing during the lemur and human vocalization than in the case of backward speech or tones," Waxman explained. 

Babies can't answer questions verbally, and it will be years before they can fill out multiple-choice surveys. So for psychologists, the gaze of babies — where they look, and for how long — is a tried-and-true way of indicating whether they're engaged. 

Project on Child Development/Sandra Waxman/Northwestern University

A 3-month-old at Sandra Waxman's lab at Northwestern University gazes at a blue dinosaur projected on the screen (inset) in front of her.

In the tests conducted by Waxman and her colleagues, 3- and 4-month-olds were shown a series of eight similar shapes — all dinosaurs — projected on a screen in front of them. In the background, one of the four kinds of sounds would play on a loop. Then they were shown an image of a ninth dinosaur, placed next to a dissimilar image shaped like a fish.

"If the baby has noticed what's common about the objects, they're going to prefer this as one over the other," Waxman explained.

The babies who were trained on the first eight images while they listened to the speech played backward or the mechanical tones didn't master the categorization task as easily as they did when they heard the human or lemur sounds. That indicates that the babies were less engaged in the task while they were listening to the artificial sounds. 

The babies who were 6 months old exhibited a different trend: They seemed receptive to the human voices, but not to the lemur calls. That suggests that they lost their sensitivity to the non-human primate sounds because they were hearing human voices all the time. 

Having established that babies can be sensitive to the lemur sounds, Waxman and her colleagues are working on refining their understanding of the qualities of lemur calls and human voices that attract an infant's attention, and finding out what other kinds of sounds — primate or otherwise — can bring out a similar response. 

Meanwhile, a second study at Waxman's lab is investigating whether babies can retain their ability to engage with lemur calls and human voices, if their parents play them the lemur calls at bedtime every day.

Cuantos atomos tiene un humano de 70 kg

microsiervos

El físico Enrico Fermi, además de su contribución al desarrollo de la primera boma atómica, era conocido por su afición a plantear problemas que en principio parecían irresolubles pero que a fuerza de irlos descomponiendo en otros más simple a menudo era capaz de solucionar con una precisión bastante razonable, por lo que son conocidos como problemas de Fermi.

Un problema de este estilo es el de calcular cuantos átomos hay en un cuerpo humano, y a fuerza de calcular el peso de cada uno de los elementos que lo componen basado en su porcentaje y sabiendo cuantoss caben ese peso es posible estimar que un cuerpo humano está compuesto por 6,7 * 10^27 átomos de hidrógeno, oxígeno, carbono, nitrógeno, calcio, fósforo, cloro y potasio. [Fuente: El tercer precog.]

Huge foreheads, flat faces and saucer-like eyes: How the human face might look in 100,000 years

Mail Online

Just as the human face has evolved considerably since stone age times so it is expected to keep changing in the future.

Today the human brain is three times the size of our primate ancestors. As our brains grew so did our heads get bigger, our skulls expanded and our features became flatter.

Now with the advent of wearable technology, such as Google Glass, how will our heads and faces evolve in 20,000 years, 60,000 years and even 100,000 years from now?

100,000 years: The human face will have evolved to be proportioned to the 'golden ratio,' with unnervingly large eyes featuring a sideways blink

2013: A typical man and woman

This was the question posed by artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm from MyVoucherCodes.co.uk when he quizzed Dr Alan Kwan, who holds a PhD in computational genomics from Washington University in St Louis. 

Based on their discussions Lamm has created a stunning series of images which display one possible evolution for the human race over the next 100,000 years.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337804/Huge-foreheads-flat-faces-saucer-like-eyes-How-human-face-look-100-000-years.html#ixzz2cRGpATb0

Teaching a robot to anticipate human actions

KurzweilAI

By Amara D. Angelica

“Hey, you spilled my last beer!” “Sorry, Frank, Kinect crashed.”

