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Innovation

Melding Man and Machine

Before Hugh Herr became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a promising rock climber. However, at age 17, he lost both his legs below the knee to frostbite after being trapped in a blizzard during a climb. Since then, he has dedicated himself to developing prosthetic legs that function and feel like natural limbs. His efforts appear to have succeeded.

State-of-the-art prosthetic limbs can help individuals with amputations achieve a natural walking gait, but they don't provide full neural control. Instead, they rely on robotic sensors and controllers which do not allow for much agility.

MIT researchers, in collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have developed a new surgical intervention and neuroprosthetic interface that allows a prosthetic leg to be driven by the body’s own nervous system. This surgery reconnects muscles in the residual limb, enabling patients to receive proprioceptive feedback about their prosthetic limb’s position.

In the study, published in Nature Medicine, seven patients underwent this surgery. The MIT team found they could walk faster, avoid obstacles, and climb stairs more naturally than those with traditional amputations.

“This is the first prosthetic study in history that shows a leg prosthesis under full neural modulation, where a biomimetic gait emerges. No one has been able to show this level of brain control that produces a natural gait, where the human’s nervous system is controlling the movement, not a robotic control algorithm,” says Herr, who is the co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT and senior author of the study.

Patients experienced less pain and muscle atrophy after the surgery, known as the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI). So far, about 60 patients worldwide have received this surgery, also applicable for arm amputations.

The researchers found that patients with the AMI surgery could more precisely control their amputated limb muscles. These muscles produced electrical signals similar to those from intact limbs. Encouraged by those results, the researchers investigated whether the electrical signals could not only generate commands for a prosthetic limb but also provide the user with feedback about the limb’s position in space. This proprioceptive feedback would enable the wearer to adjust their gait voluntarily as needed.

This theory was validated when individuals with the AMI interface walked faster, navigated obstacles more easily, and exhibited more natural movements than those with traditional prosthetics. Despite providing less than 20 percent of the normal sensory feedback, the AMI interface enabled natural biomimetic behaviors to emerge.

Culture

Amazing and Impossible…

This is a fascinating video about building a cathedral without science or math…

It sounds impossible, but you might be surprised. Our modern idea of engineering is quite a bit different than it was when some of the most beautiful and impressive structures in the world were built.

As someone who is neither an engineer nor an architect, this video thoroughly fascinated me.

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World News

World’s Oldest Narrative Cave Painting

Previously a painting of a Sulawesi warty pig on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi had become the oldest known cave painting, dating back 45,000 years.

This record has now been broken by another painting on the same island. The new discovery, a hunting scene featuring human-bird hybrids from 49,000 BCE, is now the oldest narrative story depicted through art.

Scientists from Griffith University in Australia discovered the painting in 2017 while surveying Sulawesi's caves. They used a technique called laser-ablation U-series imaging to date the painting. Sulawesi's unique climate and topography have preserved these cave paintings and their pigments for tens of thousands of years longer than those found on other continents. Water seeping through the karst rock forms protective calcite layers over the pigments.

The laser measures the age of the initial calcite layer closest to the paint. This technique allowed scientists to reassess and often date the paintings thousands of years older than previously thought.

The research indicates that humans on Sulawesi were painting for ceremonial purposes over 50,000 years ago. The caves, difficult to access, were likely used for specific purposes linked to ceremonies, according to study co-author Renaud Joannes-Boyau.

The painting, believed to depict a hunting narrative with human-animal hybrids, suggests imaginative storytelling rather than a factual record of hunts. This rare representation of human figures and storytelling from 51,200 years ago is a significant discovery, as Joannes-Boyau noted to NBC.

This is very fascinating, but I think there could be another explanation that they are not considering. While humans certainly do like telling stories, if the Internet has taught me anything, it is that sometimes humans just like to joke around. I think it is entirely possible that cave man 1 said to cave man 2, “Haha, would if there was a bird man” and then drew it on the wall. But hey, I am no expert.

Mind Stretchers

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What part of a clock is always old?

Answers to yesterday’s Mind Stretchers:
I am four times as old as my daughter. In 20 years time I shall be twice as old as her. How old are we now? - 40 and 10 (60 and 30 in 20 years)

Linda Runatz got the correct answer first!

Be the first to send us the correct answer for today’s mind stretcher for a shout-out with the answer tomorrow. Just send us the answer and your name to [email protected] or reply to the email.

If you have any uplifting stories and experience you might want to share, send those over to [email protected] for the chance to be featured.