[Kosh]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14790160/wid/11915773/

[Mars]

Very cool 

When can I become a cyborg?

Seriously though, it's nice that amputees have better options now

[Dark Hunter]

Very nice. 

I even heard they had developed a camera to place in the eye socket that transmits understandable visual info to the brain. It's just.... incredible what they can do.

[Kosh]

I would prefer if the robotic arm looked more like it was from the Terminator; ditto with the robotic eye.

[achtung]

Very nice. 

I even heard they had developed a camera to place in the eye socket that transmits understandable visual info to the brain. It's just.... incredible what they can do.

I believe that's been around for a few years IIRC.

[Bobboau]

so they graft a nerve to a muscle and use the muscle to decond the mesagas from th nerve, interesting, but I'm still pussled why we can't just read from the nerve directly.

[Mefustae]

When can I become a cyborg?

Technically, that's already happening. I mean, people with pacemakers for instance are cyborgs.

[Herra Tohtori]

The first cyborgs appeared when people started to use glasses to fix refractive errors...

But yeah... it would be cool to be able to say "I'm living tissue over metal endo-skeleton". 

[Prophet]

so they graft a nerve to a muscle and use the muscle to decond the mesagas from th nerve, interesting, but I'm still pussled why we can't just read from the nerve directly.

That would propably be too cheap. Normal people could afford it...

[Descenterace]

Something to do with robustness of the system, I expect. Maybe if the nerve is only connected to electronic devices it begins to die.

Not only that, decoding the signals isn't necessarily as simple as 'on or off'. Why build a complex device to do the decoding if a muscle can do it more compactly and more efficiently?

[Ulala]

Reading the article gave me the jitters.

[Tyrian]

Not only that, decoding the signals isn't necessarily as simple as 'on or off'.

He's right.  The electrical signals inside the human body are extremely noisy.  The muscle probably cleans the signal and makes it more understandable by the brain. 

[Flipside]

It's also because some of those transmission contain instructions to the nerve cells themselves, the human body doesn't work in Binary, a signals strength varies massively depending on the situation, and strong signals can actually take a different, more direct route than weak signals can, the nerve fibres adjust themselves, a strong signal can suggest an emergency so may be given priority, it also doesn't communicate with nerves serially or in parallel, but some strange mixture of the two, and the signals may also be followed up by a batch of instructions to the endorphines to release anti-toxins etc, so the whole signal is incredibly hard to decode properly.

[kasperl]

Ehm, no. The body does work in binary. As long as we're tlaking about the nerves themselves. It's a frequency based, on/off system. The only time things get messy is in the transfers between nerves, which is all chemical based. But I think that a nerve without a proper ending in a motoric-enplate would probably get fuct because it is either cut in half, or it is constantly producing acetylcholine, and not breaking it down.

This is only for the spine-to-muscle stuff. Anything from the spine up is probably a major mess to decode.

At least as far as my biology goes.