A robot that anticipates your actions (credit: Robot Learning Lab, Computer Science Department, Cornell University)

Why can’t a robot be like a servant (to paraphrase My Fair Lady)? You know, one who would anticipate your every need — even before you asked?
The folks at the Personal Robotics Lab of Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell assistant professor of computer science have gone and done just that.
When we last (virtually) visited the lab, we learned that the roboticists taught  “hallucinating” robots to arrange your room for you, and before that to pick up after you, These are important robot skills if you’re disabled, for example — or you live in a dorm.
Now they’ve taken the next step: they’ve taught a Cornell robot to foresee a human action, the person’s likely trajectory, and what it needs to do to help the person. Let’s say you’re walking toward a refrigerator carrying something with both hands; the robot could open the door for you (as shown in the video below).
Anticipating human actions
Understanding when and where to open the door (or when and how to pour a beer, also in the video) can be difficult for a robot because of the many variables it encounters while assessing the situation. But the Cornell team has created an elegant solution.

(Left) Robot’s video view. (Next) Heatmap of objects. (Next) Heatmap of trajectories (Right) Robot opening the door (credit: Robot Learning Lab, Computer Science Department, Cornell University).

For starters, the Cornell robot has access to a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera and a database of 3D videos. The robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene, and determines how those uses fit with the activities.
It then generates a set of possible trajectories or continuations into the future — such as eating, drinking, cleaning, putting away — and finally chooses the most probable. As the action continues, the robot constantly updates and refines its predictions.
“We extract the general principles of how people behave,” said Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research. “Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it.” The robot builds a “vocabulary” of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognize a variety of big activities, he explained.
In tests, the robot made correct predictions 82 percent of the time when looking one second into the future, 71 percent correct for three seconds, and 57 percent correct for 10 seconds.
“Even though humans are predictable, they are only predictable part of the time,” Saxena said. “The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its action. Right now we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond.”
This is amazing research, getting us closer to the robot butler in Robot & Frank and countless other science-fiction stories.
The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation and Microsoft.
Saxena will join Cornell graduate student Hema S. Koppula as they present their research at the International Conference of Machine Learning, June 18–21 in Atlanta, and the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, June 24–28 in Berlin, Germany.

rss Anticipation

Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist

follow the money

http://rt.com/usa/news/intelligence-stanford-years-fragile-531/

Ever can’t help but think you’re surrounded by idiots? A leading scientist at Stanford University thinks he has the answer, and the bad news is things aren’t likely to get any better.

Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford, has published a study that he conducted to try and identify the progression of modern man’s intelligence. As it turns out, however, Dr. Crabtree’s research led him to believe that the collective mind of mankind has been on more or a less a downhill trajectory for quite some time.

According to his research, published in two parts starting with last year’s ‘Our fragile intellect. Part I,’ Dr. Crabtree thinks unavoidable changes in the genetic make-up coupled with modern technological advances has left humans, well, kind of stupid. He has recently published his follow-up analysis, and in it explains that of the roughly 5,000 genes he considered the basis for human intelligence, a number of mutations over the years has forced modern man to be only a portion as bright as his ancestors.

“New developments in genetics, anthropology and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile,” he writes in part one of his research. “Analysis of human mutation rates and the number of genes required for human intellectual and emotional fitness indicates that we are almost certainly losing these abilities,” he adds in his latest report.

From there, the doctor goes on to explain that general mutations over the last few thousand years have left mankind increasingly unable to cope with certain situations that perhaps our ancestors would be more adapted to.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2000–6000 years ago. The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.”

According to the doctor, humans were at their most intelligent when “every individual was exposed to nature’s raw selective mechanisms on a daily basis.” Under those conditions, adaption, he argued, was much more of a matter than fight or flight. Rather, says the scientists, it was a sink or swim situation for generations upon generations.

“We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” he writes. “If selection is only slightly relaxed, one would still conclude that nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of 3,000 to 6,000 years ago.”

———–

are we are smarter than 6000 years ago?..they had great minds who could read the stars and knew maths..they made pyramids back then..we cant copy that now to that sort of precision..we had to use our minds for everything to live and survive..we have better technology now but whats that mean for human brain development?..i think hes probably correct..

Human Sapienome Project: The 100YSS

Human Sapienome Project, complement to the 100YSS (credit: Photo Wall)

By Martine Rothblatt

Dr. Martine Rothblatt suggests inviting the entire world’s population on-board the 100YSS by uploading, at no cost, their mindfiles — a 1 TB (or less) digital file of an individual’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values — into a central database that will be carried onboard the starship. Presented at the 100 Year Starship (100YSS) 2012 Public Symposium Sept. 13–16, 2012 in Houston.

