"We're taking subperceptual touch events and boosting them into conscious perception," says first author Patrick Ganzer, a principal research scientist at Battelle. "When we did this, we saw several functional improvements. It was a big eureka moment when we first restored the participant's sense of touch." The participant in this study is Ian Burkhart, a 28-year-old man who suffered a spinal cord injury during a diving accident in 2010. Since 2014, Burkhart has been working with investigators on a project called NeuroLife that aims to restore function to his right arm. The device they have developed works through a system of electrodes on his skin and a small computer chip implanted in his motor cortex.

He is most famous for cracking the Enigma code, in a move that is said to have shortened WWII by two years and saved up to 22 million additional lives. But Alan Turing also pioneered the use of computers for making music. Now, 65 years after the first computer-generated music was recorded, researchers have restored the aural artefact, which paved the way for everything from synthesizers to modern electronica. When Professor Jack Copeland (right) and composer Jason Long (left) examined the 12-inch (30.5 cm) acetate disc containing the music, they found the audio was distorted. The recording was made 65 years ago by a BBC outside-broadcast unit at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, northern England.