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In addition, the technique, which uses a combination of electrode leads and silicon polymers, could be used to develop synthetic muscles to control other parts of the body. The new procedure is described in an article in the January-February issue of the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery
It's amazing what Democratic Scientists can do these days.
Evidently.It's amazing what Democratic Scientists can do these days.
Is it too much to ask you to leave partisan hackery out of the science forum?
☭proletarian☭;1915581 said:In addition, the technique, which uses a combination of electrode leads and silicon polymers, could be used to develop synthetic muscles to control other parts of the body. The new procedure is described in an article in the January-February issue of the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery
Artificial muscles restore ability to blink, save eyesight
Combined with artificial materials that mimic bone and tendons and advancement in interfacing electronics with the nervous system, it might not be long before artificial limbs are nearly indiscernible from the tissues they replaced.
More than 50 amputees worldwide, many of them military veterans whose limbs were lost in combat, have received such devices since they were first developed by a US doctor, Todd Kuiken, in 2002. The arm uses technology called Targeted Muscle Reinervation, which works by rerouting brain signals from nerves that were severed in the injury to muscles that are working and intact. What we do is use the nerves that are still left, Kuiken said. Muscle becomes the biological amplifier.
Glen Lehman, a retired US sergeant who lost his arm in Iraq, demonstrated the latest technology at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. It feels great, it feels intuitive. It is a lot better than the other prosthetic I have now, said Lehman, whose forearm and elbow were blown off in a Baghdad grenade attack in 2008. The other one is still controlled by muscle impulse, you just flex muscle to make it move, it is not intuitive. This arm is more trained to me, whereas the other arm I had to train to it. It does feel like my own hand.
Lehman demonstrated for reporters how he could pinch his finger and thumb together, lift his forearm and bend his elbow, and turn his wrist just by thinking about those actions. Kuiken said more advances, such as the ability to transfer some sensation to the limb, are being studied in the lab, but have not yet made it to patients. Drawbacks include the inability to sense how hard the battery-powered prosthetic hand is squeezing, but Kuiken said scientists are working on ways to improve the technology with added sensors.
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Picking up something as delicate as a strawberry could easily turn the fruit to mush because there's no way to gauge how much pressure is being exerted. So scientists at Stanford have created a flexible fabric-like skin embedded with sensors that mimic some of natural skin’s sensory functions. The results of the study are published in this week's issue of the journal Science. The researchers tested a two-part device. The top layer senses pressure and translates it into digital signals. The bottom layer sends the electrical pulses to nerve cells, which transmit the information to the brain which recognizes them as touch.
Model robotic hand with artificial mechano-receptors
In tests, mice cells were able to register the pressure exerted by the artificial skin. “The end goal of this would certainly be to make sensors that can be integrated with the human body in order to make prosthetic devices," said Alex Chortos, one of the lead researchers. "So we want prosthetic devices that can feel touch the same way that humans do.” The artificial skin would also be able to respond to the amount of force being applied, noting the difference between a caress and a poke.
Chortos says researchers hope to go beyond the sensation of touch. “There are a few other things like vibration and temperature and stretching, and those other things are opportunities for future work in this field," he said. Scientists hope that perhaps in the next three to five years, they will be able to create artificial skin that would allow artificial limb wearers to feel sensation, from a handhold to the heat of a coffee cup.
Researchers Make Synthetic Skin That Adds Touch to Artificial Limbs
Researchers on Thursday said these animals, when navigating murky freshwater environments like rivers and streams, can turn on an enzyme in their eyes that supercharges their ability to see infrared light, sharpening their vision in the muck and mire. The enzyme, called Cyp27c1, is related to vitamin A, which was already known to promote good vision, particularly in low light.
Critical component
Vitamin A is a critical component of the visual pigment in eyes that facilitates sight. With the enzyme, fish and amphibians can tune their vision to match the environmental light. Chemically, Cyp27c1 makes a small modification on the molecule of the form of Vitamin A called Vitamin A1 to turn it into Vitamin A2, shifting sensitivity of eye photoreceptors to longer wavelengths such as red and infrared light. This explains how freshwater fish like salmon can smoothly adjust their vision as they exit ocean waters, where the light environment is blue-green, and enter inland waterways, where the light environment veers to the red and infrared end of the spectrum.
Zebrafish in water at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Water Development Institute. Scientists found zebrafish are capable of activating an enzyme that bost their vision.
Vision on land, in water
This ability is also valuable for amphibians that switch from vision on land to underwater. "Fresh water tends to be more turbid or murkier than these other environments. This murkiness filters out shorter wavelengths of light – blue, greens, and yellows – leaving mainly longer wavelengths – red and infrared light," said pathologist and vision scientist Dr. Joseph Corbo of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "We don't know when in the course of evolution the Cyp27c1 enzyme first acquired the function it has today," Corbo said. "However, the fact that the same enzyme is used by both fish and amphibians suggests that this function originated hundreds of millions of years ago."
The researchers first pinpointed the enzyme in a common laboratory fish called the zebrafish, then found it in bullfrogs. Humans possess a copy of the gene that controls this enzyme, but it is not active in our eyes. Corbo said the enzyme possibly could be used in conjunction with optogenetic devices, which allow scientists to turn the activity of neurons on and off with light, in a new approach to treat neurological and blinding diseases. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.
Scientists Learn How Some Fish Can Supercharge Their Vision