Daedalus starship (credit: David Hardy)

In 1985 We Are the World, the first-ever multi-platinum single, got tens of millions of people singing “There is a choice we’re making; we’re saving our own lives.” [1]. These words may never apply to a project more meaningfully than to the 100 Year Starship (100YSS), intended to “make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system to another star a reality over the next 100 years.”.

Digital size of a person

Research from several groups show that a digital file of a person’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values can be represented by less than one terabyte (1TB) of structured information [2] [3] [4] [5]. This is because a limited number, n, of human universals, m, yield millions of unique human combinations via (n!)/(m!*(n-m)!).

Add to this a few gigabytes of unique memories and you can account for the billions of diverse human mindsets, notwithstanding a very modest toolkit of building block characteristics.

For example, a megabyte of information about one’s daily experiences amounts to under 20 GB of information in 50 years. That daily megabyte is adequate to handle all of one’s tweets, texts and emails plus some compressed photos, audio and video. Combined with structured answers to personality inventories [5] and socio-cultural contextual information, a TB is ample space to provide a comprehensive digital reflection of your consciousness, known as a “mindfile.” The vast majority of information we store is redundant.

Websites exist that collect video streaming of an individual’s daily interactions. While such video streams can rapidly exceed many terabytes in volume, they far exceed the amount of information needed to accurately reflect a person’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values. Advanced versions of pattern recognition software will be able to abstract from such continuous digital records such information as uniquely contributes to a mindfile. These pattern recognition based-abstracts are unlikely to require more than a TB of storage, especially when intelligently structured.

Digital size of all human mindfiles — the “Human Sapienome”

Digital memory of approximately 10²² bytes, the size of all human mindfiles in aggregate, what should be called the human “sapienome,” will be available within 20 years at less than 1% of the likely weight and cost of the 100 YSS. Ten billion people, times one trillion bytes, yields 10²² bytes.

The Project Daedelus starship, either in its original British Interplanetary Society version or in subsequent self-replicating conceptualizations, had a payload mass of on the order of 500 tons [6]. Orion Starship designs of Freeman Dyson had estimated costs ranging from a tenth 10% to 100% of 1968 US GNP [7].

The past five decades of relatively steady, 18-month doubling rates in constant cost for digital memory is not expected to change over the coming decades, due to economic demand, competition and the availability of three-dimensional traditional and novel computing substrates [8].

Hence, by exponential growth, today’s terabyte of memory will become a giga-terabyte of memory in 45 years. Ten such memory modules would hold a ten billion person human sapienome at that time. Alternatively, a few thousand mega-terabyte modules could contain the human sapienome about 30 years from now.

A terabyte today costs around $100 and weighs about 0.5 kg. These numbers are not significantly different from lesser amounts of memory in years past, and are considered by Ray Kurzweil to remain constant or shrink with exponential growth [8]. Hence, 45 years from now, the mass and cost of the human sapienome on a 100YSS would be insignificant. Even 30 years from now, the mass would be a few thousand pounds and the cost about $1 million. This represents less than 1% of the mass and cost of the starship.

Universal access to information technology needed to create a mindfile is at hand. Already three-fourths of the world’s population has a mobile phone, about one-fourth of which are smartphones capable of full mindfile creation capabilities.

Specialized websites to create mindfiles, such as LifeNaut.com and CyBeRev.org, as well as more generic websites that can also be used to create mindfiles, such as Google+ and Facebook, are free to the public.

Virtually every human being will be able to freely create a mindfile, as smartphone ownership becomes all-but universal over the next decade (with shared access to one for individuals in deep poverty). Hence, there are neither economic nor technological barriers to the creation of a human sapienome.

Activation of mindfiles with consciousness operating system software, or “mindware”

It may well be feasible to activate the individual mindfiles within the sapienome with consciousness operating system software, known as “mindware.” This would enable all participating members of the human race to be digitally present, via software agent extensions of themselves, and interfaced with sensors upon arrival at the 100 YSS destination.

However, even if such mindware activation is not possible, the entire human race can still be conceptually — and in a sense spiritually and philosophically — “present” at the interstellar destination by virtue of their mindfiles being present onboard the starship.

