Claudia Mitchell - first woman to have a bionic arm - a prosthetic limb that she controls with her mind. Claudia Mitchell, who lost her arm in a motorcycle crash in 2004, volunteered to be fitted with the limb in 2006 after becoming frustrated with a standard prosthetic. Surgeons took nerves from her shoulder and embedded them under muscle in her chest.
The "bionic arm" technology is possible primarily because of two facts of amputation. First, the motor cortex in the brainhttp://health.howstuffworks.com/brain.htm (the area that controls voluntary muscle movements) is still sending out control signals even if certain voluntary muscles are no longer available for control; and second, when doctors amputate a limb, they don't remove all of the nerves that once carried signals to that limb. So if a person's arm is gone, there are working nerve stubs that end in the shoulder and simply have nowhere to send their information. If those nerve endings can be redirected to a working muscle group, then when a person thinks "grab handle with hand," and the brain sends out the corresponding signals to the nerves that should communicate with the hand, those signals end up at the working muscle group instead of at the dead end of the shoulder.
(read more from science.howstuffworks)
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