The universe is looking younger every day, it seems. New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos. From a report: The huge swings in scientists' estimates -- even this new calculation could be off by billions of years -- reflect different approaches to the tricky problem of figuring the universe's real age. "We have large uncertainty for how the stars are moving in the galaxy," said Inh Jee, of the Max Plank Institute in Germany, lead author of the study in Thursday's journal Science. Scientists estimate the age of the universe by using the movement of stars to measure how fast it is expanding. If the universe is expanding faster, that means it got to its current size more quickly, and therefore must be relatively younger.

The expansion rate, called the Hubble constant, is one of the most important numbers in cosmology. A larger Hubble Constant makes for a faster moving -- and younger -- universe. The generally accepted age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, based on a Hubble Constant of 70. Jee's team came up with a Hubble Constant of 82.4, which would put the age of the universe at around 11.4 billion years. Jee used a concept called gravitational lensing -- where gravity warps light and makes far away objects look closer. They rely on a special type of that effect called time delay lensing, using the changing brightness of distant objects to gather information for their calculations. But Jee's approach is only one of a few new ones that have led to different numbers in recent years, reopening a simmering astronomical debate of the 1990s that had been seemingly settled.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Chinese scientists have published the first report in a scientific journal of an attempt to use CRISPR-edited cells in a patient -- a 27-year-old man who is HIV-positive. While the treatment did not rid the man of the AIDS virus, the researchers and others are calling the report promising. That's because it indicates that so far the gene-editing technique seems to safely and effectively make the precise DNA change intended. The case was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In the new report, the researchers attempted to use CRISPR to recreate the experiences of two men known as the Berlin patient and the London patient. In those cases, HIV-positive men were declared effectively cured after they received stem cell transplants from people born with variations of a gene known as CCR5 that makes people naturally resistant to HIV. The variation disables a molecular gateway HIV uses to enter and destroy key immune system cells. In the new case, [Hongkui Deng, a professor of cell biology at the Peking University] and his colleagues used CRISPR to edit the CCR5 gene on stem cells to recreate the naturally occurring protection against HIV. They then used the edited cells to perform a stem cell transplant for the patient. The man also had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a form of blood cancer. The transplant appears to have put the patient's leukemia into remission, the researchers reported. He suffered no apparent adverse side effects from the gene-edited cells, which have persisted in his body for more than 19 months, according to the report. "The approach did not reduce levels of HIV in the man's body because only about 5% of his white blood cells carried the edited CCR5 variation," the report adds. "So Deng says his team plans to focus on finding ways to boost that closer to 100%, which is what would be needed to eradicate the virus."

Regardless, the findings are important positive outcomes that suggest the approach is safe and could work.

ted_pikul writes: A team of scientists have created a device that turns the cold of space into enough electricity to power an LED light. As described in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Joule, the device is based off of a thermoelectric generator that creates electricity from the difference in temperature between a "hot side" and a "cold side." The researchers -- UCLA scientist Aaswath Raman, and Stanford scientists Wei Li and Shanhui Fan -- decided to take this idea one step further and use the ambient environment of Earth as a heat source and the cold of outer space as one gigantic cold sink.

The prototype consists of four stilts supporting two plates sandwiched between a thermoelectric generator. One plate is aimed at the ground, the other at the sky. The downward-facing plate draws heat from the air around it, while the upward-facing plate is paired with an aluminum disk painted black. The disk acts as an emitter that radiates heat into space through Earth's atmosphere, cooling the plate to below ambient temperature. This effect is known as radiative cooling, Raman said, and scientists have known about the phenomenon for years. It's the reason why a window can be frosty in the morning even when last night's temperature wasn't below freezing, and, as Raman explained in a 2018 TED Talk, it's the reason ancient Persians were able to make and store ice in the desert.

