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Category Archives: Cyborg

FBI needs your help snaring 'Cyborg Bandit'

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The FBI has dubbed this bank robber the Cyborg Bandit. Can you guess why? Here hes pictured robbing a Bellevue Key Bank on Sept. 24. (FBI photo)

OK, it is Halloween, but this guy isnt trick-or-treating. At least not in the normal sense.

The FBI has dubbed this bank robber the Cyborg Bandit for obvious reasons.

They say he has robbed at least four different banks in the past two months, most recently in Bothell on Oct. 23. Hes also hit banks in Woodinville, Shoreline and Bellevue.

Hes described as white, between 5-feet-9 and 6 feet tall, with a thin build. Despite the getup, theres nothing bionic about him.

During the robberies, the FBI says hes covered his face with a distinctive cloth and worn the hood of his sweatshirt over his head.He has also worn clear latex gloves.

Anyone with information on Cyborg is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).Callers may remain anonymous and are eligible to receive a cash reward of up to $,1000, according to the FBI.

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FBI needs your help snaring 'Cyborg Bandit'

Cris Cyborg expects Invicta FC return in January

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Cristiane "Cyborg" Justino captured the Invicta FC featherweight title in a four-round domination over Marloes Coenen last July, and shes looking to return to the cage in January 2014. The opponent and the weight class are yet to be determined.

"This is the last fight in my contract with Invicta FC, and they asked me if I can fight in January," Justino told MMAFighting.com. "I dont know who Im fighting next, but Im fighting in January.

"They asked me if I would accept a fight at 155 pounds, and I said I would. I just want to fight. At 145 or 155, Ill fight whoever they give me. But I dont know if Ill defend the title in my next fight."

Invicta FC has never done a lightweight bout in their previous six events, and the seventh show, planned for Dec. 7, includes only one featherweight clash -- and again, zero lightweight contests.

Featherweights Julia Budd and Charmaine Tweet are both coming off three stoppage victories, but "Cyborg" believes its unlikely that she puts her title on the line against the winner of that bout.

"I dont think Ill fight the winner of this bout because theyre fighting in December, so I dont believe the winner would be ready to fight me in January," she said. "Who knows? It might happen, but I think its unlikely."

Justinos three-fight deal with Invicta FC ends in her next bout, and shes willing to sign a new deal with the promotion.

"This is the last fight of my contract, but Im really happy at Invicta FC, and I believe Ill sign a new deal," she said. "I like them, and theres simply no other place to go. UFC has womens division, but they dont have my weight class. I believe Ill sign a new deal with Invicta FC after this fight."

Signing a new contract with Invicta FC doesnt mean "Cyborg" forgot the idea of fighting UFC bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey, though.

"I really wanted to fight Ronda Rousey in a catchweight bout, but UFC doesnt want to do this fight," she said. "It wouldnt be interesting to them because I would go there, beat the crap out of her and return to Invicta. It would be bad for the UFC and they know that, and thats why they dont want this fight."

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Cris Cyborg expects Invicta FC return in January

The Cyborg Foundation: we urge you to become part-machine

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Moon Ribas and Neil Harbisson from The Cyborg Foundation urged the audience at Pioneers Festival to consider experimenting with cyborgism.

Both Ribas and Harbisson use technology to extend their perceptions. Harbisson, who was born colourblind, has developed a tool involving a head-mounted camera and bone conduction audio, to turn the colours of the world into sounds.

"I was born completely colourblind and always wanted to extend my senses and perceive what colour is," he said. He mentioned the critical culture role that colour, for example with things like Yellow Pages, the Pink Panther, James Brown and countries like Greenland. He showed how the flags of France, Ireland and Italy look identical to him and how frustrating it was when trying to navigate colour-coded maps, such as London's Tube Map.

With his Eyeborg device, he can transform the world around him (as viewed through a webcam) into sound. "Each colour has a specific note," he explained. After wearing the device for many years, his brain "got used to hearing colour and now it's an extra sense". He can even now perceive infrared and ultraviolet.

One of the benefits of this approach is that now every object, painting, scene or even someone's face can become a piece of music. He can walk through the supermarket and hear a symphony. "I can dress as a song," he said, pointing out that his garish tie actually corresponded to a piece of music he liked. "I can now compose music with food. So you can create a specific song [using different coloured ingredients] and eat your favourite song."

"My sense of beauty has changed. Beauty doesn't depend on the shape of someone's face but on the combination of colours," Harbisson explained. "You might look beautiful but sound terrible!"

