Questions
Reading 1
The author defines nature as topos, a common place, rather than ‘others’ who offers origin, replenishment and service, should we really separate these two definitions and only pick one to believe in?
I kind of disagree with what the author believe, and I would like to combine the two definitions together. Because to some extent, nature does both. So, for it is a topo, kind of true, because in daily life, nature does act as a commonplace and coordinates with the constructed world and the contructed world also coordinates with it. While as it appeared earilier than us, and as the four ancient civilizations emerged by the riverside due to geological reasons, nature is also our origin, which could be something that is higher than the level of any organisms or non-organisms exsisting right now. In this case, to me, nature is a senior topo where everything originated from.
Reading 2
What is attractor? Just don’t quite understand the term.
In the case of cells and xenobots, the “attractor” represents the specific shape or behavior that cells will naturally form or adopt when they follow certain rules of interaction and self-assembly.
Writing
How prosthetics went from peg legs to biolimbs (youtube.com)
In this case, the scientists are just growing pure bio limbs using rat legs, which could probably change the future of prosthetics. However, in my studies during 2050-2053, it was very hard to to make the pure bio limb support the humen body due to the bones inside. We tried with growing different animals’ legs, but the structures of the bones could not match human needs. For those we tested, we found their walking or hand-using movements were weird, far from normal people. To ungrade, or you could say make improvement, we decided to combine some of the tissues and mechanisms together to make the prosthetics.
In previous experiment, pig’s tissues are more aligned with human’s, so we combined it’s muscle slices and electrodes at each end of them to simulate the stretchs of muscles when human moves. The whole prosthetic has a main metal support in the middle and stretched out some layers of branches to hold the electrodes, and the stretches are simulations of how the mucles in our body is connected to each others and the bones, but much more than the amount of the connecting points in original body structure due to the strength. In between the layers, the pig’s muscles are clamped.
What needed to be mentioned is, the muscle slices contains nerves inside, so when we also planted electrodes at the end of patient’s amputative limb, he will re-feel the feeling of touching, stepping and so on. This is because the embeded electrodes in the body is directly connected to the nerves, and when the electrodes are on, the nerves in the prosthetics will trasnport the signal to the brain through the original nerves in our body, which gives the patient new lives and hopes. Also, as long as the patient could feel his limbs, it would help alleviate phantom limb pain. But to maintain the prosthetics, you need to change the muscle slices once a month, or else it will die, because they are not fed with nutrients to live longer.
By inventing this, me and my team won the Nobel Prize in Physicology and Medicine in 2060!
Drawn by AI
The red ones are muscle slices, the gold and white ones are metal.