Biohacking on Spark

The process of bioengineering is becoming democratized. People anywhere and everywhere can extract and tinker with a living cell’s DNA right from their very own home. The trend is called biohacking. The people getting into it range from the hobbyist to the closeted scientists. All the means to do it are at our fingertips. A…

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Designer Organs on Spark

Back when I was on maternity leave, a senior producer from CBC Radio’s show Spark contacted me to ask if I could look into a story for them.  It was about a biophysics professor at the University of Ottawa who tinkers with living materials.  He stretches and pulls stem cells to get them to act…

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Mind Controlled Digital World

EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON OUR NOT-SO-FAR-FLUNG SCI-FI’ISH FUTURE

When I started wondering, “When will I be able to tweet directly from my mind?” – I never imagined where that question would take me. It started as an idea for the CBC Radio program Spark – a show about tech, trends and ideas. I knew a biomedical engineer from the University of Wisconsin Madison had tweeted from his brain using an EEG system. I also knew researchers from the University of Utah recently announced they used microelectrodes implanted on the brain to decode a few words. I figured tweeting from our brains would be within our grasp.

It is and it isn’t.

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