Robot skin made of organic and inorganic materials

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Thin skin will help robots 'feel':

"Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch. The team manufactured a type of 'skin' capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature.

"These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed.

"The University of Tokyo team describe their work in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

"The researchers explain how pressure-sensing and temperature-sensing networks can be laminated together, forming an artificial skin that can detect both properties simultaneously....

"The transistors used in the circuits and the semiconductors both use 'organic' materials based on chains of carbon atoms."

Genbot, coming soon to a theatre near you

Genbot Warps to New Line| FilmStew.com:

"Angela Robinson, who directed Disney's Herbie: Fully Loaded to over $63 million at the domestic box office, has signed with New Line Cinema to helm the Genbot, an action-comedy she pitched to the studio with co-writer Alex Kondracke. According to Daily Variety, Robinson will receive seven figures to direct, co-write and produce the project through her Pink Thunder production banner.

Robinson and Kondracke's pitch centers on a young woman who gets mixed up with a secret government operation that slowly transforms her into a cyborg."

1960s cyborg anime coming to DVD! Yes! Yes! I am so excited!

Nostalgia wave sees '60s 'anime' hits going DVD | The Japan Times Online :

Please, please Santa (I've been sooooo good), I want a set for Christmas!

"Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a sales segment of Walt Disney Co. (Japan) Ltd., and Toei Animation Co. jointly launched three monochrome cartoon DVD series from March to May, including the internationally popular 'The Cyborg Soldiers,' or 'Cyborg 009' in Japanese, which was first released in Japan in 1964."

Cyborgs in the news at the Hartford Courant

Group envisions high-tech humans - 08/14/05:
William Weir reports briefly on comments by James Hughes, executive directory of the World Transhumanist Association:

"HARTFORD, Conn. -- Sitting in his office at Trinity College, James Hughes explains his vision of a family gathering a couple of hundred years from now: One family member is a cyborg, another is outfitted with gills for living underwater. Yet another has been modified to live in a vacuum.

'But they will all consider themselves as descendants of humanity,' he said."

Weir notes that political scientist Francis Fukuyama, "recently nominated transhumanism as the 'world's most dangerous idea' in Foreign Policy magazine. His fear is that enhanced versions of the human being will threaten the sense of equality that societies have been working toward for centuries."

Oh no! Here comes Captain Cyborg again | The Register

Oh no! Here comes Captain Cyborg again | The Register :
Intrepid journalists at The Register are reporting a new siting: Kevin Warwick, cyborg at Reading University, is promoting his latest book QI: the Quest for Intelligence.

"Talking about the new book, Warwick also hinted at a new 'experiment'. We can hardly wait. 'Intelligence is what puts humans in our position,' he said. 'If there is something more intelligent than us, it would take over. We can't trust politicians and the military on this.'

Dr Neil Gascgoine responded that he felt Kev has been 'frightened by an episode of Star Trek' when he was younger. He continued that the book was all about how you can't define intelligence and that his 'manic fear' that machines would take over were 'not justified'. The discussion turned to ethics. Prof Warwick said that we were looking at the issue through human ethics and morals, whereas machines will have different morals and ethics - and hence will happily go about killing us.

'What a strange way to think about it,' replied Gascgoine, before announcing that Kev's stance was a 'wholly unwarranted, unsupportable position'."

James Cameron to make a 3D cyborg movie for 2007

Battle Angel scheduled for realease by 20th Century Fox in 2007 | Coming Soon! - Latest News:




Battle Angel will be based on based on the Japanese Manga series of graphic novels Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro. The movie combines the first three books, Ido, Alita, and Hugo.





Cameron explains the gist of the story:

"26th century, the story takes place 300 years after a societal collapse caused by a major war, but in that society, it's a technological dark age following a pinnacle of achievement far, far beyond where we are right now. So in a sense it's post-apocalyptic, but it's post-apocalyptic from a very high level. So now, you've got cyborg technology as just a way of life. People are augmented a lot as workers and so on, so being a cyborg is not unusual. The main character is a cyborg. She has an organic human brain, and she looks like she's about fourteen years old. She has a completely artificial body and she's lost her memory- she's found in this wreckage and she's reconstituted by this guy who is a cyber-surgeon who becomes her kind of surrogate father. It's a father-daughter relationship story that just has the most insane action that you can imagine. It will be PG-13 -- lots of blood, but it's all blue.'"