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]

Industrial designer Joanna Hawley decided to challenge the notions that prostheses need be purely functional – or that they should try to mimic biological limbs – by conceiving a prosthesis that is attractive and stylish in its own right:

Prosthetics generally lack humanity, style and grace. Often, they look much like landing gear and make the wearer uncomfortable, self aware, and sometimes depressed. By channeling the Eames' use materials and iconic style, we designed a leg with Steve McQueen in mind. We sought to convey a creative use of positive and negative space, a balance of materials and a reflection of the wearer.

Using the furniture designs of Charles and Ray Eames as an aesthetic model, Hawley and pre-med student Kayhan Haj-Ali-Ahmadi interviewed amputees, met with color specialists from make-up company Sephora, and scanned legs to achieve the proper proportions. The result: an individually tailored limb that does not look like a biological leg, but still meshes quite nicely with the human body, and hope for an aesthetically pleasing cyborg future.

[Eames-inspired Prosthetic Leg] via Yanko Design via William Gibson

Replacement joints have always been sprayed with a compound that helps trick the body into thinking that they are natural bone. But the new process, developed by Tel Aviv University Professor Noam Eliaz, uses electricity to charge the replacement joint, and the charged metal pulls the coating from an electrochemical bath, similar to the very old technology of electroplating.

This new coating method makes the applied synthetic tissue pretty much indistinguishable from actual bone tissue. This process tricks the body into thinking the replacement joint is actual bone and accepting the replacements much more easily. The team has reported 33% fewer complications with this new coating process.

And as these coatings improve, doctors will get closer and closer to being able to say "We can rebuild him. We have the technology." Or maybe to "upgrade" humanity into some sort of race of Cybermen...[via PhysOrg]

(Image: an electron microscope image of the synthetic coating, from AFTAU)

Even as CG threatens to overwhelm science fiction media, these artists use physical materials and ingenuity to create beings that are sometimes frightening, sometimes inviting, and always intriguing. Click the links to see dreamy-crawly galleries of what these artists have done:

Neill Gorton, Millennium FX

Optic Nerve Studios

Michael Westmore

Dave Elsey, The Jim Henson Creature Shop

Todd Masters, MastersFX

KNB EFX

Of course, we could take this in the exact opposite direction. How about a gene mod for blue skin? Maybe someone out there wants to osseointegrate an extra set of arms onto his torso. Right now, we're focused on replacing or repairing damaged parts, but how long before we start on the upgrades? This year we dealt with the question of whether an amputee athlete with prosthetic running legs had an unfair advantage over runners with just human legs. Are you feeling post-human yet? Image by: StudioCanal.

Surgery Will Put Dog With Amputated Leg Back On All Fours Again. [Science Daily]

Most robot "muscles" are actually motors, but to create more human-like movement, we need to use spring tension. Muscles do their work by shortening, not by rotating. Toads and chameleons can fire their tongues out to catch prey at amazing speed, producing force 700 times the animal's weight (watch some amazing video of this here). If we could make a robotic version, that would be one hell of a robo-crane kick.

Researchers like Professor Kiisa Nishikawa (pictured with a cane toad) at Northern Arizona University are studying animal muscles to try and improve prosthetic limbs for humans and to create more powerful and efficient mechanical devices. We're just waiting for the day when our robots can say:

01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101011 01100001 01110010 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101001 01110100

Toad research could leapfrog to new muscle model. [Northern Arizona University via EurekAlert!]

Herr says we're less than ten years away from the leg-swapping scenario, and even closer to bions that directly sample the signals our brains send to our limbs to move them. Check out his awesome video here, or read below for the coolest snippets:

Probably two years from now, I will have a device implanted into my body called bions that measure the extent that my spinal cord has activated the muscles in my biological leg. Those signals will be sent out to a robotic artificial ankle system. I will be able to think and move my ankle...[Herr lost his lower legs to frostbite when he was 15]

I believe in the next decade we will have artificial legs that are better than human legs for running. The best amputee runner for the 100-dash is only a second slower than the world record with biological legs, and that's just with carbon composite, dumb passive springs...

We'll see this gradual merging of the human and technology and what will come out of that is a hybrid human that's actually better, using certain metrics. As tissue engineering technologies progress, we can imagine eventually replacing certain components of the prosthesis with biological materials.

It'll be a future where, when we architect a machine we'll ask 'for this component, should we use skin or should we use steel or a composite? what should we use? Inevitably I believe we'll end up with hybrid devices because it won't always be optimal to use synthetic components, nor will it always be optimal to use biological components.

Sources: Technovelgy, MIT

Image: IGN.com