Hasta La Gadget!

Schildi was a pet turtle living in Germany, presumably leading a happy life, gnawing on greens and taking forever to get anywhere as turtles do, but when he was abandoned, he lost a leg somehow. Luckily for Schildi, he was rescued, and vets were able to amputate his mangled limb. They replaced it with mankind’s solution for all things: LEGO.

Yes, this turtle now has a LEGO wheel in place of its front right leg. Because let’s face it, a shopping cart wheel just would have been annoying on everyone’s ears. The doctor used a special surgical glue to stick the base block underneath Schildi and then superglue to connect the corners of the block:

“After that we could add blocks to achieve the correct height,” he said. And now the single wheel has proven to be successful, Schildi has been taken back to the animal shelter. “We will see him again once in a while for check-ups,” Azmanis said. “If he gets a ‘flat tyre’ it will be a simple matter to replace the wheel. They move around quite a lot so I’d expect to see him for a new wheel about once a year.”

They should have put a LEGO castle on his back while they were at it. That would be awesome.

[The Local via Gizmodo via Geekologie]

Maybe it’s because I don’t want to see what they’ll look like when I’m old and shriveled up, or maybe it’s just because I have a low threshold for pain that I’ve never had the desire to get a tattoo. That said, If I did have the balls to get inked, I’d hire artist Yomico Moreno to do the job.

The Venezuelan tattoo artist is known for creating an incredible sense of depth and dimensionality in his designs, with many of his images looking like what you’d see if you peeled back the flesh and looked underneath.

His most incredible designs reveal muscle, flesh, blood and sometimes even the mechanical structures like those you’d find in a cyborg – if cyborgs existed.

Sure, his designs are quite disturbing, but they’re also totally awesome. For now, though, I’m sticking to the temporary tattoos you might find in a old box of Cracker Jacks.

You can check out more of Yomico’s tattoo artistry over on his Facebook page.

[via Demilked]

While some mind-control technologies may not amount to much more than gimmicks, there’s also plenty of serious research being done in the field — particularly when it comes to artificial limbs. So far, the majority of that work has focused on robotic arms, but a team of researchers from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach, California have now made some progress with a robotic leg prosthesis controlled by EEG signals. As you might expect, things remain a bit limited at this point — not amounting to much more than the ability to start and stop — but the researchers say they’ve been able to achieve a 100 percent response rate with no “false alarms,” and that the results are promising enough to begin tackling additional degrees of freedom like turning and sitting. What’s more, while the system has so far only been tested on able-bodied individuals, the researchers hope that it will eventually be able to aid those with spinal cord injuries and aid in rehabilitation. You can get a quick look at it on video after the break.

Continue reading Researchers tout progress with brain-controlled robotic legs

Filed under: Misc, Robots

Researchers tout progress with brain-controlled robotic legs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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