As noted above, dozens (n) of mannerism, personality and feeling types (m) yield many thousands of unique human combinations via (n!)/(m!*(n-m)!).

Once you add to these thousands of personality and worldview templates differential recollections, beliefs, attitudes and values (within the terabyte of mindfile information), there are many billions of unique possible combinations of human psyches, one of which will be a best-match for digitally stored mindfiles of each 100YSS participating biological person.

Mindware best fits one of the “m” compound mannerisms, personality and feeling types to that analyzed from stored mindfiles, and then populates it with the recollections, beliefs, attitudes and values evident from that stored mindfile. These combinations and correlations can be accomplished with software that needs be nowhere near the complexity of synaptic connectivity of the human brain, and yet still appears as true to the original person as to persuade others, and their digital self, that the same personal identity is present, albeit via a digital extension.

In the last century people became accustomed to the notion that electro-acoustic waves via telephony represented a biological original person. In the coming century, an analogous association is likely with digital simulacra of unique conscious minds.

Keep reading on kurzweilai >>

Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man

babalublog

By Carlos Eire

Another liberal plot to take over the world has been leaked to the press.   Get this: a superior but extinct humanoid race is about to be unleashed on the world by Harvard University.

And, as we all know, since all intelligent human beings are liberals, breeding these ultra-brainy beings who once roamed much of the earth will mean the extinction of conservatism.

Yeah.  Wow.  Never mind what Darwin said about survival of the fittest.  Imagine the laws these beings could enact!  Utopia, here we come....  out with the gun-totin' , bible thumpin' trailer trash.

With proper funding from George Soros and the NSF, this breeding program might actually turn out to be the crowning glory of  President Obama's second term.  Rumor has it that women are lining up at Harvard to take part in this noble experiment.

Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man - Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby

* Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA
* His ambitious plan requires a human volunteer willing to allow the DNA to be put into stem cells, then a human embryo

By ALLAN HALL and FIONA MACRAE, Daily Mail

They're usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species. So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby?

Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life.

Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago.

His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church’s ambitious plan requires a human volunteer.

He said his analysis of Neanderthal genetic code using samples from bones is complete enough to reconstruct their DNA. He said: ‘Now I need an adventurous female human. ‘It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done.’

Professor Church’s plan would begin by artificially creating Neanderthal DNA based on genetic code found in fossil remains. He would put this DNA into stem cells.

These would be injected into cells from a human embryo in the early stages of life.  It is thought that the stem cells would steer the development of the hybrid embryo on Neanderthal lines, rather than human ones.

After growing in the lab for a few days, the ‘neo-Neanderthal’ embryo would be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother – the volunteer. Professor Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology who helped initiate the Human Genome Project that mapped our DNA.

He says Neanderthals were not the lumbering brutes of the stereotype, but highly intelligent. Their brains were roughly the same size as man’s, and they made primitive tools.

He believes his project could benefit mankind.

Read more HERE.  Prepare to be fascinated...

But, wait a minute...  maybe the Harvard professor is not the first to go down this daring route?   What if someone beat him to the punch around 87 years ago?   Startling proof of such an experiment is offered below:

Smarter than all other humans, and smart as the Devil:  Super Sabio! Inteligentisimo! El seso maximo! Sabelotodo supremo!

Darwin in Space: How Multigenerational Missions Could Shape Human Evolution

scientificamerican

Listen Here >>

“New environments inside this starship, for example, new radiation environments, whatever the gas composition is that people are breathing, whatever is the gravity field, those basic environmental conditions will reshape the human genome.”

That’s Cameron Smith. He’s an anthropologist at Portland State University who studies human evolution and prehistory. But he’s also very interested in the human future, including how space travel will impact the human race—both culturally and biologically. He wrote an article on the subject in the January issue of Scientific American, called “Starship Humanity.” He recently talked by phone with John Matson, host of our 60-Second Space podcast, about what might happen to a spacefaring humanity if we really were to take a star trek.

John Matson: This article that you’ve written for Scientific American, maybe you can just give us a brief overview of what the article is about.

