Cloaking Devices

Invisibility has long been a staple in science fiction and fantasy, from 'cloaking devices' on Star Trek spaceships to Harry Potter’s magic cloak.

Researchers recently have demonstrated the ability to guide light around objects, which eventually may result in a practical invisibility technology. When light strikes a surface, some of that light is reflected, some of it is absorbed, and some of it transmitted (i.e., passes through). Most of the visible light that strikes a sheet of glass, for example, is transmitted, and thus glass is transparent.

Cloaking devices must somehow warp space so that incident light rays bend around the object instead of being reflected from it.

Optics is the science of light. Reflection and refraction are the principal means of focusing light with mirrors and lenses. Optical scientists often consider beams of light as bundles of linear rays. Refraction changes the direction of a light ray by virtue of its shape and the fact the speed of light within glass is different from the speed of light in air or on a vacuum.

Yautja technology presumably used some kind of force field to bend light around an object in such a way that it was impossible to see the object itself. A combination of geometry and special materials may help to render these objects virtually invisible to radar. Composite materials and special coatings in the ship's fuselage and wings absorb much of an incoming radar wave.

Active or adaptive camouflage is camouflage that adapts, often rapidly, to the surroundings of an object such as an animal or military vehicle. In theory, active camouflage could provide perfect concealment from visual detection. Active camouflage is used in several groups of animals, including reptiles on land, and cephalopod molluscs and flatfish in the sea. Animals achieve active camouflage both by color change and (among marine animals such as squid) by ounterillumination, with the use of bioluminescence. Military counterillumination camouflage was first investigated during World War II for marine use. More recent research has aimed to achieve crypsis by using cameras to sense the visible background, and by controlling panels or coatings that can vary their appearance.

Special "electrochromic" paints change optical properties with applications of electric currents. Like a chameleon, an aircraft with an electrochromic paint job could be programmed to take the color of the sky or treetops, for example, rendering the plane very hard to see in daylight. Combined with cloaking devices, such aircraft would be extremely difficult to detect visually or by radar.

Active camouflage technology exists only in theory and proof-of-concept prototypes. In 2003, a Japanese scientist developed a coat which appears to make the wearer invisible. The illusion was part of a demonstration of optical camouflage technology at Tokyo University. It is the brainchild of Professor Susumu Tachi who is in the early stage of research he hopes will eventually make camouflaged objects virtually transparent. Tachi created a prototype active camouflage system in which a video camera images the background and displays it on a cloth using an external projector. It's hoped the technology will be useful for surgeons frustrated their own hands and surgical tools can block their view of operations and pilots who wish cockpit floors were transparent for landings.

Phased array optics (PAO) would implement active camouflage, not by producing a two-dimensional image of background scenery on an object, but by computational holography to produce a three-dimensional hologram of background scenery on an object to be concealed. Unlike a two-dimensional image, the holographic image would appear to be the actual scenery behind the object independent of viewer distance or view angle.

In 2011, BAE Systems announced their Adaptiv infrared camouflage technology. It uses about 1000 hexagonal panels to cover the sides of a tank. The panels are rapidly heated and cooled to match either the temperature of the vehicle's surroundings, or one of the objects in the thermal cloaking system's "library" such as a truck, car or large rock.

Interstellar Travel

Warp drive, which enabled the Enterprise to travel the enormous distances between stars quickly via matter-antimatter power generation. While the mixing of matter and antimatter theoretically could generate power for a future starship, we're nowhere near that ability yet. Physicists have theorized that warping space-time to enable faster-than-light travel might be possible; we just don't yet have the ability to generate the incredible amounts of energy needed to try it. Matter-antimatter power generation helped propel Federation starships.

Scientists are seriously looking at concepts such as wormholes, space-time distortions and space drives to achieve interstellar travel. This requires scientific breakthroughs on three fronts: propulsion (specifically propellant mass), speed and energy. Although we do not yet know if these breakthroughs can be achieved, we at least know how to begin making the progress to find out. In a sense, interstellar travel is already happening. The Pioneer 10 and Voyager 1 spacecraft, both launched in the 1970's, have travelled more than 6.5 billion miles from Earth and are on their way out of the solar system. The real question is when it will be fast and easy enough to send the first mission.

