Re-engineering where body meets machine

The human body is a marvel of engineering, however it’s a machine that requires maintenance and repair. Every now and then, which implies in quest of to exchange parts lost to injury or illness. The oldest known prosthesis is the “Cairo toe,” crafted out of wood and leather and considered 2,Seven-hundred to three,000 years old. Its flexibility as well as signs that it become repaired greater than one times suggest that it wasn’t built only for appearance — it helped the person walk.

Many efforts to supply a boost to replacement body parts followed, including a leg crafted from bronze and hollowed wood created in what’s now Italy around 300 B.C. Some people in Switzerland and Germany within the fifth to eighth centuries sported wood, iron or bronze feet. Within the 15th century, cranks, gears and springs made artificial limbs more functional for those that had not not up to one hand to house the hardware. The technology has improved exponentially since then, but one key challenge remains: making the replacement limb easy for the user to manage. To resolve that major problem, researchers are flipping the script and re-engineering the human body.

In the course of this issue, we explore efforts to restore senses such as proprioception, a person’s sense of where their body is in space, after an amputation (SN: 10/three/24). Such efforts involve engineers who design prostheses in collaboration with surgeons. The surgeons reroute muscles suffering from amputation, realigning them so they generate electrical signals more typical of uninjured musculature. Those signals then direct joints within the prosthesis. In a up-to-the-minute to locate out about, individuals with these new muscle-to-prosthesis interfaces increased their top walking speed by 40 p.c. Other engineer-surgeon collaborations have rerouted nerves on the way to send stronger signals to a prosthesis, or have connected an artificial limb instantaneously to bone to avoid the too-common issue of pain as a consequence of a prosthetic socket. In a paper, some of the most scientists termed it “co-engineering the body and machine.”

We also delve into an specifically different form of research: fieldwork. Charles Darwin become famous for developing his theory of evolution by painstakingly gathering specimens of plants, animals and fossils across the globe. Most field researchers never turn into household names, but their work matters.

I didn’t find out about Margaret S. Collins, who become a global expert on termites, until our life sciences writer Susan Milius proposed a profile of Collins as element of our Unsung Characters series (SN: Eleven/27/24). And what a life she led. As a Black woman born in West Virginia in 1922, she become a up-to-the-minute of the Hidden Figures mathematician Katherine Johnson, and like her peer, Collins contended with both racism and sexism, which impeded her efforts to participate equally within the sciences and in society. Alternatively, Collins persisted, changing into the first Black female entomologist Ph.D. within the U. S., raising two sons and conducting field research within the U. S., Central and South America, and the Caribbean.

Collins made fundamental observations about how termites adapt to hostile dry environments and provided a wealth of knowledge for evolutionists investigating how related species turn into so diverse. The “termite lady” also opened the door for other women who dreamed of a life as a scientist within the sphere.