Month: December 2013

After losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle accident four-and-a-half years ago, 32-year-old Zac Vawter has been fitted with an artificial limb that uses neurosignals from his upper leg muscles to control the prosthetic knee and ankle. The motorized limb is the first thought-controlled bionic leg, scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago reported Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is a groundbreaking development,” says lead author Levi Hargrove, a biomedical engineer and research scientist at RIC. “It allows people to seamlessly transition between walking along level ground and going up and down stairs and slopes.”

Until now, only thought-controlled bionic arms have been available to amputees.

When Vawter thinks he wants to move his leg, the brain signal travels down his spinal cord and through peripheral nerves and is picked up by electrodes in the bionic leg…

Virtual Reality needs a controller? How about mind controlled?

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/first-mind-controlled-bionic-leg-groundbreaking-advance-8C11257732

We lost the cats to the Roombas, and the dogs to the pointing PeopleBots. Now, it seems that robots are casting a spell on curious chimps, too.

When 16 chimps from the Yerkes National Primate Center in Georgia encountered Robota, a doll who made pre-recorded chimp sounds from her chest, they tried to befriend her and talk to her, and they even banged on their cages to invite her to play.

“In one case, a chimp laughed at the robot while gesturing ‘play,'” Marina Davila-Ross, a psychology lecturer at the University of Portsmouth and part of the team who watched the chimps interact with Robota, wrote in Ars Technica.

Two chimpanzees, Faye and Jarred, offered the robot “toys,” she writes. Almost all the chimps tried to communicate with the bot using gestures or facial expressions, Davila-Ross and her co-authors note in a new study in Animal Cognition.

Quite the charmer: Robota doll befriended chimps at the Yerkes National Primate Center.

University of Portsmouth

Quite the charmer: Robota the doll befriended chimps at the Yerkes National Primate Center.

The chimps were particularly interested when the bot – to the extent that it could – mimicked apelike movements. They were less interested when her movements seemed more human.

For anyone who’s surprised that our primate relatives seem smitten with a robotic playmate, remember that we form bonds with robots, too…

Makes the concept of ALF’s more plausible doesn’t it?

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/chimps-go-ape-over-sweet-talking-robot-8C11406920

Video games have long promised to offer their players “immersive experiences,” but full-blown virtual reality (the holodeck or the matrix) was still a fantasy. Now with the Oculus Rift headset on the horizon, that’s no longer the case: soon gamers will be able to slip on a pair of high-tech goggles and truly be immersed in a virtual world.

The only problem is: How will gamers play when they get there? With the Oculus Rift still in development for a full consumer launch, developers are finally realizing the deficiency of contemporary controls. In this brave new world where “The Matrix” suddenly doesn’t seem like too remote a possibility, the standard joysticks and gamepads that gamers have been using for decades are defunct…

https://www.nbcnews.com/technology/virtual-reality-gaming-nearly-here-we-just-need-right-controller-8C11331493

Software billionaire Paul Allen is already using his riches to further brain science, spaceflight, rock ‘n’ roll history (and oh, the Seattle Seahawks, too) but he’s not done yet: Artificial intelligence and cell biology are the next big ideas on the agenda for the guy who calls himself “Idea Man.”…

OK, doesn’t this “idea” sound like a movie we made? 😉

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/next-big-ideas-idea-man-paul-allen-i-cell-biology-8C11284483