Kate Marvel, writing for Scientific American: We are, I promise you, not doomed, no matter what Jonathan Franzen says. We could be, of course, if we decided we really wanted to. We have had the potential for total annihilation since 1945, and the capacity for localized mayhem for as long as societies have existed. Climate change offers the easy choice of a slow destruction through inaction like the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot. And there are times when the certainty of inevitability seems comforting. Fighting is exhausting; fighting when victory seems uncertain or unlikely even more so. It's tempting to retreat to a special place -- a cozy nook, a mountaintop, a summer garden -- wait for the apocalypse to run its course, and hope it will be gentle.

[...] It is precisely the fact that we understand the potential driver of doom that changes it from a foregone conclusion to a choice, a terrible outcome in the universe of all possible futures. I run models through my brain; I check them with the calculations I do on a computer. This is not optimism, or even hope. Even in the best of all possible worlds, I cannot offer the certainty of safety. Doom is a possibility; it may that we have already awakened a sleeping monster that will in the end devour the world. It may be that the very fact of human nature, whatever that is, forecloses any possibility of concerted action. But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens. A flower in a garden is an exquisite thing, rooted in soil formed from old rocks broken by weather. It breathes in sunlight and carbon dioxide and conjures its food as if by magic. For the flower to exist, a confluence of extraordinary things must happen. It needs land and air and light and water, all in the right proportion, and all at the right time. Pick it, isolate it, and watch it wither. Flowers, like people, cannot grow alone.

Data from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed water vapor in the atmosphere of an Earth-size planet. "Although this exoplanet orbits a star that is smaller than our sun, it falls within what's known as the star's habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where it would be warm enough for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface," reports National Geographic. From the report: The discovery, announced this week in two independent studies, comes from years of observations of the exoplanet K2-18b, a super-Earth that's about 111 light-years from our solar system. Discovered in 2015 by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, K2-18b is very unlike our home world: It's more than eight times the mass of Earth, which means it's either an icy giant like Neptune or a rocky world with a thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere. K2-18b's orbit also takes it seven times closer to its star than Earth gets to the sun. But because it circles a type of dim red star known as an M dwarf, that orbit places it in the star's potentially life-friendly zone. Crude models predict that K2-18b's effective temperature falls somewhere between -100 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit, and if it is about as reflective as Earth, its equilibrium temperature would be roughly the same as our home planet's. "This is the only planet right now that we know outside the solar system that has the correct temperature to support water, it has an atmosphere, and it has water in it -- making this planet the best candidate for habitability that we know right now," University College London astronomer Angelos Tsiaras, a coauthor of one of the two studies, said during a press conference.

A comet first spotted by a Ukrainian amateur astronomer looks to be just the second known object to visit our cosmic neighborhood from beyond the solar system. What could be an even bigger deal is the fact that this one was discovered as it's still approaching us. CNET reports: The comet was found by Gennady Borisov of Crimea on Aug. 30, and went by the temporary name GB00234 until very recently. After being watched by several other observatories over the past few weeks, it was given the official name of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) by the Minor Planet Center on Wednesday. From the start, the orbit of the comet seemed unusual: It appeared to follow a so-called hyperbolic trajectory, which means it does not orbit the sun and probably originates from far beyond our solar system. This comet is still inbound, and will not reach perihelion (its closest pass by the sun) until Dec. 10. Hopefully that will give scientists ample time to study it, a luxury we didn't have with Oumuamua. And no, there doesn't appear to be any risk that the comet will collide with Earth.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Scientific American: Humans effortlessly know that a tree is a tree and a dog is a dog no matter the size, color or angle at which they're viewed. In fact, identifying such visual elements is one of the earliest tasks children learn. But researchers have struggled to determine how the brain does this simple evaluation. As deep-learning systems have come to master this ability, scientists have started to ask whether computers analyze data -- and particularly images -- similarly to the human brain. "The way that the human mind, the human visual system, understands shape is a mystery that has baffled people for many generations, partly because it is so intuitive and yet it's very difficult to program" says Jacob Feldman, a psychology professor at Rutgers University.