Similarly Ribas, a choreographer, wanted to augment her senses in some way. She started by developing a device -- Kaleidoscopic Vision -- that allowed her to perceive colour but not shape. But she realised that colour wasn't as important to her, so wanted to investigate movement. Her resulting Speedborg device embedded in earrings used infrared to monitor how quickly people were moving around her. The speed at which bodies shifted was relayed to her with a vibration motor. She also added a sensor to her back to produce 360-degree perception.

After the Speedborg, Ribas experimented with creating a Seismic Sense that would allow her to perceive seismic activity around the world, by linking up to a website that monitors such earthly movements. "Every time there is a small earthquake it makes a little vibration in my arm. I can tell if it's small or big," she said.

The duo concluded their talk by defending cyborg rights: both managed to convince the passport offices (of the UK and Spain) to allow them to feature their equipment in their ID pictures. "It's an extension of my sense and so it should be included. So they allowed me to be photographed with my electronic eye," explained Harbisson.

The pair also believes that cyborgism may help us identify with other species, such as animals that have senses like bone conduction (dolphins), the ability to perceive ultraviolet (insets) or have antennae.

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The Cyborg Foundation: we urge you to become part-machine

Cyborg Cockroaches For Kids? Get The Christmas List Ready

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View of giant cockroaches (Blaberus giganteus) on display during an exibition at the Explora Park in Medellin, Antioquia department, Colombia on February 5, 2013. This species, usually found in tropical forests of South America, prefer high humidity and low light habitats, live about 20 months and are omnivorous. (credit: RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/Getty Images)

DETROIT (WWJ) Cockroaches arent on the typical childs Christmas list, but an Ann Arbor company is hoping to change that with a cyborg device meant to turn the creepy crawlers into scientific entertainment they can control with a smartphone.

Backyard Brains has developed a Kickstarter project, the RoboRoach,that allows one to cut live cockroaches and implant electrodes to control the insects movements. One hundred and eighty three people have pledged $12,339 exceeding the $10,000 goal to fund the project.

Its like a remote-controlled car in the body of a live bug, the game Operation writ large. But the creators want it to be taken seriously, with Greg Gage saying his product advances the study of neural circuits, allowing students to make scientific discoveries.

Twenty percent of the world will have a neurological disorder with no known cure and so what we are trying to do is get kids interested in neuro-science at an early age and and we can actually capture those kids and turn them into neuro-scientists and actually help us cure these diseases, said Gage.

PETA doesnt see it like that.PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is crying fowl and believes the RoboRoach kit should be declared illegal. PETA counsel Jerrod Goodman claims it promotes the practice of veterinary medicine without a license by altering an animal from its normal condition.

This cruel and inhumane product instructs children to, without anesthesia, send down various parts of a living cockroachs body, Goodman said in a statement Tuesday. They stab a syringe through the animal, force electrodes into the animal, and superglue apparatuses to the inside and the outside of the cockroachs body.

According to Backyard Brains website, The RoboRoach circuit is not a toy, but a tool for studying neural circuits and allows for students to make discoveries about electrical micro-stimulation.

Cockroaches are intelligent animals, they have learning and memory capacities, Goodman said. They have sophisticated social lives with each other and they can feel pain. Its not okay to pull the wings off of flies and its not okay to teach children to torture and mutilate cockroaches. You can hate and dislike someone all you like, but it doesnt make it okay to torture them.

According to Backyard Brains website, the cockroaches are anesthetized and the purpose of their product is to enable better retention of neuroscience concepts compared to traditional book based teachings.

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Cyborg Cockroaches For Kids? Get The Christmas List Ready

Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu ADCC 2013 World Absolute Champion and Beats Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida – Video

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Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu ADCC 2013 World Absolute Champion and Beats Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stuart-Cooper-Films/297651150246415 https://twitter.com/stucooperfilms http://www.stuartcooperfilms.com/ Brought to you Maluko...

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Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu ADCC 2013 World Absolute Champion and Beats Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida - Video

BJJ Scout Bsides: Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida vs Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu ADCC China 2013 +99kg Final – Video

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BJJ Scout Bsides: Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida vs Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu ADCC China 2013 +99kg Final
1080p for better quality. : Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida vs Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu ADCC China 2013 +99kg Semi-Final. Go to bjjscout.com for ADCC Day 1 and Day 2 Review. Go to http://www.bjjscout.co...

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BJJ Scout Bsides: Marcus "Buchecha" Almeida vs Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu ADCC China 2013 +99kg Final - Video

Turn Fido into a K9 cyborg

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I am back where Im supposed to be, and my tracker is in power save mode.

That is the opening line of an email I receive multiple times a day from Saggio, my 3-year-old German Shepherd. No, he has not yet learned to type or use the Internet. (Hes not that smart.) Instead, his comforting correspondences come courtesy of Tagg, a small, Apple-white gizmo that attaches to his collar. I doubt he even knows its there. And he certainly has no clue that its getting in touch with people on his behalf. But there it is my dog now sends emails.

