Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind

Show menu Hide menu

Tagbiohacking

The Food Free Diet

March 18, 2013 /

Rob Rhinehart

Rob Rhinehart claims that for the past two months he’s eaten very little food. Many days he didn’t eat food at all. No, he’s not a breatharian. He’s invented a concoction that he claims has all the nutrients necessary to sustain him. He calls it “Soylent.” Yes, that sounds disgusting, but he claims it’s delicious.

This past month 92% of my meals were soylent. I haven’t given up food entirely, and I don’t want to. I found if I wake up early I sometimes crave a nice breakfast, I’ve gone to lunch meetings, and on the weekends of course I love eating out with friends. Eating conventional food is a fun leisure activity, but come Monday I usually have a strong craving for a tall glass of Soylent.

Full Story: Rob Rhinehart: Two Months of Soylent

How I Stopped Eating Food

Vice interview

Rhinehart claims to be doing “trials” people. But if you want your hands on this stuff now, a blog post listing the nutritional content makes it sound not unlike a typical meal replacement shake or the mass gainers used by body builders.

This could be a hoax. Rhinehart hasn’t posted the recipe for the drink. He has posted some blood work, but he that could, of course be faked.

Anti-Doping In Sports: The New Front In The War On Drugs

January 17, 2013 /

Brian Alexander writes:

If you’re like most Americans, you watched the Tour de France for about five minutes, and cheered when Armstrong won. You know a little about his cancer charity, and that he dated a pop star. And that’s about the extent of emotional energy you’ve expended. Since I’ve written a lot about doping in sports – and delved into how anti-doping agencies like the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) conduct business – I’ve expended a lot more energy on your behalf.

So here’s the thing you need to know: The USADA takedown of Armstrong matters, and it could effect everybody. Because it will enhance the power and reach of a private, non-profit business that has managed to harness the power of the federal government in what’s quickly becoming a brand new war on drugs … with all the same pitfalls brought to you by the first war on drugs. […]

In an eerie echo of the tactics used by the American House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare days, the Australian agency issued a call this past November “to anyone involved with, or has information about, doping activity in the sport of cycling to come forward and talk before someone else accuses them of doping.” If you talk first, you can get credit for snitching. If you wait, well, who knows what somebody else might say about you?

Wired Playbook: Why Lance Armstrong’s Confession Should Make You Worry

See also: Hacking your body: Lance Armstrong and the science of doping

The Biocurious DIY BioPrinters

October 8, 2012 /

Biocurious InkJetBioPrinter

bioprint petri dish

The Biocurious biohacker lab in the San Francisco Bay Area (Sunnyvale, specifically) is working on a couple of DIY bioprinters, InkJetBioPrinter and the HackteriaBot.

They’re built out of old CD-ROM drives, recycled ink cartridges and a open source Arduino boards. So far I think they just print bacteria? From the InkJetBioPrinter page:

We’ve disassembled an abandoned HP 5150 inkjet printer for use as a bioprinter. So far, we’ve pried open some ink cartridges, filles the black cartridge with arabinose, printed the BioCurious logo on filter paper, put the paper on a lawn of pGLO E. coli, and watched our logo light up in GFP!

Check out some pics on our Flickr group here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bioprinter

Next, we want to start printing live cells, starting with E. coli. We’ll probably print the cells on a sheet of filter material and put it onto an agar plate, or pour a thin, dense layer of agar on a support material, and feed that into the printer directly. We’ll see…

(via H+ Magazine)

Shannon Larratt Interview On The DIY Transhumanist/Grinder/Biohacker Movement

October 1, 2012 /

BME founder Shannon Larratt was interviewed by io9 about the grinder/biohack movement:

Making a wristwatch implant would actually be quite simple. The electronics need to be as small as possible of course. Even though implants can be quite large (a single double-D breast implant has more volume than many laptop computers at this point), if the implant is kept thin it will be inconspicuous, perhaps even undetectable without touching it. So the wristwatch would be built with surface mount components in a tight package. The LEDs would easily be visible through the skin — it’s quite possible that some small backlit panels could be visible through the skin but simple round or bar-shaped LEDs would be my choice for a watch.

One could do a numeric display, a geeky binary display, or even just use a single light and flash the time with morse code. You’re probably not going to leave the light on all the time in order to preserve the battery, but triggering could be accomplished in many ways. An accelerometer could be used to trigger it with a specific arm motion, a pressure switch could respond to touch, or in my case, or a magnetic switch could respond to me waving my finger over it — there are many options, but whatever is chosen would have to be versatile enough to also allow the time to be set.

Finally — and this is the biggest issue — there’s power. You could have yourself cut open have the battery replaced — but there’s no need for that. Inductive charging is easy to build, and wireless chargers are commonplace these days — personally I would include such a circuit.

Full Story: io9: What does the future have in store for radical body modification?

Update: Here’s the full, uncut transcript of the interview
Previously:

Short Documentary On The DIY Bodyhacking/Transhumanist Underground

World’s First Eyeball Tattoo

Shannon Larratt Leaves BME

Short Documentary On The DIY Bodyhacking/Transhumanist Underground

August 10, 2012 /

kevin warwick

The Verge did a short documentary, and a piece of long form, participatory journalism, on the DIY transhumanist/bodyhacker/grinder/whatever movement:

The boys from Grindhouse Wetwares both sucked down Parliament menthols the whole time we talked. There was no irony for them in dreaming of the possibilities for one’s body and willfully destroying it. “For me, the end game is my brain and spinal column in a jar, and a robot body out in the world doing my bidding,” said Sarver. “I would really prefer not to have to rely on an inefficient four-valve pump that sends liquid through these fragile hoses. Fuck cheetahs. I want to punch through walls.”

Flesh and blood are easily shed in grinder circles, at least theoretically speaking. “People recoil from the idea of tampering inside the body,” said Tim. “I am lost when it comes to people’s unhealthy connections to your body. This is just a decaying lump of flesh that gets old, it’s leaking fluid all the time, it’s obscene to think this is me. I am my ideas and the sum of my experiences.” As far as the biohackers are concerned, we are the best argument against intelligent design.

Neither man has any illusions about how fringe biohacking is now. But technology marches on. “People say nobody is going to want to get surgery for this stuff,” admits Cannon. But he believes that will change. “They will or they will be left behind. They have no choice. It’s going to be weird and uncomfortable and scary. But you can do that, or you can become obsolete.”

Full Story: The Verge: Cyborg America: inside the strange new world of basement body hackers

(via Grinding)

See also:

Transcending the Human, DIY Style

DIY transhumanism on the cheap

One in four Germans wants microchip under skin

Archive by Subject

Archive by Date

© 2024 Technoccult

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