bionic amputees and fake muscles
January 12th, 2005Two interesting articles about the current state and future of bionics: this story about war amputees getting high-tech arm and leg prosthetics, and this article about scientists trying to create artificial muscles that convert chemical energy to mechanical energy. In the next 10-20 years, bionics should become a HUGE industry, not just to replace lost arms and legs, but to replace lost hearing, eyesight, and even memory and neural functions. Once brain-machine interface technology matures and becomes more commonplace, the sky will be the limit for what lost human functionality can be restored, and even (gasp!) augmented.
