Tag: body

Imagine this: You are a waitress in a busy restaurant. As you’re taking orders at a new table, one man turns to you with his eye glowing red.

Do you…

A) Involuntarily drop something as you realize that you are staring into the face of a seemingly indestructible humanoid cyborg sent to assassinate you and expect, when you look up, to lock eyes with a handsome stranger sitting at the bar who, though you don’t know it yet, is likely a soldier sent from the future to protect you at all costs, one who will make love to you like it’s 1984, giving you a son destined to lead humanity in a war against the machines? Or,

B) Struggle not to look at his eye. Politely ask, “What would you like to order, sir?”

If you’re waiting tables in Toronto, the answer is 100 percent B, which should surprise no one. (Insert stereotype about Canadian politeness.)

Rob Spence, a man with a glowing red eye, learned this firsthand in May at a dinner out in the city. It’s impossible to know how Spence would’ve reacted had the Toronto waitress responded with option A, though we can say that he would’ve agreed with at least one of its premises: he is a cyborg.

Eyeborg

When he was 9 years old, Rob Spence shot his eye out. He was in Ireland visiting his grandpa when a shotgun he’d aimed at a pile of cow dung reared back and smashed into his face, damaging his right eye so badly that he was declared legally blind, despite having a healthy left eye and some remaining vision in his right.

Now 44, the Coburg, Ontario, resident has combined his interests as a documentarian and his prosthetic eye and created something new: a tiny wireless video camera capable of recording what he sees.

Spence first looked into eye cameras about a decade ago, when his damaged eye began to swell and his cornea started deteriorating. Doctors told him he would have to replace it. The recording prosthetic device’s first iteration—built in 2008 after collaboration with camera makers, engineers, and tech partners—contained a radio frequency micro-transmitter not connected to the optic nerve that allowed him to record others, even though he was not able to see out of it directly.

Spence continues to only use the eye camera for special projects—that is to say, not for keeping track of his every waking moment. Red LED light alerts others when the eye camera is recording, which it can only do for half an hour before sputtering out of battery.

Even though Spence has referred to himself as “Eyeborg,” and his laser-looking eye brings out pretty obvious comparisons to the Terminator, people’s willingness to acknowledge his physical differences directly IRL depends a lot on the setting.

“In this city, people are very polite, and don’t want to call attention to my eye,” Spence told Motherboard, referring to Toronto, where he was attending a robotics and high-tech prostheses conference. “But in Brazil, for example, they wanted to engage with me.”

The Singularity

When I hear the term “the singularity,” I just think of The Matrix, which is probably another way of revealing to all of you that I am the type of person who shields herself from as many technological advancements as possible. Unlike me, however, many futurists are deeply invested i
n the singularity and have a lot of ideas about what defines it.

The singularity, according to some science-fiction and technologically inclined thinkers, is the future of our world: when man and machine become one. As Annalee Newitz puts it for io9, it is “the moment when a civilization changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations.”

Hal Hodson, writing for New Scientist, defines it as “a date in the not-so-distant future when machine intelligence outstrips our own and goes on to improve itself at an exponential rate.”

Once these swift but profound technological and scientific advancements take place, so say some future-thinkers, societies and all they are comprised of—human bodies, families, governments, economies—will be irreversibly transformed. As you can imagine, the singularity as it’s referred to today hints at a time when artificial intelligence will become linked to human intelligence—or overtake it entirely—in a way that is now only barely conceivable. But do experts believe this is plausible?

Not all of them, at least not in the way portrayed in…basically, any sci-fi movie that came out after 1999. Danko Nikolic, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, describes himself in his LinkedIn profile as an “AI [practitioner] and visionary … foremost interested in i) closing the mind-body explanatory gap, and ii) using that knowledge to improve machine learning and AI.” He doesn’t believe that the dramatic depictions of AI taking over the world will come to pass.

“You cannot exceed human intelligence, ever,” Nikolic said in 2016 before an audience of artificial intelligence researchers in Berlin. “You can asymptotically approach it, but you cannot exceed it.”

Bionic Humans Who Live Among Us

Singularity or no singularity, some people have already coalesced with technology. Along with Spence, many individuals—who call themselves biohackers, cyborgs, and grinders—have chosen to implant their bodies with external objects that they believe will improve their quality of life.

Take, for example, Zoe Quinn, a developer in the independent video game world who had a computer chip and a tiny magnet implanted in the tip of her left ring finger. In 2015, she wrote for Vice about exploring her implants’ capabilities. “Sometimes it’s just noticing things around you that you wouldn’t otherwise—like feeling subways pass under you, or being able to sense if a plug-in adapter is actually working or not,” she writes. “Sometimes it’s incredibly useful, like when I’ve had to reset circuit breakers in dark basements with just enough of a magnetic field around the switches for me to detect which one isn’t getting any power.”