A paper published in Scientific Reports in June comparing various object recognition models came to the conclusion that people do not evaluate an object like a computer processing pixels, but based on an imagined internal skeleton. In the study, researchers from Emory University, led by associate professor of psychology Stella Lourenco, wanted to know if people judged object similarity based on the objects' skeletons -- an invisible axis below the surface that runs through the middle of the object's shape. The scientists generated 150 unique three-dimensional shapes built around 30 different skeletons and asked participants to determine whether or not two of the objects were the same. Sure enough, the more similar the skeletons were, the more likely participants were to label the objects as the same. The researchers also compared how well other models, such as neural networks (artificial intelligence-based systems) and pixel-based evaluations of the objects, predicted people's decisions. While the other models matched performance on the task relatively well, the skeletal model always won. On the Rumsfeld Epistemological Scale, AI programers trying to duplicate the functions of the human mind are still dealing with some high-level known-unknowns, and maybe even a few unknown-unknowns.

pgmrdlm shares a report from Live Science: In Douglas Adams' sci-fi series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a pair of programmers task the galaxy's largest supercomputer with answering the ultimate question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. After 7.5 million years of processing, the computer reaches an answer: 42. Only then do the programmers realize that nobody knew the question the program was meant to answer. Now, in this week's most satisfying example of life reflecting art, a pair of mathematicians have used a global network of 500,000 computers to solve a centuries-old math puzzle that just happens to involve that most crucial number: 42.

The question, which goes back to at least 1955 and may have been pondered by Greek thinkers as early as the third century AD, asks, "How can you express every number between 1 and 100 as the sum of three cubes?" Or, put algebraically, how do you solve x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = k, where k equals any whole number from 1 to 100? This deceptively simple stumper is known as a Diophantine equation, named for the ancient mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria, who proposed a similar set of problems about 1,800 years ago. Modern mathematicians who revisited the puzzle in the 1950s quickly found solutions when k equals many of the smaller numbers, but a few particularly stubborn integers soon emerged. The two trickiest numbers, which still had outstanding solutions by the beginning of 2019, were 33 and -- you guessed it -- 42. Using a computer algorithm to look for solutions to the Diophantine equation with x, y and z values that included every number between positive and negative 99 quadrillion, mathematician Andrew Booker, of the University of Bristol in England, found the solution to 33 after several weeks of computing time.

Since his search turned up no solutions for 42, Booker enlisted the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Andrew Sutherland, who helped him book some time with a worldwide computer network called Charity Engine. "Using this crowdsourced supercomputer and 1 million hours of processing time, Booker and Sutherland finally found an answer to the Diophantine equation where k equals 42," reports Live Science. The answer: (-80538738812075974)^3 + (80435758145817515)^3 + (12602123297335631)^3 = 42.

The color-changing capabilities of chameleons have long bewildered willing observers. While humans can't yet camouflage much beyond a green outfit to match grass, inanimate objects are another story. From a report: A team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has brought us closer to this chameleon reality, by way of a new system that uses reprogrammable ink to let objects change colors when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) and visible light sources. Dubbed "PhotoChromeleon," the system uses a mix of photochromic dyes that can be sprayed or painted onto the surface of any object to change its color -- a fully reversible process that can be repeated infinitely. PhotoChromeleon can be used to customize anything from a phone case to a car, or shoes that need an update. The color remains, even when used in natural environments. "This special type of dye could enable a whole myriad of customization options that could improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce overall waste," says CSAIL postdoc Yuhua Jin, the lead author on a new paper about the project. "Users could personalize their belongings and appearance on a daily basis, without the need to buy the same object multiple times in different colors and styles."

PhotoChromeleon builds off of the team's previous system, "ColorMod," which uses a 3-D printer to fabricate items that can change their color. Frustrated by some of the limitations of this project, such as small color scheme and low-resolution results, the team decided to investigate potential updates. With ColorMod, each pixel on an object needed to be printed, so the resolution of each tiny little square was somewhat grainy. As far as colors, each pixel of the object could only have two states: transparent and its own color. So, a blue dye could only go from blue to transparent when activated, and a yellow dye could only show yellow. But with PhotoChromeleon's ink, you can create anything from a zebra pattern to a sweeping landscape to multicolored fire flames, with a larger host of colors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: In a surprise meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump pushed to ban all non-tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes from the market. Trump discussed the proposal during a meeting at the White House after discussing the move with advisers like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Norman Sharpless, Bloomberg reported. "Not only is it a problem overall, but really specifically with respect for children," Trump told reporters. He continued, "We may very well have to do something very, very strong about it."

