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Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were awarded no less than $34.5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue their outstanding work in the field of prosthetic limb testing, which has seen them come up with the most advanced model yet. Their Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system is just about ready to be tested on human subjects, as it has proved successful with monkeys. Basically, the prosthetic arm is controlled by the brain through micro-arrays that are implanted (gently) in the head. They record brain signals and send the commands to the computer software that controls the arm. To be honest, it will be interesting to see just how these hair-chips are attached to the brain, but the APL say clinical tests have shown the devices to be entirely harmless. The monkeys didn’t mind them too much, at least.

Even in sleep, the human body is rarely still—and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within. Until now, scientists have had to estimate the speed of complex but common actions such as protein folding (which turns an unorganized polypeptide strand into a complex and useful three-dimensional protein). They could watch the action unfold, so to speak, in a test tube but weren’t sure how close the pace conformed to real life. A group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, however, have developed a system to move the observation out of in vitro and into in vivo.