I knew something was amiss when I slept through the beginning of an afternoon shift at work. The culprit seemed at first to be the torrential rainfall thundering through my window screen, blocking the noise of the streets, of alarms, of frantic phone calls from coworkers. Now I know it was and is in fact something else: monkeys have been controlling the third arm with their minds. AGAIN!
From New Scientist: “Monkeys can control a robot arm as naturally as their own limbs using only brain signals, a pioneering experiment has shown. The macaque monkeys could reach and grasp with the same precision as their own hand.
“It’s just as if they have a representation of a third arm,” says project leader Miguel Nicolelis, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Experts believe the experiment’s success bodes well for future devices for humans that are controlled solely by thought.”
Chilling quotation from the NYTIMES: “In the real world things don’t work as expected, the marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that,” said the paper’s senior author, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “But the monkeys’ brains adjusted; they were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.”
marshmallow is always sticking to my paw too. Never thought of cutting it off and using a oiled-prosthetic though. Thanks for the insight, 3rdarm.
Next on the discussion board is supernovas. I can feel it. No, seriously, I do have news about that.