'Bionic man' makes debut at Washington's Air and Space Museum

An engineer makes an adjustment to the robot ''The Incredible Bionic Man'' at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington October 17, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts

By Lacey Johnson

WASHINGTON | Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:14pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A first-ever walking, talking "bionic man" built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.

The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum was built by London's Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.

"This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development," museum director John Dailey said.

The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, "The Incredible Bionic Man," airing on Sunday.

A "bionic man" was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show "The Six Million Dollar Man" showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.

The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.

"The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today - one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?" said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.

The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.

"It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy," said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.

The robot has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.

The bionic creation's artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.

"The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," he said. "So, he's not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with."

Assembly began in August 2012 and took three months to finish.

The robot made its U.S. debut last week at New York's Comic Con convention. It will be on display at the museum throughout the fall.

(This story has been corrected to fix spelling of documentary host's first name to Bertolt, not Bertold, paragraph 7)

(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Barbara Goldberg and Leslie Adler)

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'Bionic man' makes debut at Washington's Air and Space Museum

An engineer makes an adjustment to the robot ''The Incredible Bionic Man'' at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington October 17, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts

By Lacey Johnson

WASHINGTON | Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:14pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A first-ever walking, talking "bionic man" built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.

The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum was built by London's Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.

"This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development," museum director John Dailey said.

The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, "The Incredible Bionic Man," airing on Sunday.

A "bionic man" was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show "The Six Million Dollar Man" showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.

The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.

"The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today - one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?" said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.

The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.

"It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy," said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.

The robot has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.

The bionic creation's artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.

"The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," he said. "So, he's not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with."

Assembly began in August 2012 and took three months to finish.

The robot made its U.S. debut last week at New York's Comic Con convention. It will be on display at the museum throughout the fall.

(This story has been corrected to fix spelling of documentary host's first name to Bertolt, not Bertold, paragraph 7)

(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Barbara Goldberg and Leslie Adler)

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Gut Microbe Makes Diesel Biofuel

Reconfiguring the genetics of the food pathogen E. coli produces hydrocarbons indistinguishable from those burned in trucks

By David Biello

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E. coli can now replicate the hydrocarbon molecules that burn predominantly in big trucks and other powerful moving machines. Image: Flickr/Carlos de Paz

Welding bits and pieces from various microbes and the camphor tree into the genetic code of Escherichia coli has allowed scientists to convince the stomach bug to produce hydrocarbons, rather than sickness or more E. coli. The gut microbe can now replicate the molecules, more commonly known as diesel, that burn predominantly in big trucks and other powerful moving machines.

"We wanted to make biofuels that could be used directly with existing engines to completely replace fossil fuels," explains biologist John Love of the University of Exeter in England, who led the research into fuels. "Our next step will be to try to develop a bacterium that could be deployed industrially." Love’s work was published April 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That means harnessing E. coli's already high tolerance for harsh conditions, such as the high acidity and warmth of the human digestive tract. That hardiness also seems to be helping the bacterium survive its own production of such longer-chain hydrocarbons, which could have proved toxic to the microbes, in the way brewer's yeast cells are killed off by the alcohol they ferment. The engineered E. coli used genetic code from the insect pathogen Photorhabdus luminescens and from the cyanobacterium Nostoc punctiforme as well as soil microbe Bacillus subtilis to make the fuel molecules from fatty acids, along with a gene from the camphor tree—Cinamomum camphora—to cut the resulting hydrocarbon to the right length.

The E. coli are currently fed on sugar and yeast extract, which suggests that the resulting fuel would be expensive compared with the kind refined from oil found in the ground. "We are hopeful that we could change their diet to something less valuable to humanity," Love suggests. "For example, organic wastes from agriculture or even sewage."

Exactly how the E. coli microbes expel the diesel fuel molecules is unknown at this point. The researchers have found them floating in the growth medium, suggesting the microbes are somehow secreting the hydrocarbons from their cells once produced. "We don't know how they get there yet," Love admits. But that may solve a problem posed to other would-be biofuels produced in microbes; algal oils have proved difficult to extract cheaply and effectively from inside the algae themselves, among other challenges.

Besides a better grasp of the process itself, fine-tuning the genetic engineering may one day yield other useful hydrocarbons, such as jet fuel or even gasoline (a short-chained hydrocarbon). Similar work at the University of California, Berkeley, has tinkered with E. coli genetics to allow the bacteria to digest the inedible parts of plants known as cellulose and turn them into microbial diesel that can be used in place of fossil-fuel diesel or other useful hydrocarbons. And E. coli has been harnessed in the past to make specialty oils for cosmetics; the company Amyris makes the moisturizing oil known as squalane from E. coli fed sugarcane and grown in vats in Brazil. The synthetic biologists at Amyris have also coaxed yeast to produce the antimalarial drug artemisinin, a technology that is currently being commercialized with drugmaker Sanofi.

Regardless, industrial-scale fuel production from microbes remains a much tougher proposition than making specialty oils or medicines, given the low cost and high volumes required to compete with the fuels made from fossil sources. "Fuel is actually a lot cheaper than artemisinin, so it has to be made in significantly larger quantities," Love notes. "That in itself is a challenge."

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[News & Analysis] Neuroscience: Tissue Imaging Method Makes Everything Clear

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Measuring microbes makes wetland health monitoring more affordable, says researcher

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