Monkeys are paving the way for future. A report in NY Times:
If Idoya could talk, she would have plenty to boast about.
On Thursday, the 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity.
...
These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person's brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a kind of external skeleton, worn on the legs.
As a frustrated primate forced by evolution to walk on my knuckles, I'd love to get rid of my arms and legs - wonderfully dexterous, but they are ultimately an evolutionary throwback. In their place I'd love to have something more sensibly designed.
Imagine an advertisement that offers to replace your filthy bioware: arms, legs, eyes, hearts, penis that break down at the most inopportune moment with exquisitely crafted technological ones that run on reprogrammable hardware. Dreams of Utopia! Of course, there are a lot of hurdles to cross before we can live in that future. But a man can dream, can't he.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Two hundred pound robot lumbering along on tread mill, doing the bidding of a monkey several thousand miles away.An international and interdisciplinary team of scientists have developed a robot that will carry out physical activities in imitation of the activities of a monkey. The monkey and the…
This film clip describes how neuroscientists have controlled the movements of a humanoid robot using a brain-computer interface (BCI) embedded in the motor cortex of a monkey.
I've written about BCIs before, so I won't go into details here. For more information about how they work, follow the…
'If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments
merely to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own
homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which…
Researchers from the University of Washington have demonstrated that paralysed monkeys can move using a simple neuroprosthesis consisting of an external electrical circuit which connects individual neurons in the motor cortex to muscles in the arm.
Similar prostheses have been used to move…