Longevity science

Computer chips and silicon micromachines are ready for your body. It’s time to decide how you’ll take them: implantable, ingestible, or intimate contact. Every flavor now exists. Some have FDA approval and some are seeking it. Others are moving quickly out of the research lab stage. With the round one Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize entries due in one year, we’re soon to see a heavy dose of sensors tied to the mobile wireless health revolution.

With these sensors comes a heavy dose of information about your health, data about what medication you are taking and when you took it. The sensors are available to protect your health, but choosing how to use them and how to protect the privacy of your data will be a matter of personal responsibility.

There may soon be help for people who have been rendered functionally deaf by problems of the middle ear. Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology have developed an implant that bypasses the defective middle ear, transmitting sounds to the inner ear by sending vibrations right through the skull bone.

How do you power an implant? Surgical battery replacement is undesirable...

Ada Poon, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, and doctoral candidates Sanghoek Kim and John Ho have demonstrated that it’s possible to construct a super-small implantable cardiac device the size of a 1.6 millimeter-wide cube.

The device uses gigahertz-frequency radio waves that can power extremely small devices five centimeters (1.96 in) inside the chest on the surface of the heart – a depth once thought impossible.

You probably don’t give a lot of thought to squid beaks, but they actually possess a pretty interesting quality. While the end of the beak is hard and sharp, the beak material gradually becomes softer as it nears the mouth. This means that there’s no abrupt boundary between the hard beak and the soft mouth, which could result in discomfort or injuries. Inspired by the squid, scientists at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University have now developed a material with the same qualities, that could be used to create more comfortable, less harmful medical implants.

The natural squid beak is composed of a nanocomposite material, made up of “a network of chitin fibers embedded within increasingly cross-linked structural proteins from mouth to tip.” While that gradient is present even when the beak is dry, it’s particularly apparent when it’s wet – and squid beaks tend to be wet a lot.

A new moisture-proof sensor has been developed, to monitor cerebral pressure that can lead to dementia. It was created by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering IBMT in St. Ingbert in Germany.

Scientists don’t know why cerebral pressure suddenly increases in certain people, but they do know that it disrupts blood circulation, leading to parts of the brain dying off as happens in a stroke. The condition is so common that it could be the cause of up to 10 percent of cases of dementia in Europe.

A neural prosthesis has been shown to restore the decision-making ability in monkeys.

The prosthetic device was developed by researchers from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, the University of Kentucky and the University of Southern California. It incorporates an array of electrodes, which is capable of both measuring the electrical impulses made by individual neurons, and of stimulating those neurons.