Ze Cyborgs are Comink!

Thought I'd do a robot post today, since I haven't done one for a while. Or rather, I'm posting about cyborgs—real, sorta-real, and fictional.

Let's start with fictional. In case anyone needs reminding of what a cyborg is, io9 has a great gallery of cyborgs in pop culture. Each section is its own slideshow, just to warn you. There's also artwork: Ryan Begglen has drawn a number of cyborg animals* and Ron Pippin does cyborg taxidermy**. I especially love Begglen's cat and Pippin's  … everything. Oh, and John Nolan does creepy animatronics!***

In the realm of the sorta-real, the advances in robotics that will make cyborgs more prevalent, we've got:

• robotic skin and more robotic skin****
• the MeBot, the next thing in telerobotics*****
• robotic (evil) twins, for sale †
• Petman, the disembodied legs ††
• a robot modelled on a human skeleton †††
• a very fast hand††††

And in terms of real cyborgs, there's a bionic hand†††††, a cyborg gosling*, a slime mold bot**, and a robot controlled by on-board brain cells***. Gizmodo's published a fantastic essay on cochlear implants, and links to a Wired piece on cyborg videos. (Not all the cyborgs are human. Someone's cyborged a cockroach, as if that was necessary.)

And then there are the exoskeletons. The Kobayashi Lab has one designed for lifting.**** Cyberdyne has one for walking*****. Gizmodo has profiled the Human Universal Load Carrier, or HULC. And finally, io9, Futurismic, and BoingBoing all did articles on a bionic arm. Funny how they all made reference to Aliens.



* BoingBoing ** io9 *** BoingBoing **** io9 and Gizmodo ***** Engadget
† io9 †† Futurismic ††† io9 †††† io9 and BoingBoing ††††† io9
* Engadget ** Engadget *** Futurismic **** Gizmodo, Engadget ***** io9