One step closer to monkey robot domination:
With the probes inserted into the monkeys motor cortices, computer software was used to interpret the brains electrical impulses and translate them into movement through the robotic arm.
This arm was jointed like a human arm and possessed a “gripper” that mimics a hand.
After some training, two monkeys – who had had their own arms restrained – were able to use the prosthetic limbs to feed themselves with marshmallows and chunks of fruit.
For some reason, the BBC is reporting on a 3-year-old story, but it’s still cool and there’s a video, so I’ll post it anyway.
Blendor 
Talk about dated; my dad was working on a similar neural project for rats with broken spines twenty years ago. His first job out of electronics school was assembling circuit boards that sat on the backs of these rats and sent electric impulses from the brain to the extremities beneath the severed chord. I don’t know how successful the project he was involved with was – he wasn’t involved in the testing phase, he just worked on a team who took direction from scientists to design modified circuits that implemented the tweaks they had over time. He started to develop a moral objection to the work and quit the project after several months and went on to bag groceries for a while until landing a gig building circuits for military control systems which oddly didn’t bother him as much….
huh, bet it was pretty interesting work, though – and probably pretty sci-fi at the time
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