The first challenge is propulsion. Unlike aircraft that can thrust against the air, rockets need to bring along their own propellant to push against. By blasting propellant out the back, rockets push spacecraft. The problem is quantity. Propellant needs rise exponentially with increase in payload, destination, or speed. This assumes you are using chemical engines like those on the space shuttle. Even with nuclear fission rockets, ion propulsion, or antimatter concepts, the situation gets better, but not by much. Ideally, we would want to use a space drive that does not need any propellant. A few researchers have begun studying how to achieve this, searching for something else in space to push against, perhaps by pushing against the very structure of space-time itself, or by finding a way to modify gravitational or inertial forces.

A new ion engine smashed the fuel efficiency record. Inventor Patrick Neumann reported the drive could go to “Mars and back on a tank of fuel." (IFLScience.com). Neumann measured the speed of titanium ions released by a pulsed electric arc, similar to an arc welder. The titanium was coming out at 20 kilometers per second [12.4 miles per second] and he thought he could use that for thrust. In subsequent work Neumann proved his hunch right, eventually testing the suitability of 11 materials. One measure of thruster efficiency is specific impulse, commonly called “bounce per ounce,” and is measured in seconds. The existing record is NASA's High Power Electric Propulsion (HiPeP) with 9,600 seconds, but fueled by magnesium Neumann's drive managed an estimated 14,600 seconds of specific impulse. Other metals have lower efficiency, but higher thrust. So you would need more fuel to get to Mars, but could get there faster.

Metal fuels have advantages besides efficiency. HiPEP uses Xenon, and as Neumann says, “Xenon is hard to source away from Earth.” Magnesium is found as olivine in asteroids, but Neumann has achieved promising results with titanium, aluminum and other widely used metals. Spaceships using his drive might find capturing fuel made from a dead satellite a handy way to refuel, cleaning up the space junk problem at the same time.

Ion thrusters such as the one that took Dawn to Ceres are only suitable for use in vacuums, and Neumann says even getting off the Moon or larger asteroids will remain a job for rockets. However, he says his drive could be suitable for lifting a spacecraft from low gravity objects like Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos.

“Using very rough, very early calculations we think 20 kilograms [44 pounds] of magnesium could get a 100 kilogram [220 pound] ship to Mars and back. It would take three to five years and there will be some weight for the craft, solar panels and communications, but we think there would be 20 kilograms left over for the payload,” Neumann told IFLScience. “With a higher thrust fuel in a Neumann Drive you could do it in nine to 11 months, but the fuel tank would be empty when you got there.” In the second case a return journey would require either scavenging material locally or parking fuel in Mars orbit or on a refueling station established at Phobos or Deimos, preparatory to the voyage.

Neumann says experiments with pulsed electric arcs on metals go back to the 1920s, and some of the data collected was useful to him in assessing what to test. This work was done with less than half the current he uses, and no one before him had tried using high current pulsed arcs for thrust.

Another challenge is energy. Even if we had a warp drive, it would still require a lot of energy.

Dark energy produces a gravitationally repulsive force throughout empty space. In fact, dark energy is causing regions of the universe now to move away from us faster than the speed of light, or at "warp speed" in the Star Trek sense. Dark energy is just the kind of thing you need to put behind a spacecraft to make space expand behind it exponentially and make the ship travel faster than light. Unfortunately, the impact of this expansion is that the rest of the universe will disappear before our very eyes.

The University of Alabama in Huntsville's Aerophysics Research Center, NASA, Boeing, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating on a project to produce nuclear fusion impulse rocket engines (CNET). It's no warp drive, but it would get us around the galaxy a lot quicker than current technologies. According to Txchnologist, the scientists are hoping to make impulse drive a reality by 2030. It would be capable of taking a spacecraft from Earth to Mars in as little as six weeks.

"The fusion fuel we're focusing on is deuterium [a stable isotope of hydrogen] and Li6 [a stable isotope of the metal lithium] in a crystal structure," Txchnologist quotes team member and aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate Ross Cortez saying. "That's basically dilithium crystals we're using." Let's pause and savor that for a moment. Dilithium crystals. Awesome.

Plenty of obstacles will need to be overcome during the development process. The issue of harnessing fusion is prominent, but there is also the question of turning the power generated by fusion into thrust for an engine. The craft using the impulse drive would also need to be assembled in space, much like the International Space Station.