Like FitBit, or any number of other fitness trackers available for humans, Tagg keeps tabs on various aspects of its users life specifically, how much exercise Saggio receives each day and where the hell hes wandered off to. But unlike human gadgets, Tagg provides more than just bits of data for obsessed pet owners like myself to pour over it gives him a way to communicate with me that has never before been possible.

My dog has, in other words, become a cyborg. And Tagg and other similar products are only the beginning.

Big furry business Over the past 30 years, Americans have become mad about their pets. More than 74 percent of U.S. households purposefully share their dwelling with another species, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. Thats up from 56 percent in 1988, by the American Pet Products Associations (APPA) count. Some 55.7 million households have at least one dog, and 45.3 million have a cat (or 10) sulking around. We have, in total, 218 million pets in the U.S. not counting fish. My house, for example, is currently occupied by two humans, one dog, three cats, and one ball python a relic from my bachelor days that keeps my ophidiophobic fiance from going anywhere near my home office.

- Tagg CEO Scott Neuberger

The U.S. Department of Labor calculates that American pet owners spent $61.4 billion on our pets in 2011 more than what we spent on booze that year a number that some expect to rise by as much as $2 billion every year. Whats more, the money we spent on our pets was one of the few non-essential expenditures that remained consistent throughout the Great Recession, at about 1 percent of our total income.

Tagg is but one of an increasing number of technology companies tapping into that revenue stream. Theres FitBark, and Whistle, both of which monitor a dogs activity similar to Tagg. There are RFID chip-activated doggy doors. Smartphone-activated pet food feeders and webcams. Pet treadmills. Robotic litter boxes. Remote-controlled gophers. Automatic laser toys. And collars that let your pets post tweets to Twitter. The bevy of pet technology may seem absurd but it should surprise no one considering 63 percent of us view our pets as full fledged members of the family not animals at all, but people.

Theres this over-arching trend thats sort of dominated the whole industry for a bit of time now, this term humanization of the pet, says Tagg CEO Scott Neuberger. Theyre as close to human as they can get. In every way, were turning them into humans.

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Gregory Berns, author of How Dogs Love Us and a neuroeconomics professor at Emory University, asserts that the theory that dogs are humanlike may have a scientific foundation. Using MRI scanners, researchers discovered for the first time that dogs brains function surprisingly similar to our own so similar, in fact, that Berns argues for granting dogs limited personhood a sentiment with which many dog owners already agree, Im sure.

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Turn Fido into a K9 cyborg

How close are we to full-fledged cyborgs?

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HALF MAN, HALF MACHINE: Joel Kinnaman stars as the titular character in the 2014 remake of the seminal cyborg classic, Robocop.

The dream of the cyborg is coming true at an exhilarating rate.

As humans gets better and better at making machines, we keep attaching those machines to our bodies to make ourselves better humans.

It seems at times that the only question left is if we can put a human brain in a robotic frame. Actually, it's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when.

This week, social psychologist Bertold Meyer's been travelling around the country with a contraption that looks like a cross between a Halloween mask and Johnny Number Five.

It's the subject of a new documentary by the Smithsonian Channel called The Incredible Bionic Man.

Meyer makes for a great spokesman, since he was born without the lower part of his left arm and now wears a bionic prosthesis. He is, by definition, a cyborg - but only partially.

So just how close are we to a fully formed cyborg? And even more curiously, what will it look like?

WHAT IS A CYBORG?

Let's take a second to agree on what exactly it means to be bionic and what it means to be a cyborg.

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How close are we to full-fledged cyborgs?

The petting zoo full of ROBOTS: Cyborg animals with light-up tentacles have 'personalities' that react to touch

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The artificially-intelligent creatures have the capacity to learn and explore behaviours through interaction with humans The animals show 'emotions' when touched, by moving, lighting up and making sounds and evolve their behaviours over time Petting Zoo is the latest work by two brothers who make up the Minimaforms studio and is on show in France

By Sarah Griffiths

PUBLISHED: 05:48 EST, 21 October 2013 | UPDATED: 05:50 EST, 21 October 2013

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A petting zoo featuring light-up 'cyborg creatures' instead of the usual rabbits and miniature goats has opened in France.

The robotic animals have bright, flexible tentacles and react when touched, much like a living animal, as each arm has features and 'personalities' that change according to the activity of visitors.

The interactive exhibition, created by a British architecture and design studio, intends to make visitors question how future environments could enable new forms of communication.

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The petting zoo full of ROBOTS: Cyborg animals with light-up tentacles have 'personalities' that react to touch


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