Cameron Smith: You bet. So far the experience of humanity in space has been very limited. We have gone up for short periods of time, we’ve gone in very small numbers. But as space access becomes cheaper and more people start going up, eventually we’re going to have communities, we’re going to have populations of people up there. And then it shifts, our understanding of that is going to have to shift from purely biology to anthropology. These will be communities of people, and of course communities are cultural and they’re also biological. So anthropology marries culture and biology. And it will be used to help us plan out successful space colonization.

JM: Let’s say, just to set a scenario, a group of space travelers sets out on a multigenerational voyage to Alpha Centauri, where we now know that there is an exoplanet. What’s going to happen to these people on the way?

CS: Well, we can only predict that change will occur. We can make some predictions about some very few biological changes that might occur. But because mutation is random, and mutation is the origin of new characteristics in populations, because that is ultimately random, it’s not entirely possible to say precisely what will happen. What we can say, though, is that new environments—for example, new radiation environments, whatever the gas composition is that people are breathing, whatever is the gravity field inside this starship—those basic environmental conditions will reshape the human genome. Subtly, subtly, but they will reshape it.

We know that we have evolved under almost 15 pounds of pressure per square inch at sea level. And in the last few thousand years, though, some people have migrated to higher elevations, where they are under somewhat less pressure. Their biology has changed to account for that, or to make it possible to live there. They have different blood oxygen levels, they have deeper chests with greater what is called lung ventilation, greater capacity for breathing in and taking in oxygen. And even the biology of the developing infant is somewhat different. And I am certain that exactly the same sort of thing, on that same magnitude, will happen in off-Earth environments.

JM: What about weightlessness? Do we have any sense of what that would do to human physiology in terms of stature or size of human beings?

CS: Weightlessness is a big issue, and 30 years of almost continuous presence of humans in space—this is quite amazing—whether in Mir or the International Space Station or other stations, for 30 years somebody has been in Earth orbit almost continuously. What they have learned through that long period is that, yeah, weightlessness can have some pretty detrimental effects. Bone loss is one of them. Muscle is also reduced, but bone loss is a big one.

And so, I don’t think we’re going to try to do long-term space colonization in free-floating zero gravity. So we’ll go to places like Mars where there is one third, roughly, the gravity of Earth, and I think we’ll build these things that rotate and give us artificial—well, they give us gravity by rotating. You saw it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the rotating space station. That works, and I think we’re going to be doing that for a much longer time than trying to actually live in zero or very small gravity.

But yes, it will have effects on the physiology as well. I was thinking of course in Mars, at one third, roughly, gravity, essentially in evolution, essentially if you can get away with something that costs less energy to do than your sibling, you have a selective advantage. And on Mars if you don’t require all of the muscle that a person does on Earth, where you have an extra two thirds gravity, then presumably you live in better health and have more offspring. So in the long term on Mars I think we will eventually see a lighter, lither build than on Earth.

JM: So the image of those spindly little green men is maybe not too far-fetched.

CS: Maybe so.

JM: Now, do we have a sense of how quickly these changes start to happen?

CS: The time scale for significant biological changes—yes, you can get them in a few centuries. You can start to see effects on the physiology in a number of centuries. This is the timescale that I’ve been working with. For example I’m in contact with a group in Germany called Icarus Interstellar. They’re devising propulsion systems to reach stars on the scale of several centuries. So I’ve been thinking about that scale as well—what kind of changes would we see in that kind of time frame? And some basic population genetics calculations that I’ve done, that concern what’s called time-to-fixation, and this is the spread of novel genes in a population.

And this suggests that yes, within a few centuries you could have changes on the order of different skin hues, or altered skin colors, different hair textures. But radical reshaping of the human body, for example. major stature differences or even new anatomical structures, those should take much, much longer. Those should take into the many thousands of years.

JM: There’s definitely a perception, especially in this country, in the U.S., that space exploration is on pause, that it’s ground to a halt. I happen to disagree with that, but it’s clear that no one is going to Alpha Centauri tomorrow. So why is it important to consider all these things now? Why is it important to think out all the implications of what space travel might mean?

