A great advance but it obviously needs more work. One motion at a time is a significant limitation.

Proof that we can still do good things with technology.

Now if we can only make a street-legal pirate...

I welcome our cyborg overlords.

Thanks for posting this. Amid the gloom we see every day, even here; applied physics and these doctors are a real bright spot. Kind of gives one hope for the rest of us.

We all know the real benefit; banging a bunch of broads into SciFi

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time! Thanks Amy! Especially seeing Mr. Baugh's expressions and body language as he's working with the new limbs, I could feel that sense of accomplishment and renewed pride in himself. A very nice treat to start my day with!

☑ Ppen at December 19, 2014 7:30 AM

Say "Johns Hopkins" to most people and they think of the medical school. But the Applied Physics Lab does amazing science and tech work. I've worked with them on several projects and they are all kinds of awesone.

Ppen: "We all know the real benefit..."

Wow! Eventually they'll probably cover the mechanical arms and hands with a pliable, flesh-like material. Imagine what could be done! An electromechanical hand could be made to do anything any machine or battery powered electrical appliance can do. Movements no human hand would be capable of.

> Movements no human hand would
> be capable of.

Build me a left like his.

(Steel strings: The hired help's playing vinyl.)

Also... I mean, neurology... Y'know...

They shuffled the nerves in his chest, OK? Nerves which over decades had accelerated their sensitivity to fulfill the synaptic bandwidth formerly consumed by his arms. That's what human bodies do when something goes away; the neurological connections are irretrievably offered to whatever nearby currents might make use of them.

We can be certain this guy wasn't kidding when he said this procedure was painful. I don't even like looking at his eyes while he talks about it. I can't imagine the suffering, and he didn't have to. Still, we have to sympathize with these innovative doctors, who didn't get into the business to torture people. For now, they have to move our nerves to work with naive technology.

Stevie Wonder has two kinds of blindness, both since birth; one eye has cataracts, and I've forgotten what the other problem is. Perhaps both conditions can be treated in adults nowadays, but it doesn't matter. He hadn't learned to see by the time he was three or four, so his neurological connections had be spent on other things.

So I'm surprised they took an older man for this research. Perhaps they'd know he could be stoic about the sacrifices... But even with the surgery, I doubt he'd be as able to develop the artificial dexterity as well as would almost anyone younger, certainly a young child.

Itzhak Perlman was on the Donahue daytime talk show once... He charmed the Hell out of the audience of housewives. Many of them asked about the children in their families, asking whether they could hope to be similarly brilliant violinists. "Twelve isn't too late to start, is it? 14? 16?"

"Sorry," he replied... For an instrument as weird and demanding as the fiddle, you've got to start in grade school, or you won't grow into the necessary posture.

When these devices begin to hit their stride, they'll almost certainly be of greatest benefit young children.

(I remember there was once some sort of artificial arm-contraption that was operated by the tongue... Which, as we have all been shown, can readily flex and adapt for graceful work in all sorts of novel contexts.)

Also: Yes— For the first time since about 2007, I actually watched an Amy video, rather than skipping that part to get to the comment candy.