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Clever Artificial Hand Developed
AccUser writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have developed an ultra-light limb that they claim can mimic the movement in a real hand better than any currently available. Researcher Dr Paul Chappell, a medical physicist who worked on the device, said, 'With this hand you can clutch objects such as a ball, you can move the thumb out to one side and grip objects with the index finger in the way you do when opening a lock with a key, and you can wrap your fingers around an object in what we call the power grip - like the one you use when you hold a hammer or a microphone.'"
RTFA: The new hand - called the Southampton Remedi-Hand - can be connected to muscles in the arm via a small processing unit and is controlled by small contractions of the muscles which move the wrist.
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Digitally Yours, Martijn Beekhuis. ]\/[ Here Cometh The Bandwidth
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Yes there is! Skin changes color constantly, depending upon temperature, sun exposure, health, all kinds of reasons. And it's not one color to begin with, it's a blend of a lot of different shades. Teeth are exposed to the same basic environment all the time. Some minor changes occur, but your teeth don't change color dramatically in short periods of time. It takes years for teeth to actually change color without a helping hand. And then, false teeth are exposed to the same thing and will react the same way, because the acrylics used are similar to the material your teeth are made of. The materials used in hearing aids are nothing remotely like skin.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Rather than having "geek-brain-developed-for-technical-stuff-at-the-c ost-of-everything-else-itis", it's more likely that you have some hearing loss. Perhaps in the high treble area. This would make it difficult to distinguish between certain consonants for example 't' and 'c'. Hearing loss in lower frequencies makes discerning between vowels more difficult. Either way, your brain has to work harder than others to decode language.
;).
I have alot of hearing loss (from a combination of loud noises and as the indirect result of a nasty ear infection (that later madated surgery)), and while I love music and feel that I hear it quite well, I'm actually wrong, and I can't hear it well compared to people with good hearing. Also, I often have to do the 'decoding' thing that you mention.
Hearing loss can be conductive (the bones conducting the sound to your cochlea) or can be more-permanent when hairs inside your cochlea (that vibrate at different resonant frequencies to trigger nerves to send the info to your brain) break due to loud or long duration noise.
I've been told (by my surgeon) that they have found an enzyme that actually repairs the hairs inside the cochlea but haven't found a safe way to get the enzyme into the cochlea without further damaging it. My surgeon also mentioned that experimentation of using viruses to carry the enzyme to the cochlea are taking place (if the experiments go wrong though, I'd hate to have a stomach that can hear
Does anyone know about any of the research that's going on in this area? Or have any (informed) forecasts as to when average-joe-semi-deaf-blokes like myself might be able to opt-in for some miraculous hearing-regenative viral infection?