CS: It’s absolutely important to start now because there’s so much to do. I mean, if we’re talking about long-term voyages, we’re talking about again, understanding things that we are just barely understanding today. For example, we have only in the last two decades got a high-resolution understanding of the human genome. And that helps us to understand human evolution, and evolution, it cannot be stopped. The only way to stop it is with extinction. And evolution of humanity is going to continue in space. And to prepare for it—again, you could do it without anthropology, but I don’t think it would survive. I don’t think it would work. So to do it with a good expectation of success, we need to think in long term. Well, what is the field that has given us a long-term understanding of humanity? That’s anthropology. Biology, relatively short-term, although it deals with evolution. But humanity, human evolution is somewhat different from most other evolution. And it's anthropology that has explored that. So, I think anthropology is going to be central to this.

JM: So as the physicists and engineers are working on propulsion systems and cosmic ray shielding, this is something that anthropologists should be working on in parallel, you believe?

CS: I believe absolutely we need to build an anthropology of space, an anthropology of space colonization. We know if we're going to spend generations in space that you have to prepare for the long term. Again, we think of it as people pop up there and they come back down. And the long-term view is, no, eventually, this will be migration. And this is part of the goal. Even just a few years ago NASA had a Vision Report that they released, which said that the essential mission of NASA was to better life here on Earth, to extend life there, that is, move some part of humanity to be able to live off of earth, and to find life beyond, that is exobiology. The interesting thing there is that in common in all three of those, what is common about those, it's not computers, it's not the technology, you need all of that, but what is common about those three statements is that it's about life. It's about living things. And living things change through time by evolution, and it's anthropology that has understood human evolution.

JM: You have a fairly recent book out about evolution.

CS: I have a book out now, a Popular Science book about human adaptation and space colonization, and in that my co-author and I are sketching out, it's an exploration, we're sketching out some of the kinds of ways that anthropology can assist us in making a success of space colonization. But right now I'm working on a technical book, it'll be a couple of years down the line, that again brings everything pertinent known from anthropology to the concept of space colonization, and hopefully that can be a foundation for a space anthropology.

JM: Now just to sort of wrap things up here, aside from the physics and the engineering of the actual spacecraft, what do you think will be the biggest challenge facing either the people who are putting together a crew for a long-duration spaceflight, or for the crew themselves?

CS: Well, one critique of this whole endeavor of space colonization and space activity by people in general is that, well, this isn’t going to fix humanity. We’re just going to transport our ancient problems off of the surface of the Earth. Well, I think so. Yeah, this isn’t meant to fix humanity. It is meant to give humanity an insurance policy. If the Earth is hit by a catastrophe, at least someone is left, if we are a several-planet species, for example.

The biggest challenge, I think they’ll be both biological and cultural. We don’t know how reproduction works in space. We also have to be very careful—we can’t just be ready to go and colonize space once we understand human biology in space and human evolution. We have thousands of plant and animal domesticates that are going to have to go with us. We can’t be eating canned food for generations. We have to ensure the health of those populations as well. That is why, you asked before, why start now? Well, there is a tremendous amount to do to think about all this.

So what will be the challenges? They will be both biological and cultural. We will have biological evolution happening—some of it will be painful. Much of that evolution will play out on those early stages of development. And there will be an increase, let’s say, in infant mortality. We’ll also have our same cultural baggage. We have ethnic rivalries, we have political differences, we have religious issues. I don’t think that’s going to go away. We should certainly take our best nature with us, but those things are rather ancient, and I think those will be as big a challenge as the biology.

Cameron Smith’s book, co-authored with Evan Davies is titled Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization. And Smith’s article "Starship Humanity" is in the January issue of Scientific American. A short preview is available free on the Web site, titled "How Humans Will Evolve on Multigenerational Space-Exploration Missions."

That’s it for this episode. Get your science news at our Web site, www.scientificamerican.com, where you can check out the In-Depth Report about Humanity’s Enduring Fascination with the Apocalypse. The so-called Mayan apocalypse is just the latest in a long line of doomsday predictions. And, ironically, it will not be the last. And follow us on Twitter, where you’ll get a tweet whenever a new article hits the Web site. Our Twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American’s Science Talk, I’m Steve Mirsky, thanks for clicking on us.

Being Human: What Does It Mean To You?