"Imagine using a 1-ton TNT equivalent explosive and putting it out the back end of a rocket. That's what we're doing here," Cortez says in a press release about the project. Now we can all practice saying "full impulse power" to our imaginary starship navigators.

FTL (Faster Than Light) travel

The warp drives on Star Trek ships use a matter/antimatter reactor, while Star Wars ships use comparatively lower-tech fusion and fission reactors. The fastest speed achieved by a ship in the Star Trek universe at around 21,000 times the speed of light, with slower ships maxing out at around 9,000 times light-speed. However, most ships probably cruise at something around 2,000 times the speed of light. In the Star Wars canon, the fastest ships come in at around 16,500 times light-speed but the typical cruising speed is around 11,000 times the speed of light.

If the Enterprise were restricted to flying just under the speed of light, it might seem to the crew that the round trip to the center of the galaxy took only a few years, but 80,000 years would have elapsed on Earth before the spaceship's return.

The exact definition of FTL travel is traveling from A to B in less time than light, which travels at light speed. Light speed is the physical constant which represents the speed of energy waves and massless particles in vacuum, which is 299,792.458 km/s. Our nearest neighboring star is about 26 trillion miles away. That is more than four years away at the speed of light.

Einstein's theory of special relativity has frustrated scientists and science fiction fans ever since 1905. His theory of relativity established the speed limit and revealed that just approaching the speed of light causes horrible problems. If the speed of light forms a barrier, and we cannot travel at the speed of light, then we can never travel faster than the speed of light.

Applying what we know about general relativity, the idea of faster-than-light travel is possible in principle. You can expand space behind you and contract it in front of you and therefore quickly go from one place to another across the galaxy. But the amount of energy required is just unfathomable. So while getting to exoplanets fast is still far-fetched, getting to them slow is no more far-fetched than it was before.

Current technology cannot reach FTL travel because there is no way to protect against the enormous G-forces that occur while the ship accelerates or decelerates.

As a spaceship travels closer and closer to the speed of light, the ship's length becoming shorter and shorter. The clocks tick slower and slower. And the ship's mass becomes greater and greater, requiring more and more energy to accelerate a bit closer to the ship's goal. Slowly the ship gains speed, expending huge quantities of energy. As the ship approaches the speed of light, it becomes infinitely massive, requiring infinite energy to accelerate that last tiny bit. Because of this, only objects that have no mass, such as light, can travel at the speed of light. We cannot.

It also becomes impossible for your heart to pump strongly enough to force the blood up to your head. This is why fighter pilots sometimes black out when they perform maneuvers involving rapid acceleration. Special suits have been created to force the blood up from pilots' legs to keep them conscious during acceleration. This physiological reaction remains one of the limiting factors in determining how fast the acceleration of present-day spacecraft can be.

Einstein discovered this limitation when he realized that the speed of light will always be measured to be the same, no matter what the observer's speed is relative to the light. The only way for the velocity of light to remain constant is for your measurements of distance and time to change.

The Warp drive idea is something like a moving sidewalk. By expanding space-time behind the starship and contracting it in front, a segment of space-time moves and carries the ship with it. The starship itself still moves slower than light within its space-time, but when you add the "moving sidewalk" effect, the apparent motion exceeds the speed of light. Thus, you circumvent the light speed limit.

You never get more energy than you do when you annihilate matter with antimatter. That's why the warp drive is matter/antimatter-powered, as well. Of course, it's hard to create antimatter, much less carry it around. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to produce antimatter. If we used the antimatter-making device at Fermilab just outside Chicago, the energy cost would be many thousands of times the gross national product of the U.S. to produce enough antimatter to light up a light bulb. As for storing antimatter, you need huge magnetic fields to keep it away from touching container walls made of matter. Given the infrastructure required to keep antimatter around, it might be more effective ounce-for-ounce to just carry around hydrogen bombs.

Suspended Animation

Many animals hibernate during winter months, waiting out the freezing winter months in underground burrows until the first thaw of spring. During hibernation, the animal's blood pressure, heart, and respiration rates and glandular activity drop to extremely low levels, allowing the animal to survive for months on whatever body fat and fluids they've stored before entering the dormant state.