Changes like these diverge from typical body modifications in that they are primarily about function—but that they appeal to cyborgs on an aesthetic level is clear.

“It felt like I’d put my hand against a can of something really carbonated,” Quinn told NBC News about one of the first moments after her wound had healed, as she worked on a game on her computer about two weeks after getting the implants. “I realized, oh my God, I’m feeling my hard drive. I can feel this whole new dimension of the tools I use to make my art. It was beautiful.”

Actually, Are All Of Us Cyborgs?

People who get gadgets surgically inserted inside their bodies may seem extreme to those of us who occasionally have nightmares about getting the wrong tattoo, but biohackers can argue that they are not so different from the rest of us. They’ve just taken the fact that we are already steeped in technology into more literal, expedient terms.

There are also self-proclaimed cyborgs who skipped the implants altogether. Isa Gordon, who considers herself an academic of the cyborg movement, has done performance art that explores “creative cybernetics” while wearing sensors that show her heartbeat on her sleeve. (According to Merriam-Webster, cybernetics is “the science of communication and control theory that is concerned especially with the comparative study of automatic control systems […e.g.] nervous system and brain and mechanical-electrical communication systems.”)

“When you send an email, you are engaged in a system of control of communication between man and machine,” she told NBC News. “It’s not necessary to hack into the body to become a cyborg; we are all cyborgs already.”

Say goodbye to your treadmill.
Soon, deadlifts and rowing machines will be a thing of the past. Don’t even start talking about burpees—in the future, a “burpee” will be something that happens on the way back from the fridge during an all-week binge-watching marathon.
Sound great? If you hate exercise or if you simply don’t have time to hit the gym on a regular basis, we may have some good news.

Researchers from the Salk Institute recently unveiled an “exercise pill” in a study published in the journal Cell Metabolism. The drug appears to offer many of the health benefits of regular exercise, according to a press release announcing the study.
“We previously activated the pathway in mice through genetic engineering,” said senior author Ronald Evans, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, “and discovered that doing so turned the animals into long-distance runners, and they gained many of the health benefits of exercise.”

The “long-distance runners” bit might have been hyperbole, but the Salk Institute team’s findings are impressive. Their exercise pill has a brilliant mechanism of action, and if it’s proven effective, it may greatly expand scientific knowledge of how exercise affects the human body.

The drug appears to work by activating a gene pathway designated as peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor delta (PPARD).

This pathway may be responsible for endurance during periods of heavy physical and mental exertion.

“It’s well known that people can improve their aerobic endurance through training,” said senior author Ronald Evans, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and holder of Salk’s March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology. “The question for us was: how does endurance work? And if we really understand the science, can we replace training with a drug?”
The PPARD pathway seemed to offer a pharmacological mechanism for replicating the effects of exercise. Mice that took the drug burned more fat and were able to exercise for longer than the control group.
“This study suggests that burning fat is less a driver of endurance than a compensatory mechanism to conserve glucose,” said Michael Downes, a Salk senior scientist and co-senior author of the paper. “PPARD is suppressing all the points that are involved in sugar metabolism in the muscle so glucose can be redirected to the brain, thereby preserving brain function.”

In other words, the “exercise pill” prevented muscle fibers from using sugar as an energy source.

Instead, the muscles burned fat—notable, since muscles typically prefer to burn sugar. This process is basically what happens when a person exercises, as the same gene pathway gets activated.
“Exercise activates PPARD, but we’re showing that you can do the same thing without mechanical training,” said Weiwei Fan, a Salk research associate and the paper’s first author. “It means you can improve endurance to the equivalent level as someone in training, without all of the physical effort.”

There are a couple of important caveats. The study notes that the mice that took the exercise drug didn’t exhibit all of the physiological changes that typically accompany aerobic exercise; they didn’t build more blood vessels, for instance, and they didn’t develop muscle fibers to burn fat rather than sugar.
But that changed somewhat when the mice remained active after receiving the drug. Overall, the test subjects enjoyed most of the health benefits associated with exercise, including better insulin responsiveness and greater resistance to weight gain.

Mice are not humans, obviously, and the drug has a long way to go before it can be safely used by humans. However, the team behind the study believes that their drug could be extremely useful from a therapeutic perspective.

So, will athletes be able to use this as the next performance-enhancing drug?

Not likely. The Salk Institute team sees their drug as a potentially useful medication, but they don’t intend to replace exercise entirely.

“The drug will provide the most benefit for people who are physically unable to exercise due to other health conditions, like having [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], being elderly, or wheelchair-bound,” said Downes.
Of course, if the drug is safe for humans, Downes understands its potential for abuse, and he’s ready to burst your bubble.
“We realize athletes may want to take this drug for a competitive advantage, but it’s really meant for people who simply don’t have the option of exercising.”