ForaTv

Laurie Santos: Understanding the Origins of the Human Mind

Uploaded by ForaTv

 

El visor 3D del cuerpo humano de Google vuelve como Zygote Body

Microsiervos

Google Body, la aplicación web que permitía indagar las interioridades del cuerpo humano en 3D y uno de los muchos servicios de Google que desapareció del mapa, ha vuelto renombrado como Zygote Body.
Zygote Media Group ha utilizado el código original de Google Body para construir Zygote Body, que funciona en Firefox y Chrome.
Mas >>

Super Humans [Dcoumentary]

Top Documentary Films

Throughout history, the forces of evolution and genetic mutation have endowed humans with astonishing new abilities and features. It’s a process that continues to this day, and nowhere is it more evident than in the fascinating world of Stan Lee’s Superhumans. Co-hosted by Stan Lee, the legendary creator of the X-Men, the series scours the globe for the real-life counterparts of Lee’s characters–people with unique genetic traits that translate into remarkable powers.

These include a man whose body is powerfully magnetic, another who can withstand deadly levels of cold and yet another whose brain performs complex calculations at staggering speeds.

In each episode, these superhumans undergo tests that may help explain their amazing gifts, while viewers discover the long history of people with extraordinary powers.

Daniel Browning Smith, who’s been dubbed the most flexible man in the world, hosts this thrilling journey into the farthest reaches of humankind.

Not smarter, only bigger!

By Kate Kelland | Reuters – Wed, 27 Jul, 2011
LONDON (Reuters)

People from northern parts of the world have evolved bigger brains and larger eyes to help them to cope with long, dark winters and dim skies, scientists said on Wednesday.
Researchers from Oxford University studied the eye sockets and brain capacity of 55 human skulls from 12 different populations across the world and found that the further human populations live from the equator, the bigger their brains.
It's not because they are smarter, however, but because they need bigger vision areas in the brain to cope with the low light levels at high latitudes, the scientists said in a report of their findings in the journal Biology Letters.
"As you move away from the equator, there's less and less light available, so humans have had to evolve bigger and bigger eyes," said Eiluned Pearce from Oxford's School of Anthropology, who led the study. "Their brains also need to be bigger to deal with the extra visual input.
"Having bigger brains doesn't mean that higher latitude humans are smarter, it just means they need bigger brains to be able to see well where they live."
The skulls used in the study dated back to the 1800s and included samples from indigenous populations of England, Australia, Canary Islands, China, France, India, Kenya, Micronesia, Scandinavia, Somalia, Uganda and the United States.
The researchers plotted the volume of the eye sockets and brain cavities against the latitude of the central point of each individual's country of origin and found that the size of both the brain and the eyes could be directly linked to the latitude of the country.
Oxford's Robin Dunbar, who also worked on the study, said the results showed the speed at which humans had evolved to cope with the challenges of new habitats.
"Humans have only lived at high latitudes in Europe and Asia for a few tens of thousands of years, yet they seem to have adapted their visual systems surprisingly rapidly to the cloudy skies, dull weather and long winters," he said.
The researchers said that from measuring the brain cavity, the study suggested the biggest brains belonged to populations who lived in Scandinavia, and the smallest belonged to Micronesians.

The Body Machine

ShifinYutub01

The Body Machine is a landmark special on the human body that shows us just how much, how many, how large, how strong, how fast – just how amazing the body really is.
Utilizing impressive large-scale real-life stunts, CGI and strong character stories, the show makes the staggering scale of the inner workings of the body tangible.
It will show you how far our blood travels in just one day – an astounding 19, 000 km – from Quebec City to Buenos Aires and back.
You will see all the cranial fluid you produce in your lifetime laid out in front of you – all 26,280 pint glasses worth. And in just one day you will take 23,000 breaths – enough air to fill 7,714 helium balloons. You will see all this and much more.

Did Neanderthals Believe in an Afterlife?

By Jennifer Viegas

Evidence for a likely 50,000-year-old Neanderthal burial ground that includes the remains of at least three individuals has been unearthed in Spain, according to a Quaternary International paper.
The deceased appear to have been intentionally buried, with each Neanderthal's arms folded such that the hands were close to the head. Remains of other Neanderthals have been found in this position, suggesting that it held meaning.
Neanderthals therefore may have conducted burials and possessed symbolic thought before modern humans had these abilities. The site, Sima de las Palomas in Murcia, Southeast Spain, may also be the first known Neanderthal burial ground of Mediterranean Europe.

FULL STORY