An Italian research team, lead by neurologist Paolo Maria Rossini, created the LifeHand, the latest in a long line of robotic prostheses. The team performed microsurgery to attach the hand 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello, who lost much of his left hand in a car accident. Petruzziello apparently mastered the hand in just a few days, and it responded to 95 percent of his mental commands. He claims that he also received incredible sensory feedback from the hand, even registering needle pinpricks.

Several weeks ago, another team reported successful experiments with an artificial hand that provided sensory feedback, but the LifeHand team claims that the experiments with Petruzziello represent the first time a subject has made achieved such complex movements with a prosthetic using only their mind. It's also the longest a subject has worn such a prosthetic; Petruzziello wore the LifeHand for a month. More research is needed, however, before a prosthetic can be tested long-term.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the LifeHand is that it didn't require Petruzziello to learn any new neurological tricks. He simply sends the same sorts of signals to the robotic hand as he sends his right hand, and gets nearly the same result.

The bionic hand controlled by thoughts [Sun via DVICE]

A team of scientists in Italy and Sweden have been developing a sophisticated robotic hand, with fingertip sensors that feed directly into the arm's nerves. The overall look of the hand may be more like Nina Sharp's in Fringe than Luke Skywalker's in The Empire Strikes Back, but it does allow the wearer to actually feel the objects the hand touches. Just as the brain transmits data to robotic limbs — ordering them to grasp and release — so do the receptors feed data back to the brain. It not only returns to the wearer the sensation that they had lost, it likely also makes grabbing and manipulating objects an easier and more precise task.

You can see the robotic hand in action below, as a 22 year-old who lost his hand to cancer tries out the hand and its sensitive fingertips for the first time:

New robotic hand 'can feel' [BBC]

Cyberdyne showed off these HAL robot suits today at the company's new R&D center in Tsukuba City. Mass production of our new overlords the suits will begin Oct. 10. The suits actually read brain signals and figure out how you're going to move, then they assist with motion, for people with gait disorders or seniors. The suits will go for U.S. $2,200 a month, or $1,500 for just one leg. Top image by AP/Kasahara. Other images by Yoshikazu Tsuno, AFP/Getty.

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• Geordi LaForge's visor: When Star Trek launched The Next Generation in XXX, one of the most striking visuals was Levar Burton wearing what looked like a car air filter over his eyes. The visor allowed his character, who was born blind, to see in the infrared spectrum, at the microscopic level, and to detect energy levels. He could even detect vital signs and tell if someone was lying, making him handy to have around. However, he must have been happy when the First Contact film came around, because he didn't have to wear that wacky visor anymore.
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• Predator-Vision: In the Predator films, the titular aliens have evolved to the point where they have developed their own infrared vision. However, they've invented helmets with enhancements that take the vision even further, letting them see with X-Ray vision, to detect radioactive sources, auto-target, and even (in the Aliens Vs. Predator films) to see with sort kind of electro-magnetic vision that allows them to track Aliens, who don't show up on infrared scanners. While those helmets looked sleek and cool with awesome functions, they still resembled fugly crab-aliens underneath.
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• Luke Skywalker's binoculars: When Luke was trapped on Tatooine as a teenager, he had loads of time to daydream and imagine what life was like on other worlds. So he'd frequently scan the sky and the horizon with his binoculars, hoping to find some sort of excitement. Plus, they came in handy when R2D2 and C3P0 went missing. No idea what all the different numbers and gauges mean, besides distance (maybe Luke had ganked his Uncle's golf binocs) but the view through them was 1977 gee-whiz tech.
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• Cyclop's visor from The X-Men: This special visor which was outfitted with ruby quartz lenses that have the ability to block his optic blasts. So, it might not allow him to see things closer or at the molecular level, but it does keep him from blowing the hell out of everyone and everything he looks at. If you ask us, that's not a bad enhancement. Later he was able to sport some ruby quartz sunglasses, although that sort of makes his "Cyclops" name a bit useless.
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• The glasses in William Gibson's Virtual Light: In this novel, the characters are trying to track down a pair of glasses that you can't see through. Instead, they use EMP drivers to send signals directly to your optic nerve. As a result, they allow you to see without having photos hit your retinas, and they can also pump more information into the signal. For instance, one of the characters describes that the glasses cost about the same as a "small Japanese car", and that when you look at things through them, "Put 'em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that." One pair to go, please.
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• Nanotech eyes in Deus Ex: In Warren Spector's dystopian future video game, you play a "nanotech operative" who has the ability to upgrade and enhance his body in the field, which you'll have to do in order to complete the game. One of the coolest modifications was upgrading your eyes so you could see in the dark and through walls. This usually comes in handy when people are trying to kill you, as you can imagine.
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• The HUD in Down and Out in the Magic Kindom: In Cory Doctorow's future, people live with onboard computers in their brains that allow them to make phone calls, record their daily lives through sight and sound, and provide heads-up displays in their eyes where they can check the time, read files, surf the web, and check other people's "whuffie" scores. Whuffie basically tells you "how cool is this person?" and becomes the currency of the day. As interesting as that is, we're most exciting by surfing the net on our eyeballs.
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• The sunglasses in They Live: In John Carpenter's "I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum" humans vs. aliens film, former pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper finds a pair of very special sunglasses. They let him see the world as it actually is with fugly aliens controlling the human race, subliminal messages they keep them sedate and to "Obey." Of course, Roddy isn't too happy with this, and goes on a killing spree.
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• The Bionic Eye: In both the Six Million Dollar Man and the newly rebooted The Bionic Woman (sorry old Bionic woman, you got stuck with a Bionic ear), the main characters are both outfitted with bionic eyes that give them the ability to zoom in on subjects and see into the infrared. Not one was this one of the coolest Bionic upgrades in my opinion, but it also made for the best action figure I ever lost. Colonel Steve Austin's action figure had a big hole in his head that you could look through to "simulate" bionic vision. My parents probably thought I'd glued that thing to my head. Bionic eyes or bionic contact lenses, let's hope you get here soon.
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Bionic Commando was originally released back in 1987 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan, featuring "Rad" as the bionically gifted hero. He had to use his arm to fend off scored of Neo Nazis and defeat a resurrected Adolf Hitler as the final boss. When they brought this game over to American, however, they changed the Nazis into "Badds" and Adolf because "Master-D," who sounds like a rapper.

