Mind Over Machine

"Some monkey business in a Duke University lab suggests we'll soon be able to move artificial limbs, control robotic soldiers, and communicate across thousands of miles - using nothing but our thoughts...

Something incredible is happening in a lab at Duke University’s Center for Neuroengineering—though, at first, it’s hard to see just what it is. A robot arm swings from side to side, eerily lifelike, as if it were trying to snatch invisible flies out of the air. It pivots around and straightens as it extends its mechanical hand. The hand clamp shuts and squeezes for a few seconds, then relaxes its grip and pulls back to shoot out again in a new direction. OK, nothing particularly astonishing here—robot arms, after all, do everything from building our cars to sequencing our DNA. But those robot arms are operated by software; the arm at Duke follows commands of a different sort. To see where those commands are coming from, you have to follow a tangled trail of cables out of the lab and down the hall to another, smaller room.''

Read more in thi Popular Science article.