Gizmodo: hypodermic

Mimic BioShock's Body-Mod Splicing With Your Own EVE Hypodermic Needles

Jason Chen — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:06:44 EST

The world of BioShock shows what one tremendously interesting direction of hacking your body will be like. Imagine injecting yourself with flame-throwing or electric-throwing inducing stem cells and you'll get the picture. Now you can pretend with props!

These EVE hypos cost only $23 and even have LEDs to make it seem like the real thing. The actual needle looks way too thick to actually inject anything into any part of your body, unless you're thinking what we're thinking. But who needs fire and/or electricity shooting out of their ass? Oh wait, everyone. [Play via Nerd Approved]

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It's about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature's ultimate machine.

AdminPatch Pain-Free Hypodermic Alternative Does It With Millions Of Needles Instead

Kit Eaton — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 06:15:21 EST

Nanobioscience's AdminPatch sounds like a pretty amazing way to deliver drugs into the body: it's got a metal surface covered in millions of tiny microneedles that puncture the skin. You may instantly think "Ouch!" but since these are so small and pierce the skin shallow enough to avoid pain receptors, the system is apparently painless.

It's a way of delivering water-soluble drugs locally or systemically through the "micropores" it makes in the skin and it works continuously when it's stuck to you. The pores collapse quickly when the patch is removed, lessening the chances of infection.

Better yet, it's simple to use, and it's easy and cheap to manufacture, so it's got a pretty good likelihood of existing in real products soon. Good news for many a trypanophobe, I'd say—at least those who need the kinds of drugs that Adminpatch can deliver. [Medgadget]

Scientists Use Mosquito-Mouth Design for Pain-Free Hypodermic Needle

Kit Eaton — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:06:00 EDT

Scientists at Indian Institute of Technology and Tokai University have taken the natural features of a mosquito's mouth, and created a new type of needle that promises pain-free blood sample collection and injections.

When mosquitoes bite you, it's not their mouth that hurts you: their ultra-fine proboscis dips beneath the skin, and then a muscle squeeze-relax motion draws blood out of it. The new needle, made of titanium alloys for strength, has a tiny microelectricalmechanical pump that mimics the mozzy, and can work to extract blood or pump in drugs. It's also just 60 microns across, versus 900 microns of a conventional syringe. The team hopes to commercialize the product, but they've got a few technical hurdles to overcome before we can all worry less about having an injection. [NewScientist]

Medidome Syringe Aims for Veins with Kid-Friendly Design

Kit Eaton — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:59:00 EDT

We've brought you inventions that aim to replace the scary-looking hypodermic syringe before, but this new design reinvents the device in a kid-friendly package. Designed by Christopher Holden, a student at Northumbria University in the UK, MediDome combines drug and needle in a stick-on blister, designed for a single use only. So it reduces the risk of needle-stick injury, and looks much friendlier to kids. You simply stick it on, and compress it until the drug is delivered: it's even got an integrated alert system to check you've not ruptured a vein, and a built-in tamper warning. It's now being patented, so it's a product we might actually see for real sometime. [Medgadget]