Biotechnology has come extremely far in the last 10 years, with stem cell use in modern medicine and genome editing with CRISPR only being published seven ears ago, but has yet even further to go. Stem cell research was one of the hottest topics in the last decade, and the understanding of the implications has caught up to its discovery, the uses are breaking boundaries every day. Now we have 3-D printers that can use stem cells to produce complex tissues and we can grow in vitro organs from dishes from the exact same genetic coding in your body. One of the most widely benefitial research projects has been on prosthetics that are able to connect to live nerve tissue in amputations to allow the electrical signals recorded from prosthetics to equate to nerve impulses that the brain can read. Many of us live privilidged lives with all four of our original limbs, but hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. alone are living with upper arm amputations or are born without complete limbs. This project was started to create a prosthetic hand that enabled that feeling of having a hand. The mechanism has sensors that collect data like the sensory receptors in our own hands: pressure, texture, temperature. The sensed data is then translated to electrical signals and interpretted into neural signals that travel through electrodes deposited into the nerve bundles in the limb. The nerves pick up the signals and send them to the brain for recognition and response in the body, as if all the feelings were real and the hand was human.
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