DARPA’s Brain-controlled Prosthetic Arm and a Bionic Hand That Can Touch. A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel - News - Gadgets & Tech. The patient is an unnamed man in his 20s living in Rome who lost the lower part of his arm following an accident, said Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The wiring of his new bionic hand will be connected to the patient’s nervous system with the hope that the man will be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receiving touch signals from the hand’s skin sensors. Dr Micera said that the hand will be attached directly to the patient’s nervous system via electrodes clipped onto two of the arm’s main nerves, the median and the ulnar nerves. This should allow the man to control the hand by his thoughts, as well as receiving sensory signals to his brain from the hand’s sensors.
It will effectively provide a fast, bidirectional flow of information between the man’s nervous system and the prosthetic hand. “This is real progress, real hope for amputees. “The idea would be that it could deliver two or more sensations. A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel - News - Gadgets & Tech. The world's most advanced Prosthetic Hand - bebionic. Glass - Home. Cyborg. A lab grown Rat Brain fly's a Air-force fighter jet. 3D-printed cyborg muscle produces artificial heartbeat. Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV You might expect a robot's heartbeat to be a metallic ticking. But the pulsing in this video isn't completely artificial: it's powered by living material. Created by Peter Walters from the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, and colleagues, the pump uses the gas released by live yeast to generate pressure and distend a membrane, turning it into an artificial muscle.
A valve - activated by electricity produced by a microbial fuel cell - controls the movement of the membrane. It opens to release pressure when the muscle is fully expanded, allowing it to shrink back to its resting state again to begin another cycle. Walters says that using yeast allows a lot of pressure to be generated quickly.
The downside is the pong: "With the live yeast, the laboratory smells like a brewery," he says. Getting rid of the waste that the yeast produces is also a challenge. In the future, the robotic pulsing could be used in art and design.