Some animals literally freeze in winter, including certain species of frogs. When the frogs thaw out in early spring, their hearts begin beating to pump blood into their extremities, gradually warming the rest of their bodies until they are completely revived.

Cryonic suspension involves freezing the body in liquid nitrogen. It is a (currently non-standard) medical technique for attempting to prevent the permanent cessation of life in individuals on the brink of death. A person who is cryonically suspended cannot be revived by current medical technology. The freezing process does too much damage. The reason for performing a cryonic suspension is the belief that science, technology, and society will advance to the point where revival of the person is both possible and desirable.

The problem with freezing human tissue is that water, unlike virtually all other substances, actually expands by a small amount on freezing. This has the effect of rupturing cells (which are composed mostly of water) when they freeze, creating massive amounts of cellular damage. Frostbite is an example of the kind of damage cells experience when they are frozen.

Frogs that hibernate in a frozen state appear to circulate a "natural antifreeze" agent (in insects this agent is called glycerol), consisting of special kinds of proteins that prevent ice crystals from growing to the point that they disrupt cells.

Tardigrades are water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animals. Often called water bears, some were frozen for 30 years before coming back to life - it even had offspring. Scientists are currently studying their DNA to figure out what makes them survive practically anything.

Terraforming

References

	Collision Orbit. Jack Williamson. Astounding Science Fiction, July 1942. Alien. 20th Century Fox, 1979. Movie. Aliens. 20th Century Fox, 1986. Movie. Total Recall. TriStar Pictures, 1990. Movie. Red Planet. Village Roadshow Pictures, 2000. Movie.

"Terraforming" (literally, "Earth-shaping") is a word invented by Jack Williamson in a science-fiction story Collision Orbit.

There is nowhere beyond Earth, as far as we know, where we will find environments in which unprotected humans can survive. In the future, we shall have to decide whether to leave a planet unaltered or modify it to make it closer to that of Earth. With technologies that have been the subject of much study, terraforming would be feasible for some of the bodies in the solar system. Environmentalists, pointing at the mistakes humans have made on Earth, will have much to protect in this venture.

• In Alien, a ship's crew sets down on planetoid LV-426 (Acheron), a world so environmentally hostile that the three crew members who exit the ship must wear full life support suits. In the 1986 sequel, Aliens, the planet has been terraformed using atmosphere processing equipment to an Earth-like state. The process is described as taking "decades," but is apparently so routine that the colonies responsible for it have earned the whimsical nicknamename "Shake N' Bake Colonies." The Weyland Yutani corporation sports the phrase "Building Better Worlds" as its slogan, and it is implied that terraforming is a large part of its business.
• In Total Recall, aliens have built a terraforming device on Mars, which when turned on, fills the atmosphere with oxygen, allowing humans to live on the surface. However, a giant corporation tries to prevent terraforming from happening on Mars with an elaborate cover-up.
• In Red Planet, after humanity faces heavy overpopulation and pollution on Earth, uncrewed space probes loaded with algae are sent to Mars with the aim of terraforming and creating a breathable atmosphere.

Artificial Gravity / Weightlessness

The Starship Enterprise had artificial gravity that simulated the normal environment of a planet such as Earth. NASA says it doesn't have anything close to that yet, though the generation of artificial graviton particles is imaginable.

People have long been concerned with the problems that might arise during prolonged space travel. A mission to Mars could last up to three years, and many biomedical problems could compromise such a mission. One of these problems, known even to Jules Verne when he wrote From the Earth to The Moon in 1685 (written almost a century before the flights of the astronauts), was weightlessness. Because this condition cannot be reproduced for more than a few seconds on Earth, no one knew how the human body would react to it.

We do not have any way to create artificial gravity. Generating artificial graviton particles is imaginable, but there is no way to say how it might be done.

One solution was to make the living quarters of the spaceship a slowly revolving drum, so the centrifugal force gave the occupants the sensation of weight, allowing them to walk on a cylindrical "floor".

Stanley Kubrik showed this in 2001: A Space Odyssey's orbiting Hilton Hotel. Babylon 5 also makes use of this revolving drum.

There may be long-term effects about which almost little is yet known. Humans have lived in space now for longer than a year, and indeed some astronauts have become addicted so addicted to weightlessness that they were reluctant to return.

