In today’s newsletter, Inkoo Kang on the year in TV. But, first, a new kind of prosthetic limb depends on carbon fibre and computer chips—and the reëngineering of muscles, tendons, and bone. Plus:

Rivka Galchen
Staff writer

As a kid, I found a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat charming and adorable. But when a magician would say, “Think about a number,” and then, after a bit of chatty buildup, tell me that I was thinking about the three of clubs—and I was!—that mind-reading was thrilling. The paper in Nature Medicine that inspired my piece in this week’s issue was titled, with the classic flat affect of scientific journals, “Continuous Neural Control of a Bionic Limb Restores Biomimetic Gait After Amputation.” It describes a leg prosthesis that can move as a brain wants it to move, one that follows the directions of both the conscious and the unconscious. Or, you might say, a leg that can read its user’s mind. There was no “magic trick” I was more keen to understand.

As is often the case in science, learning in detail how something works doesn’t diminish the feeling of mystery but instead expands and refines it. Visiting Hugh Herr’s Biomechatronics Group at M.I.T.’s Media Lab—where they are working on mind-reading appendages—was the beginning of a redirection of my wonder. When I started reporting this story, my attention was on marvels made of wires and metal. Soon my focus shifted to the more awesome and everyday capacities we tend not to notice—those of the human body, and the human mind. Read “A Bionic Leg Controlled by the Brain” »