Secretary Azar said the FDA would soon issue regulatory guidance to remove flavored vaping products from the market. The secretary cited statistics showing five million children using e-cigarettes of some kind, a number he found "alarming." In December, the US Surgeon General declared underage vaping "an epidemic," laying the groundwork for future regulatory action. Last week, federal officials announced that over 450 people across the country had grown sick with deadly lung illnesses that have been linked to e-cigarette use.

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: People with a fear of small holes have claimed the design of Apple's iPhone 11 Pro is triggering their phobia. At its unveiling on Tuesday, many found their attention drawn to its "ultra-wide" rear camera, with three high-powered lenses packed closely together. The lenses sit alongside the handset's torch and "audio zoom" microphone. And hundreds of smartphone users now claim the new design has triggered their "trypophobia," an aversion to the sight of clusters of small holes. The term "trypophobia" was first coined in 2005 in online forum Reddit and it has since become widely talked about on social media.

American Horror Story actress Sarah Paulson and model Kendall Jenner are among those who say they have the condition. Vision scientist Dr Geoff Cole, at the University of Essex, was part of the first full scientific study of trypophobia, working with his colleague, Prof Arnold Wilkins. "We have all got it, it's just a matter of degree," Dr Cole told BBC News earlier this year. The response to seeing small holes can be very extreme, their study suggests. Dr Cole and Prof Wilkins reported testimonies from some people who vomited and others who said they could not go to work for several days. "It can be quite disabling," Prof Wilkins added.

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake. From a report: The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people's brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists' lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants' brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world -- when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph -- but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone's brain actually initiating an action

The experiment's results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement. This momentous discovery was the beginning of a lot of trouble in neuroscience. Twenty years later, the American physiologist Benjamin Libet used the Bereitschaftspotential to make the case not only that the brain shows signs of a decision before a person acts, but that, incredibly, the brain's wheels start turning before the person even consciously intends to do something. Suddenly, people's choices -- even a basic finger tap -- appeared to be determined by something outside of their own perceived volition.

SpaceX isn't wasting much time now that Starhopper has completed its hover test. The company has filed an FCC communication permissions request that, as Elon Musk confirmed, prepares for test-flying the "orbit-class" Starship. From a report: The vehicle will fly much higher than its stubby predecessor, reaching an altitude of 12.5 miles before it comes back to the same landing pad used during earlier tests. It's not a true orbital test, then, but it's clearly much closer to SpaceX's goals. The FCC filing came days after word from Business Insider (later verified) that the FAA was effectively granting SpaceX permission to expand its Boca Chica launch facility for the sake of Starship launches. The company also hasn't tried to hide its construction work on the orbit-quality vehicle, and Musk has alluded to a September 28th update event that could show off the completed spacecraft. It's poised to launch sometime in October, possibly as soon as the 13th.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Emissions from diesel cars – even newer and supposedly cleaner models -- increase on hot days, a new study has found, raising questions over how cities suffering from air pollution can deal with urban heat islands and the climate crisis. Research in Paris by The Real Urban Emissions (True) initiative found that diesel car emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) rose by 20% to 30% when temperatures topped 30C -- a common event this summer.

