Implants Have Traded in Their Batteries For Wireless
One of the problem with medical implants is that you have to power the damn things. Batteries are used but once the implant is inside your body, it’s kind of a pain to replace the batteries. Also, as anyone that has designed an electric car can tell you, batteries are bulky.
Implants got a little better with Stanford University engineers demonstrating an implantable cardiac device that doesn’t need batteries. Their device runs on radio waves that are transmitted to the device from a small transmitter outside the body. This will allow engineers to further miniaturize implants once battery space isn’t an issue, helping to remove one of the major hurdles in designing implants.
Ada Poon from Stanford headed up the research. This is the same person who last year gave us a wirelessly powered, device capable of swimming through the bloodstream.
At Thought Rot, we believe in, and are waiting for Kurzweil’s Singularity
Thanks to Ada Poon and Stanford, we inched a little closer to that Singularity.
In case you don’t know about the coming Singularity, it is time where technology allows us to transcend the limitations of our current minds and our biology. Wikipedia describes it as, “The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means”. This includes living forever and a bunch of other cool stuff. I highly recommend reading Kurweil’s book. The theory is based on accelerated, exponential growth and it shows how the Singularity is just the natural progression of evolution that has be in the works with the same mathematical model since the first single celled organisms on Earth. If you follow that model out into the future, we find amazing, life changing technological advances are coming within our lifetimes. These changes are going to change everything. Personally, I have no plans to ever die and I think that is a realistic expectation.
Yeah I know… call me crazy. I’m not the only one though. Ray Kurzweil has a large following of Singularity believers.
His next book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, is scheduled for release on November 13, 2012