Space Elevators

Future technologies will make space travel no more expensive than atmospheric flight. The real cost, in terms of energy, of putting a human into space will be a few hundred dollars, not the present millions of dollars. One way of approaching this target would be to use a "space elevator," which would lift people into space using cables lowered from satellites or space stations in geostationary orbit.

This concept was developed in 1960 by the Russian engineer Y. N. Artsutanoc. Sir Arthur C Clarke describes this in his novel The Foundations of Paradise.

Robots/Androids/Synthetic Humans

Mechanical life form. Appears, reacts, thinks, learns and acts like a human. The word robot became the popular term for human-like machines when the Czech author Karel Capek used it in his play RUR: Rossum's Universal Robots. Capek's brother, Josef, suggested the term for the enslaved automatons described in the play; "robot" derives from a Czech word for indentured servant.

Androids are robots that are crafted to look and act like human beings, presumably to ease their use and acceptance among people.

Could we someday build robots as intelligent as Ash or Bishop or Call? Can we make robots that see, hear, and speak, like them? Recent advances in robotics suggest that it may someday be possible to build an artificial device that looks and acts like a human. The principle challenge in creating a "thinking machine" is crafting a computer that somehow rises above its programming.

Computers and programs capable of some degree of learning - a sign of intelligence - have been developed. An important research organization for robotics is the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Creating Star Trek's Mr. Data would be a historic feat of cybernetics, and right now it's very controversial in computer science whether it can be done. Maybe a self aware computer can be put into a human-sized body and persuaded to live sociably with us and our limitations. That is a long way ahead of our computer technology, but maybe not impossible.

Can we create robots that have their own emotions, and why would we want to? Can robots detect our emotions? Can robots express emotions?

In some science fiction, emotional computers and robots usually end up wreaking havoc. Ash, in following his mission, is willing to kill his crew mates, or allow them to die to ensure success of that mission. In others, they are exiled for them. In Artificial Intelligence, an android named David, no matter how hard he tries, cannot win the love of his mother. It is a revelation that breaks his heart and sends him on a desperate journey to evade his tormentors and somehow make himself into a real boy.

Most people believe robots should be rational, logical, and scientific, unaffected by emotion. Yet some scientists argue that while too much emotion can cause irrational behavior, so can too little.

Researchers have spent a lot of time trying to pinpoint the different sections in the brain where abstract thinking and emotional responses occur. Yet what scientists are now realizing is that most functions of the brain tends to involve both logic and emotion. The systems work in concert, intertwined, information constantly passing between them. Emotions do not intrude on reason; they are actually a critical part of it. Perhaps computers have been unable to reason intelligently because they are missing the equivalent of the "emotional" part of a brain.

Emotions could potentially aid in the decision-making process, associating certain options with good or bad "gut" feelings, and giving the computer a sense of the importance of various factors. Emotions could help computers to realize certain actions or decisions lead to negative results, and to avoid repeating those mistakes in the future. Emotions could help robots set priorities, create motivations, make decisions, focus their attention, and communicate more helpfully with humans.

Recently, it was reported that an AI Machine Has Same IQ As Four-Year-Old Child (IFLScience). Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines can already do several remarkable things: they are far better than humans at performing complex calculations, and they're pretty good at playing chess. Researchers put one of the world's most intelligent AI machines through its paces with an IQ test, and the results are in: it has the same IQ as an average four-year-old child, as reported by MIT Technology Review. Measuring intelligence through an IQ test is thought to be the best way to determine the intellectual capacity of people from a huge range of human cultures. A team of researchers, led by Stellan Ohlsson at the University of Illinois, decided to apply this concept to intelligence outside of any normal human culture: an AI machine developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The intelligent machine, dubbed ConceptNet 4, was given a verbal reasoning examination calibrated for four-year-old children. Known as the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, it calculates a child's IQ by asking a selection of questions from five categories. The vocabulary category contains questions such as “What is a cat?” The information category asks questions such as “Where can you find a tiger?” and the word reasoning section asks the child to identify an object after being given three clues as to its identity. The comprehension category tests the child's ability to understand the motivation behind action, such as querying why people say hello or shake hands. Finally, the similarities category asks the child to understand the link between two objects, such as “Rain and snow are both made of _ ?”

