Researchers develop a new blueprint for touch-sensitive prosthetic limbs. The findings could someday convey real-time sensory information for amputees.
Artificial sensors in a prosthetic hand allows rhesus macaques to sense tactile stimulus, according to a new study. A similar device could be used in human trials within the next year, researchers hope.
Researchers electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats for the first time, enabling them to communicate directly to solve simple behavioral puzzles. A further test of this work successfully linked the brains of two animals thousands of miles apart - one in Durham, N.C., and one in Natal, Brazil.
Building a robotic bat wing, researchers have uncovered flight secrets of real bats: the function of ligaments, the elasticity of skin, the structural support of musculature, skeletal flexibility, upstroke and downstroke.
Researchers have given rats the ability to "touch" infrared light by fitting them with an infrared detector wired to microscopic electrodes implanted in the part of the mammalian brain that processes tactile information. The study demonstrated that a novel sensory input could be processed by a cortical region specialized in another sense without "hijacking" the function of this brain area.
Scientists used an electronic prosthetic system to tap into existing circuitry in the brain at the cellular level and record the firing patterns of multiple neurons in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in decision-making. They then “played” that recording back to the same brain area to electrically stimulate decision-based neural activity. Not only did it restore function, in some cases, it also improved it.
