A radical plan for transplanting a head onto someone else’s body is set to be announced. But is such ethically sensitive surgery even feasible?It’s heady stuff. The world’s first attempt to transplant a human head will be launched this year at a surgical conference in North America.
The idea was first proposed in 2013 by Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. He wants to use the surgery to extend the lives of people whose muscles and nerves have degenerated or whose organs are riddled with cancer. Now he claims the major hurdles, such as fusing the spinal cord and preventing the body’s immune system from rejecting the head, are surmountable, and the surgery could be ready as early as 2017.
The first successful head transplant, in which one head was replaced by another, was carried out in 1970.
A team transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another. They didn’t attempt to join the spinal cords, though, so the monkey couldn’t move its body, but it was able to breathe with artificial assistance. The monkey lived for nine days until its immune system rejected the head. Although few head transplants have been carried out since, many of the surgical procedures involved have progressed.
So, how will this be done?

The recipient’s head will moved onto the donor body and the two ends of the spinal cord – which resemble two densely packed bundles of spaghetti – are fused together. To achieve this, the team intends to flush the area with a chemical called polyethylene glycol, and follow up with several hours of injections of the same stuff. Just like hot water makes dry spaghetti stick together, polyethylene glycol encourages the fat in cell membranes to mesh.
Next, the muscles and blood supply would be sutured and the recipient kept in a coma for three or four weeks to prevent movement. Implanted electrodes would provide regular electrical stimulation to the spinal cord, because research suggests this can strengthen new nerve connections.
When the recipient wakes up, it predicts they (recipient) would be able to move and feel their face and would speak with the same voice. Physiotherapy would enable the person to walk within a year. And according to Sergio Canavero, several people have already volunteered to get a new body.
The trickiest part will be getting the spinal cords to fuse. Polyethylene glycol has been shown to prompt the growth of spinal cord nerves in animals, and the ambitious team intends to use brain-dead organ donors to test the technique.
If polyethylene glycol doesn’t work, there are other options Canavero could try. Injecting stem cells or olfactory ensheathing cells – self-regenerating cells that connect the lining of the nose to the brain – into the spinal cord, or creating a bridge over the spinal gap using stomach membranes have shown promise in helping people walk again after spinal injury. Although unproven, Canavero says the chemical approach is the simplest and least invasive.
But what about the prospect of the immune system rejecting the alien tissue? Robert White’s monkey died because its head was rejected by its new body. Are we prepared for a change of “head”?

DIGITAL TATTOO LETS YOU CONTROL DEVICES WITH MIND POWER ALONE
What’s on your mind? Anyone can buy a headset that reads the electrical activity of their brain. It’s called an electro-encephalo-gram, or EEG, and you can use it to control devices with the power of your mind. But there’s a drawback: they don’t work when the wearer is moving and they look silly, so no one wants to wear them.
The solution could be a kind of EEG system that does away with the cumbersome electrodes, annoying gels and wires of its predecessors, replacing them with a flexible electronic skin that conforms to the body. It promises to let us monitor our brains discreetly 24 hours a day, and can be worn continuously for two weeks, staying put whether you’re swimming, running or sleeping. Comprising just a small patch of gold electrodes on and behind the ear, it beats the existing tech.
To test it, the team looked at their system’s performance in tasks that clinical EEG devices usually handle. For example, volunteers were able to spell out the word “computer” on a screen in front of them using their brains’ electrical activity.
Their stick-on EEG was wired up to a computer for the tests, but the team is working on wireless transmission of data and power, something they have already achieved in other devices.
The focus is on medical applications to begin with – “EEG is important in detecting seizures – particularly in premature babies. But the fact that it can sit discreetly behind an ear means that all kinds of other applications are feasible. No one wants to wear a headset constantly, but applying a hidden electronic tattoo once every two weeks is more acceptable.

DIGITAL CLOCK WON’T LOSE OR GAIN ONE SECOND IN 15 BILLION YEARS
With the advent of Internet-connected phones, computers, and other devices, it’s become something of a non-issue to worry about whether it keeps time properly. Now it’s down to edge cases, such as an old car I had with a specific model-year problem that caused the dashboard clock to gain roughly 10 minutes every month. And I still find the occasional PC or Mac that loses track of time gradually if the Internet sync is turned off.
Meanwhile, the tech world has been working on maintaining and improving the best time-keeping devices on the planet. And it seems we may have a new record, with the latest modification to a strontium lattice atomic clock allowing for some incredible precision: It won’t lose or gain one second in some 15 billion years. For context, that’s slightly longer than our universe has existed.
So what does this mean exactly? The team working on the clock measures its accuracy by tracking how closely it nears the resonant frequency where the strontium atoms oscillate between two distinctly different energy levels. The clock is now accurate enough to measure extremely small changes in the passage of time and the force of gravity at different heights, as per Einstein’s general theory of relativity — the clock will tick ever so slightly faster at higher elevations. The performance means that we can measure the gravitational shift when you raise the clock just 2cm on the Earth’s surface!
The improvements included two platinum resistance thermometers surrounding the atoms, and now include measurements from an incredibly stable laser to track electron movement. Today, the clock contains a “few thousand atoms of strontium held in an optical lattice,” a 30-by-30-micrometer column of about 400 regions formed by an intense red laser light at the frequency that prompts the switch in energy levels. Every second, strontium “ticks” 430 trillion times. And thanks to a radiation shield around the atom chamber, the clock can sit in a relatively normal space.
As you can imagine, this race to build the most accurate clock ever is actually a thing, and it’s been going on for some time. Back in February, a team of researchers in Poland at the National Laboratory for Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (KL FAMO) made similar claims about their own four-room-wide timepiece. In the end, the more accurate we can build a clock, the better we can make global positioning systems (GPS) — as well as improved 3D measurements of the shape of the Earth with more frequent geodetic updates, and more advanced communication networks.