DailyDirt: Six Million Dollar Man People
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Science fiction about bionics grossly underestimated how much advanced prosthetics actually cost to develop. The Six Million Dollar Man was off by at least a couple orders of magnitude. But bionic limbs have been getting a lot better over the years, and more Paralympic athletes are becoming famous for their achievements all the time. Here are just a few inspiring links about people and technology making awesome advances in bionics.
- Aimee Mullins has turned her prosthetic legs into a possibly desirable advantage — prosthetics can make people taller and potentially super-abled instead of disabled. Mullins is a a champion sprinter in the Paralympics, and she has over a dozen different prosthetic legs — and is having fun with the improving technologies of prosthetic limbs. [url]
- This American Life covered how people can totally miss seeing a one-armed woman. Mary Archbold is a professional dancer who has become incredibly good at concealing her missing appendage. [url]
- An exoskeleton called eLegs was developed with some Pentagon funding and could sell to the general public for about $50,000. Bionics are getting cheaper, but they’re not quite ready to make anyone into Iron Man just yet. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: aimee mullins, bionics, exoskeleton, mary archbold, paralympics, prosthetics
Comments on “DailyDirt: Six Million Dollar Man People”
Hey, that was six million in 70’s dollars. Inflation, you know.
Re: Re:
well that depends, if we have a new president who believes in reagonomics we will have stagflation on necessities and deflation on discretionary items as the top 5% drain the public dry
Am I the only one here in the habit of closing my browser window the instant I discover that a link I clicked on takes me to a page that automatically starts playing a video? (…like 2 of the 3 stories linked to here)
Re: Re:
Hmm. Sorry about that Ophelia. I hate videos that play automatically, too. But I changed my browser settings so that I have to manually allow Flash to run, and that has prevented me from seeing this annoyance….
One-armed woman
The BBC’s CBeebies (pre-school children’s) channel has a presenter called Cerrie Burnell who is missing half of one arm. Many people (including myself) don’t notice this for a while, and it is a thing of beauty to watch how deftly she uses her elbow instead of a hand, or makes it really non-obvious, or even ‘natural’. Mind you, she’s a ‘thing of beauty’ herself, which might add to the distraction level…
Big Pharma companies will shut this down….. no more need for Viagra!