superpowers in the animal kingdom
Here are some great animal traits that I think would be great to emulate, either biologically or technologically. Add to the list!
1. Sharks. They have the best electrosensory systems, able to detect faint bioelectric signals several miles away. They use organs called the ampullae of lorentzini. This would pretty much make the magnetic finger implants obsolete. (On a slightly related note, it seems that sharks can be repelled by neodymium magnets)
2. Bats. Sonar.
3. Pit vipers. Heat vision.
1. Sharks. They have the best electrosensory systems, able to detect faint bioelectric signals several miles away. They use organs called the ampullae of lorentzini. This would pretty much make the magnetic finger implants obsolete. (On a slightly related note, it seems that sharks can be repelled by neodymium magnets)
2. Bats. Sonar.
3. Pit vipers. Heat vision.
Comments
Also, you might be interested in Noisebridge's project to build a haptic ultrasound/echolocation sensor. I wonder how hard it would be to develop something that is to that as the Southpaw is to the Northpaw. Also, heat vision is, for everyday objects, equivalent to infrared vision, so the two problems are equivalent. Of course, many nocturnal mammals can see infrared, so...
@Firedust: The Southpaw project is effectively an attempt to replicate the magnetoreception of birds.
Humans can already indirectly detect polarized light, through an effect called Haidinger's brush, but, yeah, it certainly would be great to be able to detect it directly.
While we're listing "animal superpowers," wouldn't it be great to have the range of vision of an eagle? Those things can see the ground fairly clearly high in the air.
Also, some animals (mostly herbivores) have eyes on the side of their head, thus increasing their field of vision at the expense of 3D vision. The most extreme example is the rabbit, which has a near-2-pi-radian field (hands up if you got that), with almost no 3D vision. But wouldn't it be great to have a sort of "tetranocular (four-eyed)" vision, so that we could combine a 360-degree field of vision with 3D vision over that entire field? And while I'm speculating, I wonder what would happen if you had three eyes' fields overlapping, instead of just two. Two gives you 3D vision, but I wonder what three would give you...
@Ian: I like the haptic ultrasound project. It wouldn't too different from the southpaw.
We don't really have 3D vision; our brains are just bloody good at solving parallax equations. Nemogrinds has posted a method for widening one's field of view in another thread. (I have an easy and reversible one; if I replace my glasses with contacts, I get an extra 20 degrees either side. Integrating that involves a LOT of twitching.)
Flies have 5 eyes; if you've ever wondered why it's so hard to catch one, now you know why. ",)
Those ultrasound rangefinders are being rapidly refined in robotics work; a feedback mechanism is possible, but implanting would mean figuring out how to get ultrasound waves out (and back in) through the skin. The field of view of the readily-available ones are quite narrow - the strategy is to keep sweeping them to generate an proper field of view in front of the platform.
You know, the implanted sonar might be a good project for L to do after it's done with the Southpaw...
And, how many of us that are willing to endure the "OOO GROSS WTF DIDJOO DO DAT 4 EW EW EW" of society really care about the reaction to having four eyes, anyway?
I wouldn't go for extra eyes. I have enough vunerable spots as it is, thank you.
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Iirc humans have magnecite nodules in the bridge of the nose too. Shouldn't be too hard to strengthen.
Electic Eels generate electricity in their electrocytes, which I hear are relatively similar to muscle cells. Of we could just a few of these in our muscle tissue then powering implants would be a whole different ballgame.
Cellular regeneration in nature is achived via stem cells. Humans create stem cells when fetal. Could this capability be reactivated?
I can't find the academic papers, but apparently a research group or two has powered electronics via ATP, which would solve power issues essentially immediately, so long as you stayed inside the body's power budget. And if the photosynthesis thing in another thread could be made to work and produce ATP, that would raise that limit...
The device is built so that it lets in the nutrients needed for the stemcells to divide without letting any stem cells into the blood stream. I do not know if there was any fail-safe should the capsule be destroyed, but apparently they were had a safe plan for human trials, so..
The company had gotten some sort of non-competition research patent essentially ensuring nobody manoeuvred them out until their research passed the critical point where it could be used outside the lab. Don't know what that's called..
//edit, of original topic, sorry.
This means that every sense imaginable can be wired to us, with today's technology, if we solve three problems. The first is miniaturization, which I remember L having trouble with at first with the Southpaw. The second is bioproofing, for obvious reasons.
The third may be a little more challenging. It has to do with the fact that certain forms of input wouldn't work under the skin. For example, let's say that we decided to give ourselves the ability to sense UV light by implanting UV sensors attached to electrodes. Our skin isn't transparent to UV light, because of a pigment in our skin called melanin. Other senses would suffer from the same problem. To get around this, from what I see, would require that we either:
a) figure out how to do things transdermal. We know from L's experience that it's not nearly as straightforward as it sounds, but if we could find a way to do it properly, we could simply point the sensor out of the skin, and put the attached electrode in the skin.
b) rather than sensing the object in question directly, try instead to sense the indirect effects of that object. For example, when UV hits your melanin, the melanin darkens (that's what it's "programmed" to do). We could then hypothetically rig a sensor that will detect when the melanin darkens, and send a signal as a result (ok, that's actually a bad example, since the darkening of melanin is more of a long-term thing. But you get the idea).
I'll give an example--strong electroreception. We already have a sense of weak electroreception; that's given by the magnets. Strong electroreception, for those who don't already know, is basically the principle of echolocation applied to electricity, creatively enough called "electrolocation." The "ampulla" sends out a weak current, and then measures the field around it as a result of putting out that current. All it would really take is to make a small machine which sends out current (which would be almost trivial), and connect it to an electrode. The electrode will tell us when the "ping" was sent out, and then the neodymium magnets would measure the field. This sense would probably work much better in salt water than in air (which is why sharks have it and we don't), but it would still be awesome. Plus, you could use it to measure the electric field inside another person while you shake their hand. How cool would that be?
The problem, again, is that this sense probably requires transdermal contact points or an indirect way to do this. Thoughts?
That paper's method involved attaching the transdermal component to the bone....