... extraordinary melding of man and machine proves that we finally have the technology to create real-life bionic humans. In the 1970s TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Major’s character had his body rebuilt using bionic technology, leaving him “better, stronger, faster”. Now, cutting-edge research is producing synthetic body parts to replace damaged tissues, limbs, organs and senses. In most cases it is used to improve a patient’s quality of life, but in others it is saving lives. ...
The article has several different bionic parts but I found the brain and muscle sections of most interest:
Dr Theodore Berger, from the University of Southern California, has been developing a device that can be implanted into the brain to restore memory functions, modelling the complex neural activity that takes place in the hippocampus, which is responsible for forming new memories.
The device – a microchip that encodes memories for storing elsewhere in the brain – has been tested using tissue from rats’ brains, and researchers are planning trials on live animals. They hope it will provide a way of restoring memory function in patients who have suffered damage to their hippocampus from a stroke, an accident or from Alzheimer’s disease.
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Scientists at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are aiming to develop an arm powered by bionic muscles made from these “electroactive polymers” that would be capable of winning an arm-wrestling contest. Dr Richard Baker, from the University of St Andrews, is also working with polymer gels, but hopes to produce material that will contract and expand in response to the kind of chemical signals that are found in the body.
... Scientists at the University of Texas have produced artificial muscles that are more than 100 times more powerful than natural muscle, using an elastic metal wire that bends when it is heated and returns to normal when cooled down.
via Bionic implants: 'We have the technology' - Telegraph.
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