Tag Archive | organismal biology
Building the Sense of Touch Into Prosthetic Arms
Prosthetic arms are more sophisticated than ever, and scientists here at UChicago are working on giving them a lifelike sense of touch that can be felt in the brain.
How Our Sense of Touch is a Lot Like the Way We Hear
When you walk into a darkened room, your first instinct is to feel around for a light switch. You slide your hand along the wall, feeling the transition from the doorframe to the painted drywall, and then up and down until you find the metal or plastic plate of the switch. During the process you […]
Vertebrate Evolution: Heads or Tails?
In the aftermath of a mass extinction, nature tends to get creative. Those lucky species that survive often explode with Seussian abandon into a diverse array of shapes, sizes, and behaviors, capitalizing upon the ecological opportunities left available by their less fortunate peers. Usually, the oddities produced by these “adaptive radiations” are whittled down by […]
“Graduate Students Can Change Everything”
The unsung heroes of scientific research are the graduate students*. Graduate students provide the enthusiasm to run experiments 7 days a week and all hours of the day and night to generate data for publications and their own thesis projects. The fresh perspective a graduate student brings to an area of research can also provide […]
Luke Skywalker’s Hand and How Touch is Like Vision
Perhaps the most famous neuroprosthetic device in movie history shows up at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. In the final scene, Luke Skywalker is fitted for a new, robotic hand to replace the one so cruelly lopped off by (spoiler alert!) his father’s lightsaber. To test out the new hand, Luke first flexes […]
Viral Video Meets Scientific Discovery
I don’t have the social media expertise to judge why particular videos go viral, what pushes certain clips to the tipping point that allows them to tear across the internet and demographics. Most of these videos seem to be of the squirrel-on-water-skis curiosity variety, but every once in a while, a significant scientific finding penetrates […]
