monkeys

It's getting much harder to cheat at sports these days. Urine tests have been re-calibrated to look for the cream and the clear, blood tests check for the presence of excessive oxygen, and you spitballers? Yeah, they're on to you, too. But a new breakthrough in gene therapy may allow athletes to skip the steroids in favor of adding muscles from the DNA up.

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Cyborg monkeys surf on OLED pickles. Ships emit slime, and our own Mikey Sklar's Benz runs on vegetable oil. And a knife-wielding, thought-controlled robot still can't conquer Japan. This is the Future.

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Last year, a monkey managed to move a robot arm using nothing but its mind. The arm was wired to the monkey's brain, and the simian test subject maneuvered the arm as if it was its own appendage. Where do you go from there? Apparently, you go wireless.

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While robotic prosthetics controlled by electrical impulses from an amputee are nothing new, their range of motion and practicality in daily life have been particularly limited since they first appeared on the market. New research coming out of the University of Pittsburgh promises to change that, with a robotic arm capable of complex and subtle movements. The scientists behind the project successfully trained macaque monkeys to feed themselves by using the arm to reach out for an grab marshmallows without knocking them over. It sounds like an inconsequential task, but the hurdles between an arm on which the "hand" simply opens and closes and an arm with an articulated shoulder, elbow, and wrist, and a gripping hand working together with the brain have been not insignificant.

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