make better limb
Robot hand that plays Jingle Bells could help us make better limbs
It's not the best version of Jingle Bells you'll hear this year but have some festive cheer – it's being played by a rubber robot hand that can't move by itself. What's more, the hand could point the way to better designs for robot limbs. Most artificial limbs require complex mechanisms to control all their moving parts, but that might be overkill. When we use our hands to play piano or pick something up, a lot of the movement comes from the way their physical structure interacts with the environment. "Hands have intelligence in themselves," says Josie Hughes at the University of Cambridge, UK.