Still, the implications are tremendous. If effective, the pill could help patients recover from surgeries or help people with severe weight issues restore their health.
The medication probably won’t be available for therapeutic use for many years. In the meantime, we’re stuck with exercise.

The Department of Health and Human Services recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week, along with strength training, which is particularly important for adults over the age of 30. If you want to increase weight loss and improve your overall health, aim for at least 300 minutes of activity. Ideally, you should also reduce periods of sitting and try for at least 30 minutes of activity per day.
Alas, exercise is hard work. For the time being, there’s no magic pill to replace it—but that might change sooner than you’d think.

When I found out I was expecting my first child, I knew I wanted to breastfeed, but I had no idea what I should expect. Even though I read up on the basics and stocked up on nursing pads, lanolin, and mother’s milk tea, when my daughter was born and the time came for me to start feeding her, I quickly realized how little I actually knew about breastfeeding.

Today, I have three kids who have all been breastfed. I certainly have a handle on the basics; I have years of round-the-clock feedings to thank for that. Still, I am constantly learning more remarkable—and frankly weird—facts about breastfeeding.
Even as a seasoned nursing mom, I am always in awe of my body’s ability to keep my children well fed for the entire first year their lives.

Think you know everything about breastfeeding? Think again. Here are 10 weird things no one tells you about breastfeeding.

1. The composition of breast milk is customized for your baby

Babies eat roughly the same amount of breast milk from the day of their birth until 6 months of age, when moms typically introduce some solid foods. However, what a baby needs from their mother’s milk changes on a daily—if not hourly—basis.

Amazingly, a mother’s body is able to respond to those needs by changing up the composition of breast milk.
For instance, milk produced during sleeping hours contains higher levels of human milk nucleotides, which are believed to induce sleep in infants, according to one study published in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience.

Remarkably, when babies nurse while they’re sick, their backwash is believed to make its way into your body, signaling your milk to adapt to fight infection, according to Science News.

2. Breastfeeding has a calming effect on Mom.

We have all heard the ways breastfeeding benefits the baby, but the benefits this practice has on Mom aren’t as well known.

For starters, the act of breastfeeding is believed to have a calming effect on the mother. Letdown (release of breast milk) is triggered by an increased presence of the hormone oxytocin.
This hormone is also known for increasing feelings of love and attachment and reducing feelings of anxiety.

In fact, increased oxytocin levels caused by breastfeeding are believed to decrease [linkbuilder id=”3565″ text=”postpartum depression symptoms”] in many moms, according to a study published in the journal Breastfeeding Medicine. It may even make Mom feel so chill it borders on drowsiness.

3. Newborn babies can crawl to their first meal

The breast crawl isn’t a myth. If given the opportunity, most brand new babies will literally crawl up their mother’s abdomen to the breast for their first meal.

Researchers believe that moms’ breasts emit an odor right after birth that is attractive to their baby.
In fact, some research suggests that the breast secretes a smell that bears an uncanny resemblance to amniotic fluid and that this odor guides the baby on their crawl to the breast.

If you’re an expectant mom, request immediate skin-to-skin contact for at least the first hour after your baby is born to up your chances of witnessing this phenomenon firsthand.

4. Most moms have a lazy breast.

If you’re a mom who has breastfed and you’ve ever suspected one of your breasts is underperforming, you are probably right. Parenting forums are jammed packed with tips and tricks for increasing milk production in a single breast, but the truth is, most moms have a breast that simply doesn’t keep up as well.

Of course, this can be annoying for both Mom and Baby, but in most cases it’s nothing to worry about. The causes of lower milk production on one side can be attributed to anything from normal anatomical differences to the mother or the baby preferring one side, according to Kelly Mom.

5. Moms’ breasts have a built-in baby thermostat.

In many hospitals, if a baby is born with a low basal body temperature, it has long been a conventional practice to separate mom and baby, putting the newborn under a warmer until their temperature rises to a healthy level.

As it turns out, this practice may be completely unnecessary, because mothers’ breasts seem to have a built-in baby thermostat. Research published in the journal Birth indicates that during extended skin-to-skin contact, the breasts actually play an important role in regulating newborns’ temperatures.
Add this to the ever-expanding list of the pros of skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth.

6. Your body tells breast milk which viruses to fight.

By breastfeeding your child, you aren’t simply providing them with calories, you are helping to strengthen their immune system. Your breast milk is full of antibodies that are specific to the bacteria and viruses you have been exposed to.

If you get a cold, don’t stop feeding your baby! Your body will create and pass on antibodies specific to that virus, according to La Leche League. Take care of yourself, get plenty of rest, stay hydrated, and nurse on, Mom!

