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Biotech Science

Robots: The New Cure for Baldness 38

Posted by timothy from the i'm-not-just-a-member-i'm-6555xyz dept.
juice writes "The NYTimes has a story on robots that will one day conduct hair-replacement surgery. Currently, it's a grueling, repetitive, 8 hours process. Perfect for a mindless drone."
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Robots: The New Cure for Baldness More

Robots: The New Cure for Baldness

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  • I guess that robots will have all the jobs (Score:5, Funny)

    by m_chan ( 95943 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @07:08PM (#6969786) Homepage
    "Currently, it's a grueling, repetitive, 8 hours process. Perfect for a mindless drone"
    That describes just about every job I have ever worked.

  • First Bender (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First Bender reference, get it while it's hot!
  • forget the hair replacing robots. I'm waiting for the human destroying robots.
  • Google news link [google.com]

    -Adam

  • Making my own... (Score:3, Funny)

    by psyconaut ( 228947 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @07:59PM (#6970182)
    ...out of Lego as I type this! ;-)

    -psy

  • i dunno (Score:2, Insightful)

    by danratherfan ( 624592 )
    by the time such a robot can be developed will people still need to have their heads butchered to cure baldness? I wouldn't invest stock in them just yet.
  • that's exactly what mankind needs. A perfect head of hair. What defines a person's intelect more than the a good rug on their cranium?

    It's funny. At least chuckle.

  • Perhaps there is some evolutionary reason for hair loss... I mean, isn't hair kind of a "vestigial organ" from when humans were furry? Perhaps now that humans wear clothes, hats, and etcetera, even the remaining hair is becoming useless, outside of vanity purposes.

    There's also another possibility. In nature, creatures tend to send "signals" that they've reached a certain stage of development. This is probably why humans develop pubic hair; it's the body's way of saying that it is physically ready to

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:bigger questions... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 )
      Speaking broadly, things that happen past the age of reproduction don't affect evolution or natural selection much, as the owner of the genes has either bred or not by then.

      Some exceptions exist for organisms which form societies, as ours do, but even then, those are the exceptions, not the rule. I think "hair loss" is perfectly adequately explained as a mutation that got into the gene pool (and remember that humanity has gone through at least one very small bottleneck and possibly more then one; you can l
    • Isn't almost everything at this point a "vainity option" ? With today's Tom Sawyer, it's a freaking crime to DIE, so survival is pretty much taken care of.

    • Male pattern baldness is caused by certain men's hair follicles having a sensitivity to dihydrotestosterone (which is converted from testosterone by agents known as 5-alpha-reductates). The most popular non-topical anti-baldness drug on the market today, Propecia (Finasteride) works by blocking the 5-alpha-reductates to stop the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. The funny thing is, Propecia is simply a smaller dose of drug used to treat swollen prostates - you can get the drug, Proscar (a

  • We do have a product in your price range..... but any hair growth will be purely coincidental.

  • I always wished that they would research one of the original ways to cure balding. Dying in your teens. More dead teens have full heads of hair than geriatric men.

  • Some people are so damned lucky they only have alopaecia to worry about. Millions die, live in agony, go blind etc. for want of essential surgery, and yet all we can think of is pandering to our own vanity. Makes you think, doesn't it?
    • You'd have a point if people only worried about trivial things like hair loss. But they don't. They also worry about heart disease, the education of our children, the environment, the starving, the poor, the homeless, and all that other stuff you probably think is more important. That's the great thing about diversity: everyone does their own thing, and eventually everything gets some measure of attention. Including those things you think are important, but I don't.
    • I see your point.

      However, I would like to point out that you have it pretty darn good to, since you apparently not only can afford a computer and an internet connection, but you have the time (like me) to spend patrolling Slashdot.

  • I don't understand (Score:3, Funny)

    by pmz ( 462998 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2003 @10:08AM (#6975474) Homepage

    It's interesting how far people will go for very very superficial things like their hair. Just one more indication that we are more ape than most of us are willing to admit.

    By the way what's the difference between a monkey with a swollen ass and a woman with swollen tits? What the difference between a grunting bullfrog and a person with a loud car stereo? Hint: there is none (other than certain aspects of appearance, of course).
    • By the way what's the difference between a monkey with a swollen ass and a woman with swollen tits?

      If you haven't figured this one out yet, please, think of the children, and shoot yourself. The last thing we need is teenage boys getting hard-ons looking at monkeys, there's enough sick shit on the internet aleady.
      On a more serious side, this type of thing really shouldn't be too suprising. Most advances we humans have made can be linked back to procreation, and the continuance of the species in some w
      • I suppose it makes sense. Although I have a wife(so the whole getting laid thing is well sorted), I would like to make money - so I can stake a bigger teratorial claim I expect - or is that just so I can buy more geek things..
        I always wanted a big black room, with a black leather chair, TV wall, multi-keyboard console, and a white fluffy cat.
        No seriously- I build robots for learning - just for the pure tech factor of it. I have plans to build robots that will save money/lives etc - like my track bot des
    • What's the difference between kids having a farting contest and Harley riders trying to blow out everyone's eardrums?

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