After modifying ConceptNet 4's programming to be able to deal with the questions it was going to be asked, the researchers gave it the same IQ test. The answers it gave were strongly linked to how it dealt with the language in the question, so more straightforward, concrete questions were handled well. Consequently, it did very well in the vocabulary and similarities segments, while doing averagely in the information question.

When concepts with inherent meaning or intent had to be handled, however, it dropped the ball. For example, when asked “why do people shake hands?” it interpreted the question as asking “what is the reason people's hands shake?”. As a result, it decided that people shake hands because they are having an epileptic fit. As you can imagine, the AI scored poorly on the comprehension questions. It also fared disastrously in the word reasoning category, giving truly bizarre answers unlike any child would ever use. When given the clues “This animal has a mane if it is male, it lives in Africa, and it is a yellowish-brown cat,” its five most common answers were “dog,” “cat,” “home,” “creature,” and “farm.”

As Ohlsson told MIT Technology Review, “if the clues say it is a cat, then types of cat are the only alternatives to be considered,” so this kind of misstep is currently inexplicable. All categories considered, the AI's measured verbal IQ was indeed that of an intellectually-average four-year-old child taking the same test. Stephen Hawking recently told BBC News he thought that artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to the extinction of humankind. Although this is entirely plausible, AI clearly has a long way to go to get to the point where it can stage a robot uprising.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in computer science has been the ability to simulate human neural networks via programs and algorithms, thereby combining the power of artificial intelligence with the computing power of the human brain. This advancement will aid in creating artificial “superintelligence,” as well as figuring out how the human brain works in an attempt to simulate it — and perhaps consciousness itself — in a machine (which scientists recently did with a worm). One specific aspect of mimicking human neural networks that has been particularly challenging is vision and object recognition, which has recently yielded some impressive and promising results, and now has taken another leap forward. Neuroscientists at MIT recently conducted a study that indicates that recent advancements in “deep neural networks” allow computer networks to see and recognize objects just as well as primates.

While many people, including Stephen Hawking, worry about the consequences of artificial intelligence vastly surpassing human intelligence, it makes sense to remind ourselves how much of our own computing power remains untapped. Understanding the way the brain computes is also helpful in understanding efficiency; rather than directing all the information through a CPU, which causes a bottleneck, the brain uses a vast network of neurons and synapses. So why not make the best of both worlds? Stanford University scientists have done just that, creating a circuit board called the Neurogrid, which imitates human brain function. The Neurogrid has 16 interconnected “Neurocore” chips which allows it to “simulates a million neurons connected by billions of synapses in real-time, rivaling a supercomputer while consuming a 100,000 times less energy—five watts instead of a megawatt!” That’s roughly 9,000 times faster than a conventional computer. Stanford bioengineering professor Kwabena Boahen has been working on such a chip for years and chose the brain as a model because “from a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match.”

Google is one of the companies whose artificial intelligence and computing algorithms involve something called “deep learning.” Whereas we usually think of software, AI, and computer algorithms as being programmed, deep learning goes a step further, integrating brain-like systems into software so it can learn as it feeds on data. Google has established itself as a leader in this burgeoning field, and its new experimental software shows why. GFR has already reported on Google’s ability (and Facebook’s) to identify objects in photos. But until now, the deep learning software has only been able to identify discrete objects — perhaps a television in a photo, or a soccer ball. But now, Google’s software can identify multiple objects in context. In the image above, the program didn’t simply recognize pizza or the stove. It recognized “two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.” This means the software can count and situate — it can also articulate what it sees in complete sentences.

Bionics

People have made use of simple prosthetic devices for centuries, but they cannot be connected to the human nervous system yet - the prosthetic must be designed in such a way that muscles can manipulate the prosthetic to perform the desired function.

The science of bionics seeks to create replacements for lost limbs, organs, and tissues that are fully integrated with connecting tissue and nerves.

Artificial eyes featuring retinas constructed out of light sensitive CCD chips have been developed in medical research labs. If the electrical signals from CCD's can be routed into the optic nerve, someday we can provide sight to the blind.

By 1998, researchers have created electrically conducting fibers several microns in diameter that can be grafted into human nerve cells. Bionic devices will someday be developed that responds to electrical impulses traveling down the nerve into the artificial component.