Emissions from a range of vehicles were found to be many times higher than those declared by manufacturers in laboratory tests, confirming earlier findings following the 2015 Dieselgate scandal, in which Volkswagen cars were found to emit 40 times more NOx on the road than during laboratory tests. Certain pollutants from motorcycles -- often considered a cleaner alternative to four-wheeled vehicles -- were also found to "greatly exceed" averages for both petrol and diesel cars. Yoann Bernard of the International Council on Clean Transportation, which carried out the study, said real NOx emissions had been found to be up to 18 times higher than those recorded in vehicle manufacturers' tests, even in newer vehicles that are supposed to be cleaner.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the single worst day in the history of life on Earth, when a city-sized asteroid smashed into the planet 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all other life. Their analysis of these new rock samples from the Chicxulub crater, made public Monday, reveals a parfait of debris deposited in layers almost minute-by-minute at the heart of the impact during the first day of a global catastrophe (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). It records traces of the explosive melting, massive earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and wildfires as the immense asteroid blasted a hole 100 miles wide and 12 miles deep, the scientists said. The sediments also offer chemical evidence that the cataclysm blew hundreds of billions of tons of sulfur from pulverized ocean rock into the atmosphere, triggering a global winter in which temperatures world-wide dropped by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit for decades, the scientists said. "The asteroid blasted a cavity between 25 and 30 miles deep in the first seconds of impact, creating a boiling cauldron of molten rocks and super-heated steam," reports The Wall Street Journal, citing the scientists' interpretation of the rock. "Rebounding from the hammer blow, a plume of molten rock splashed up into a peak higher than Mount Everest. Within minutes, it collapsed into itself, splashing gigantic waves of lava outward that solidified into a ring of high peaks, the scientists said."

"About 20 minutes or so later, sea water surged back over the newly formed peaks, covering them in a blanket of impact rocks, the scientists said. As minutes became hours, waves choked with shards of volcanic glass and splintered rock rippled back and forth, coating the peaks in a layer of impact rock called suevite, the scientists said. As the hours passed, the backwash of waves added more and more finely graded debris. At the very top of the rock core, the scientists detected traces of organic matter and charcoal."

The study was published today in the journal PNAS.

Using radar data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, recently published research presents a new scenario to explain why some methane-filled lakes on Saturn's moon Titan are surrounded by steep rims that reach hundreds of feet high. The models suggests that explosions of warming nitrogen created basins in the moon's crust. Phys.Org reports: Titan is the only planetary body in our solar system other than Earth known to have stable liquid on its surface. But instead of water raining down from clouds and filling lakes and seas as on Earth, on Titan it's methane and ethane -- hydrocarbons that we think of as gases but that behave as liquids in Titan's frigid climate. Most existing models that lay out the origin of Titan's lakes show liquid methane dissolving the moon's bedrock of ice and solid organic compounds, carving reservoirs that fill with the liquid. This may be the origin of a type of lake on Titan that has sharp boundaries. On Earth, bodies of water that formed similarly, by dissolving surrounding limestone, are known as karstic lakes.

The new, alternative models for some of the smaller lakes (tens of miles across) turns that theory upside down: It proposes pockets of liquid nitrogen in Titan's crust warmed, turning into explosive gas that blew out craters, which then filled with liquid methane. The new theory explains why some of the smaller lakes near Titan's north pole, like Winnipeg Lacus, appear in radar imaging to have very steep rims that tower above sea level -- rims difficult to explain with the karstic model. The work, published Sept. 9 in Nature Geosciences, meshes with other Titan climate models showing the moon may be warm compared to how it was in earlier Titan "ice ages."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Making artificial versions of the humble leaf has been an ongoing area of research for decades and in a new breakthrough, researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) have fine-tuned their artificial leaf design and used it to produce drugs for the first time. Natural leaves are clever little machines. They collect sunlight, and that energy is then used by chlorophyll molecules to power a chemical reaction that turns CO2 and water into glucose. The plant uses this glucose for energy, and expels oxygen as a waste product. Artificial leaves are designed to mimic this process. They're made of translucent materials that allow sunlight in and direct it towards tiny microfluidic channels running through the material like veins. A certain liquid is flowing through these channels, and the idea is that the energy from the sunlight triggers a chemical reaction in that liquid, turning it into something useful like a drug or fuel.

