Doctors Health Care System Getting Under Our Skin Literally

""In an apparent effort to further depersonalize medicine, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding research into an implantable microchip capable of digitally monitoring the health of patients and reporting their vital statistics to doctors' offices without the need for an actual doctor-patient interaction.

Reports indicate that NSF has given a $5,070 grant to a graduate fellowship project tasked with developing an implantable antenna, of sorts, to keep track of patients' vital signs. The device, after being implanted just below a patient's skin, would be capable of monitoring medical devices, for instance, and both uploading and downloading data for use in patient tracking.

The project has been categorized as a way to attain better "long-term patient monitoring," though idea-makers claim that the chips won't necessarily be permanent. Instead, they would be used for tracking primarily medical devices, though data on patient health would also be accessible remotely to nurses and doctors.

"Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare," reads the project grant. "Implantable medical devices such as cardiac pacemakers and retinal implants are a growing feature of modern healthcare, and implantable antennas for these devices are necessary to monitor battery level and device health, to upload and download data used in patient monitoring, and more."

Medical microchips to be made of special "ink" that resembles a tattoo

Funded in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea, the project aims to develop so-called "ultra high frequency signals" capable of efficient signal transfer to and from the device as implanted underneath the skin. The device would have a large range, in other words, without the need for an internal battery, maximizing its usefulness.

These special tag antennas will reportedly be comprised of "conductive ink" that, in many ways, would resemble a tattoo. Except in this application, electronic readers would have the capacity to capture signals moving to and from the "tattoo," requiring little or no maintenance.

"Ultra High Frequency [radio-frequency identification] RFID tag antennas are printed using conductive ink and have found increased applications due to advantages such as minimal cost, low maintenance, good tag read range, and ability to operate without an integrated battery," adds the grant, as reported by SputnikNews.com.

Implantable chips will allow drug companies to treat people for diseases they don't even have

Such devices won't just monitor patient health status, however. According to reports, companies are already working on next-generation devices that will also be able to detect diseases, in some cases before they even develop (which technically isn't possible), allowing doctors to treat patients for conditions that they may or may not have, or ever develop for that matter.

Drug giant Johnson & Johnson, for instance, is reportedly working on a project called the "Disease Interception Accelerator" that, according to reports, will somehow be able to identify diseases before they actually develop. From this baseline, unscrupulous doctors will then be able to treat patients based on what the device finds or detects, even if the health condition does not actually exists.""

AbaminationCare Microchip

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http://www.naturalnews.com/050007_tracking_microchips_RFID_implants_medical_doctors.html

Synthetic Chameleon Skin Created in the Laboratory: Colors on Demand Through Engineered Stretching Tech

A Material that's a Horse of a Different Color

""The colors we typically see in paints, fabrics and other natural substances occur when white, broad spectrum light strikes their surfaces. The unique chemical composition of each surface then absorbs various bands, or wavelengths of light. Those that aren't absorbed are reflected back, with shorter wavelengths giving objects a blue hue and longer wavelengths appearing redder and the entire rainbow of possible combinations in between. Changing the color of a surface, such as the leaves on the trees in autumn, requires a change in chemical make-up.

Recently, engineers and scientists have been exploring another approach, one that would create designer colors without the use of chemical dyes and pigments. Rather than controlling the chemical composition of a material, it's possible to control the surface features on the tiniest of scales so they interact and reflect particular wavelengths of light. This type of "structural color" is much less common in nature, but is used by some butterflies and beetles to create a particularly iridescent display of color.

Controlling light with structures rather than traditional optics is not new. In astronomy, for example, evenly spaced slits known as diffraction gratings are routinely used to direct light and spread it into its component colors. Efforts to control color with this technique, however, have proved impractical because the optical losses are simply too great.

The authors of the Optica paper applied a similar principle, though with a radically different design, to achieve the color control they were looking for. In place of slits cut into a film they instead etched rows of ridges onto a single, thin layer of silicon. Rather than spreading the light into a complete rainbow, however, these ridges — or bars — reflect a very specific wavelength of light. By "tuning" the spaces between the bars, it's possible to select the specific color to be reflected. Unlike the slits in a diffraction grating, however, the silicon bars were extremely efficient and readily reflected the frequency of light they were tuned to.

Flexibility Is the Key to Control

Since the spacing, or period, of the bars is the key to controlling the color they reflect, the researchers realized it would be possible to subtly shift the period — and therefore the color — by flexing or bending the material.

"If you have a surface with very precise structures, spaced so they can interact with a specific wavelength of light, you can change its properties and how it interacts with light by changing its dimensions," said Chang-Hasnain.

Earlier efforts to develop a flexible, color shifting surface fell short on a number of fronts. Metallic surfaces, which are easy to etch, were inefficient, reflecting only a portion of the light they received. Other surfaces were too thick, limiting their applications, or too rigid, preventing them from being flexed with sufficient control.

The Berkeley researchers were able to overcome both these hurdles by forming their grating bars using a semiconductor layer of silicon approximately 120 nanometers thick. Its flexibility was imparted by embedding the silicon bars into a flexible layer of silicone. As the silicone was bent or flexed, the period of the grating spacings responded in kind.

The semiconductor material also allowed the team to create a skin that was incredibly thin, perfectly flat and easy to manufacture with the desired surface properties. This produces materials that reflect precise and very pure colors and that are highly efficient, reflecting up to 83 percent of the incoming light.""

Color Palette Technology:

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2015/03/skin-changes-color-demand