Capcom's updated version of the game features the return of Nathan "Rad" Spencer, his arm and a real backstory. It's ten years later, and he's been betrayed by his government and sentenced to death. The game will be fully 3D and features Mike Patton, the former lead singer of Faith No More, as the voice Rad. If Rad ever once says, "You want it all but you can't have it," then I swear to god I'm hurling my controller through the window.

Anyhow, here's what Rad's bionic-upgrade arm can do:

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• It has a grappling hook attached, letting him swing across gaps a scale buildings. Which comes in useful because in the original game, you couldn't even jump. Maybe those bionic arms are really heavy.
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• He can whip barrels, crates, debris, and other things you find scattered around in video games at his enemies, using that hook-arm attachment like Indy.
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• He can deflect bullets with the arm, Wonder Woman-style.
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• In the original game he could use it to tap into the enemy's lines of communication, but it's not clear if they'll be bringing that over. It's either that, or slip a tire iron inside, in case he needs to tighten anything up.
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• In the novelization of the original game, the arm could do a lot more, like throw flamed and get people to tell the truth. Although it's unclear how he did that, except maybe by threatening to crush their balls with his steel hand.
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The environments in this game look especially pretty, in a sort of interstate dystopian freeway in disrepair kind of way. According to the developers, "On the very day of Spencer's execution, terrorists detonate a massive experimental weapon in Ascension City, unleashing an intense earthquake that has turned the city into rubble and wiped out its population." In other words, traffic is really going to be a bitch.

Famous names: Lee Majors, Richard Anderson, Martin E. Brooks, Harve Bennett

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Lindsay Wagner appeared in a series of episodes of season two as Jaime Sommers, who goes skydiving with Steve and becomes horribly injured. She gets her own bionic limbs and Steve decides to marry her, the only woman who can keep up with him. But then her body rejects her implants and she dies of a blood clot... only to come back to "life" shortly afterwards with no memory of her romance with Steve. Wagner went on to star in her own show, The Bionic Woman.

Change of pace: The show started as a series of TV movies, produced by Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson, which portrayed Steve as a snarky, reluctant superspy. But the actual series, produced by StarTrek II: Wrath Of Khan producer Bennett, was less James Bond-y and more friendly.

Memorable product tie-in: The classic Steve Austin action figure, wearing his red astronaut jumpsuit and featuring a big hole in the back of his head so you can look through his "bionic eye." The bionic right arm, controlled by a button in his back,could lift objects weighing up to two pounds.

The Six Million Dollar Man: Episode Guide