It’s mind-blowing to think that someone without a limb can simply think/desire to move a bionic replacement and it will do just that, including allowing a paraplegic teen to kick a soccer ball. Now, in yet another first in the field, a double-amputee has become the first person in the world to control two prosthetic limbs at once. 40 years ago, Les Baugh lost both of his arms in an accident. He recently received two of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs, which look and feel like regular human arms; possess similar strength and flexibility; have over 100 sensors that aid in touch, pressure, and positioning; and connect to a wearer via a neural interface. In order to be fitted with the prosthetics, Baugh had to have target muscle reinnervation surgery—a recent surgical breakthrough that readies the nerves for connection to the arm by “reassigning” them.

Cloning

References

	National Geographic. Aug 2016. Print.

DNA is the master molecule of life. Everything that a cell does - from basic reproduction to the kinds of chemical compounds it manufactures - is controlled by DNA. Chromosomes are composed of DNA molecules and supporting histrone molecules. The cells of human beings contain 46 chromosomes.

Genes are segments of chromosomes that "code" for the production of various protein molecules, which in turn form the tissues, organs, and other structures that make up living organisms.

A sheep named Dolly made headlines when she became the first mammal to be successfully cloned on July 5, 1996. A clone is a genetic duplicate of an individual. Before Dolly, most geneticists suspected every cell of an individual's body, the bone cells to the skin cells, contained the entire DNA necessary to make a complete duplicate of an individual. Dolly proved that this was a scientific fact.

Yet, how much of human personality is determined by genetics, and how much is shaped by the environment? Studies of identical twins (who share the same genes) who have separated at birth, or shortly afterwards, seem to show that many behavioral traits are inherited through genes. Yet recent neurological studies have convincingly demonstrated that the environment in which a child grows up has a profound influence on the development of the brain, which in turn influences intelligence, emotional development, and creative abilities.

The ability to quickly alter the code of life has given humans unprecented power over the natural world. Physicians in the future will be able to tailor medicines to a human's genetic profile. Dozens of animals have already been engineered with a technique called CRISPRto carry specific genetic traits and rid animals of viruses.

Are the Yautja Shape Shifters?

References

	Predator: A Novel. Paul Monette. Jove Books, 1987. Novelization.

Terrestrial animals exhibit some flexibility in their shape and color.

• Puffer Fish can swell their bodies to several times their normal volume, making them look too big to eat to their enemies.
• Several insects fade into the background by virtue of the fact that they look like tree branches or leaves.
• Some insects go through a complete revamping, known as metamorphosis, morphing from larva to pupa to adult.
• Mammalian figures during birth.
• Snakes can unhinge their bones at the cartilage joints.
• Chameleons, small lizards commonly found in Africa and Asia, have the unique ability to change the color of their skin as means of better blending in wit the background, thus avoiding the hungry eyes of potential predators. Their skin contains three layers of pigment cells. Each layer corresponds to a primary color: red, green, and blue. Any color can be generated by combining various intensities of red, green, and blue light. By expanding and contracting various cells in these layers, the chameleon can produce any skin color it desires.

In reading the novelization of the movie, Predator (based on an pre-final scrift draft), this gives the suggestion that the Yautja was indeed some form of shape-shifter.

"It somehow discerned living tissue from inanimate objects by picking up heat patterns of living cells. It saw the outlines of all living creatures shaded with a sort of liquid color that was the pulse of the heat of life. But 'saw' is very imprecise, for it only had eyes when it felt like having eyes. It was like a lost soul searching for a form in which to flower."

"Since it needed no earthly form of its own beyond what it chose to assume, it was incapable of feeling emotion toward any of the earthling tribes."

"It was impossible to say to look, whether monkey or crow or something more mutant. If one of the men had looked straight into the leaves with binoculars, he might have caught the yellow gleam of an eye, but the eye was only a nexus of nerves, spun from its own secretions like an insect's nest."

"It quickly searched the surrounding sky till it settled on a hawk sailing gracefully by, its wings held perfectly still while the heat-soaked air currents wafted it like a billowing schooner. The unearthly intruder followed the bird's flight with its heat vision. Then, with its sixth sense power of capture, it zeroed in on the hawk's presence, it's mind steering the bird toward it like some remote-controlled toy." Predator: A Novel. Paul Monette. Jove Books, 1987. Novelization.