7. Breastfed babies grow into healthy adults.

Okay, so this little tidbit of information is less weird and more amazingly awesome. Protecting your baby from viruses isn’t the only health perk of breast milk. Breastfed babies are more likely to grow up to be healthy children and adults.

In fact, breastfeeding your baby may help prevent chronic illnesses like diabetes and celiac disease, along with childhood asthma and food allergies.

8. Breastfeeding moms actually sleep more than bottle-feeding moms.

It’s easy to assume that moms who bottle feed are able to get more sleep simply because they can pass feeding responsibilities on to their partner during the middle of the night. The opposite is actually true.

If the goal is to clock as many hours of sleep as possible in the postpartum stages, exclusive breastfeeding is a better choice when compared with mixed feeding or formula feeding, since breastfeeding mothers report getting more hours of sleep each night, according to the journal Clinical Lactation.

9. Breastfeeding makes women healthier.

Most mothers know that breastfeeding is believed to set baby up for a healthier adulthood, but did you know it does the same thing for mothers?
Not only does breastfeeding burn a ton of calories, helping you get back into those pre-pregnancy jeans more quickly, but there are also some pretty attractive long-term perks.

Women who breastfeed are at a lower risk for diseases like ovarian and breast cancers. Breastfeeding mothers also have a lower risk of developing osteoporosis later in life.

10. Breastfed babies might grow up to be smarter teens.

If you want to raise a smarty, making breastfeeding a part of your parenting plan is something you should consider. Babies who are breastfed earlier on are likely to have a higher IQ, according to a study published in the journal Pediatric Research.

More research needs to be done, but it seems that breastmilk has unique effects on the white matter of the brain that formula manufacturers have yet to mimic successfully.
Not all moms can successfully breastfeed, and those who do may deal with a painful latch, sleepless nights, or breast infections. If breastfeeding is hard for you, don’t be afraid to make an appointment with a lactation consultant to start troubleshooting the hurdles you’re experiencing.

If in the end you can’t make breastfeeding work for you and your baby, that’s okay! When it comes to baby nutrition, fed is truly best.

Let’s be clear: Hormonal birth control pills are awesome.
They uncoupled passion from pregnancy in a way that men have taken for granted since, well, Adam and Eve. The oral contraceptive pill was an essential building block of the movement for women’s equality and has prevented countless unplanned pregnancies.
Still, as any expert will tell you, oral contraceptives are not 100 percent effective. Few things are. Abstinence, sure, but that’s not realistic for most people. When taken correctly—on schedule, without missing a dose—the pill is 99 percent effective.

But nobody is perfect, and so the pill only has a 91 percent effectiveness rating. Here are a few things you should avoid if you want to stay out of that dreaded 9 percent.

1. Taking a Progestin-Only Pill at Different Times Every Day

The combination hormone pill, which contains both estrogen and progestin, isn’t terribly time sensitive. But some women can’t take estrogen. There’s still a pill for them, but it only contains progestin, which makes it really important that they take the pill at the same time every day.

Progestin-only pills work a little bit differently from their combined cousins. Estrogen/progestin pills both prevent ovulation and thicken cervical mucus. Progestin-only pills just do the second. That—along with thinning the lining of the uterus—is designed to prevent Sperm from meeting Egg.
However, the cervical mucus returns to its natural, sperm-friendly state just three hours after the progestin wears off. That’s why it’s so important to take the minipill at precisely the same moment every single day. Otherwise, as cervical mucus thins out, your risk of pregnancy increases.

2. Combining the Pill With Certain Other Medications, Including Antibiotics and Drugs for Seizures and Migraines

The pill doesn’t necessarily play well with others. Certain medications that treat seizures do so by breaking down hormones faster. When hormones are in charge of preventing ovulation and blocking sperm, you definitely don’t want them broken down faster. (Unless you want a baby.)

A few rare classes of antibiotics, including rifampicin and rifabutin, can mess with your system when you’re on birth control. As with all things health related, talk to your doctor, and be sure to tell them you take oral birth control.

3. Forgetting to Take Your Pill

Now we’ve arrived at the crux of the matter. You can’t expect it to work if you don’t take it as directed. Most women who get pregnant on the pill do so because, well, they weren’t on the pill when they got pregnant. Not practically speaking, anyway.

“For most pills, if you are in the middle or toward the end of your pack you should be fine, but if it is the first day of active pills and you forget to restart, this might be a problem,” Nikki B. Zite, professor of obstetrics and gynecology surgery at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, told Fox News.
“The first week of pills after the placebos are the most important to stop the egg from developing.”

It’s best never to miss a pill. Even the placebos can help women remember to take the pill every day, which is crucial in the early weeks of the pack. But if you skip the placebos, be sure you never miss the first active pills. They are the most critical.
And always keep in touch with your doctors. Ask them about any possible side effects or risks associated with all of your medications. Remember: Birth control doesn’t do a darn thing to stop STDs.