The new artificial leaf design from TUE builds on the team's previous prototype, presented in 2016. Back then, the device was made of silicon rubber, but in the new version that's been replaced with Plexiglas for several reasons. [The material is cheaper and easier to manufacturer in larger quantities, has a higher refractive index, and can contain more types of light-sensitive molecules.] The leaf has started to earn its keep, too. The team put it to the test and found that it was able to successfully produce two different drugs: artimensinin, which is effective against malaria, and ascaridole, which is used against certain parasitic worms. Given its small size and scalability, the team says that the artificial leaf could eventually be used to produce drugs and other molecules right where they're needed. The research was published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

In a paper published in Nature Medicine today, researchers led by ETH Zurich describe how they modified an off-the-shelf prosthetic leg with sensors and electrodes to give wearers a sense of knee movement and feedback from the sole of the foot on the ground. Engadget reports: The researchers worked with two patients with above-the-knee, or transfemoral, amputations. They used an Ossur prosthetic leg, which comes with a microprocessor and an angle sensor in the knee joint, IEEE Spectrum explains. The team then added an insole with seven sensors to the foot. Those sensors transmit signals in real-time, via Bluetooth to a controller strapped to the user's ankle. An algorithm in the controller encodes the feedback into neural signals and delivers that to a small implant in the patient's tibial nerve, at the back of the thigh. The brain can then interpret those signals as feedback from the knee and foot.

The modified prosthetic helped the users walk faster, feel more confident and consume less oxygen -- an indication that it was less strenuous than traditional prosthesis. The team also tested activating the tibial nerve implant to relieve phantom limb pain. Both patients saw a significant reduction in pain after a few minutes of electrical stimulation, but they had to be connected to a device in a lab to receive the treatment. With more testing, the researchers hope they might be able to bring these technologies to more amputees and make both available outside of the lab.

Juul Labs, the dominant e-cigarette company, violated federal regulations by selling its vaping products as a safe alternative to traditional tobacco cigarettes without approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the agency said in a warning letter on Monday. From a report: The F.D.A. issued its warning amid a public health crisis over more than 400 cases of vaping-related lung illnesses that have hospitalized many young teenagers and adults, and possibly five deaths. Public health investigators have yet to determine a specific cause, but have cited the use of both cannabis-related and nicotine vaping products from a number of companies as possible suspects. The agency's warning letter to Juul follows a lengthy inquiry into the company's marketing and sales practices, as well as a review of congressional testimony from Juul executives, consumers -- including students and parents -- and antismoking advocates. Under federal law, companies are not permitted to market products as safer than cigarettes or a safe alternative without proving those claims to the F.D.A.

"Biohackers took one small but important step toward the science fiction dystopia depicted in William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic," reports The Parallax, in an article shared by a Slashdot reader: The Four Thieves Vinegar biohacking collective has not figured out how to precisely mimic the memory data transfer scenario Gibson conjured, but it has built a device to enable people to store and transfer data wirelessly in their bodies. Using off-the-shelf parts and focused efforts, the biohacking group has designed and built a networked hard drive, coated in a biosafe resin, to be subcutaneously implanted in the human body. It's powered by an external battery that connects to the device via an induction coil, and its storage capacity is limited only by the size of the microSD card it contains. Michael Laufer, who founded Four Thieves Vinegar, calls it the Pegleg.

In the small hours of August 8, in an operating room within the small house, two patients received the second version of the Pegleg implant, which Laufer says is the world's first subcutaneous networked drive... To make Pegleg v2, Laufer and his team removed from the Raspberry Pi both Micro USB connectors (one for power, one for data), the Mini HDMI connector, and the camera connector. They then soldered on a second Wi-Fi chip to enable it to transfer data to another Pegleg and allow other devices to connect to it, as well as an induction coil to enable it to be powered by a wireless battery resting in a contiguous sports armband or pants pocket. They enabled Bluetooth for future functionality, inserted a 512GB microSD card for storage, and updated the firmware. Finally, they coated the hacked device in a biocompatible acrylic resin to prevent it from interacting with the recipient's body and to diffuse the heat it emanates.

At 11:44 a.m. on the same day, Laufer -- an implant newbie who has three small tattoos but no piercings -- took a seat in the surgical room... During the procedure, Laufer passed out for a few seconds and vomited a little bit. But 32 minutes later, he had a functional "Pegleg" implant.