A new robotic ankle controlled by electrical signals in residual muscles below the knee is showing promise in improved mobility and reduced pain. After just two practice sessions, around six hours in total, seven participants in a clinical trial testing the new device were able to walk as fast as non-amputees and the movements of their bionic joint mimicked natural ankle movements.        Walking is easy, when you don’t have to think about it. In reality, controlling an action seemingly as simple as walking is not just a question of contracting the right muscles. It is a complex choreography of control and feedback. When you decide to take a step, your brain sends signals down your spinal cord and into your legs, telling the muscles to contract, bending your joints. The movement and position of each joint is controlled by the contrasting action of two types of muscles: agonists and antagonists.  Think about your arm. When you flex your elbow, your biceps acts as the agonist contracting and bringing your forearm closer to your upper arm. At the same time, your triceps (on the other side of the arm), the antagonist in this movement, is relaxing and allowing the movement to happen. Conversely, when you stretch your arm, your triceps acts as the agonist pulling the forearm away and the biceps is the antagonist relaxing its pull. By reading out the tension in both the biceps and the triceps your brain can figure out at what angle your elbow is bent. The ability to perceive this tension is called proprioception: the perception of yourself (proprio in Latin). This then informs your motor system. When you contract your leg muscles to walk, you bend the joints in your hip, knee, and ankle. The position of each of these joints at the start and end of the step, and the resistance each movement might meet, is different when you walk in all types of situations (dodgy terrains, slopes, sticky mud). This makes it impossible for the brain to just send a one-size-fits-all "walk" command.  Walking is a lot to think about Leg amputees have lost a lot of their muscles, and both the nerves that control muscle contraction as well as the proprioceptive ones that send feedback about how the movement is going. Developments in prosthetic limbs are trying to restore the full orchestra of commands and feedback.  In early prosthetics, patients could control their limb with a body-powered harness: e.g. they would learn to move their shoulder to control their prosthetic hand. Then, more sophisticated prostheses came along that used electrical signals in the muscles of the upper leg to steer ankle joint movements. Until now, feedback signals were not being utilized, resulting in movements that were less flexible and unable to adapt to a changing environment.  A new type of leg prosthesis is now promising smoother walking: the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI). That’s a mouthful. The AMI restores proprioceptive signaling by reconnecting the agonist and antagonist muscles. The brain and the device can then read out the complementary tension in the two muscles, the same way we do with our biceps and triceps. The first prosthetic of this type is a bionic ankle for people with amputations below the knee where the muscles of the shin and the calf can be reattached. Because the agonist and antagonist are connected again, the bending of the joints can be read out by the opposing tension in the two muscles. This tension adapts to various situations, like inclined terrain and stairs.  A decoder in the prosthesis can dynamically adjust the ankle flexion, the way that an intact limb would. The range of ankle movements in the prosthesis during walking was strikingly similar to that of non-amputees.        So, what’s next for prosthetic legs? Osseoperception. The authors point to research that shows improved integration of prosthetics when they are anchored to the bone (ossum in Latin). Bionic limbs are getting closer and closer not only to moving like a biological limb, but to feeling like one too. The study is published in Nature Medicine.

The Sunstone is a type of mineral attested in several 13th–14th century written sources in Iceland, one of which describes its use to locate the sun in a completely overcast sky. Sunstones are also mentioned in the inventories of several churches and one monastery in 14th–15th century Iceland. A theory exists that the sunstone had polarizing attributes and was used as a navigation instrument by seafarers in the Viking Age. One medieval source in Iceland, Rauðúlfs þáttr, mentions the sunstone as a mineral by means of which the sun could be located in an overcast and snowy sky by holding it up and noting where it emitted, reflected or transmitted light. Thorsteinn Vilhjalmsson translates the Icelandic description in Rauðúlfs þáttr of the use of the sunstone as follows: The weather was thick and snowy as Sigurður had predicted. Then the king summoned Sigurður and Dagur (Rauðúlfur’s sons) to him. The king made people look out and they could nowhere see a clear sky. Then he asked Sigurður to tell where the sun was at that time. He gave a clear assertion. Then the king made them fetch the solar stone and held it up and saw where light radiated from the stone and thus directly verified Sigurður’s prediction. The history of the Vikings is replete with myths, misinformation, romantic notions, and pop culture laziness. The facts about the Vikings are just as interesting as they myths and have the added advantage of being true. Iceland spar, possibly the medieval sunstone used to locate the Sun in the sky when clouds obstruct it from view. Iceland spar is a transparent variety of calcite, or crystallized calcium carbonate. Far from the violent, unwashed, horned-helmeted brutes of cultural depictions, the Vikings were explorers, farmers, traders, and colonists. They had a diverse religion, stratified society, and rich culture. While it’s popular to simply lump all residents of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in the 800s through the 1100s together as Vikings, the term truly refers to the seafaring raiders who landed up and down the British Isles and European coasts. These individual peoples would never have referred to each other or themselves as Vikings, as the term only became popular near the end of the Viking Age. They knew of the concepts of east, west, south and north. But to them, navigation was more based on where on the horizon the sun rose and how high it was during the day, rather than Earth’s magnetism, which underlies the modern compass. The optical properties of the legendary Viking sunstone are not just a myth and can be mastered using a common stone found in Iceland. The legendary Viking sunstone that could accurately navigate the seven seas in bad weather may actually be based on a real artifact, claim scientists. After spending three years examining a cloudy crystal discovered in an Elizabethan wreck, researchers believe it could have been used to locate the sun in cloudy weather – The Alderney sank off the British Channel Islands in 1592. British and French scientists have long argued that the find is a sunstone – a device that fractures the light, enabling seafarers to locate the Sun even when it is behind clouds or has dipped below the horizon. Sunstones, according to a theory first aired 45 years ago, helped the great Norse mariners to navigate their way to Iceland and even perhaps as far as North America during the Viking heyday of 900-1200 AD, way before the magnetic compass was introduced in Europe in the 13th century. But there is only a sketchy reference in ancient Norse literature to a “solar Stein,” which means the idea has remained frustratingly without solid proof. This is just one of many recent examples in which evidence has emerged to support an ancient story that was previously viewed as mere myth and legend but which appears to describe real events. The post The Mythical Sunstone Vikings Used To Navigate Warships appeared first on Anomalien.com.

Around every sin that our nation has committed — sins we are committing now and will commit in the future — will be found bad people posing as good, knowingly twisting the plain meaning of widely held values to cover and excuse the ugliest of ends and means.The best example of this newspeak on stilts is Barack Obama’s use and abuse of the book of Genesis to fundamentally transform the great American experiment in self-government.Americans need to wake up to this leveling con and reject it root and branch. We are not the keepers of our brothers. We are our own keepers.He did it with two words: “brother’s keeper.” And he got a political amen!For the unchurched, I can tell the story quickly. In Genesis, Adam and Eve had two kids: Cain and Abel. At least for a while.One day, Cain, in an act of sibling rivalry, crushed his brother’s skull with a rock. Shortly afterward, Cain encountered God walking outside the Garden, and God asked him where his brother Abel was. To which Cain replied, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”Which is a pretty good, textbook answer, unless you know exactly where your brother is because you killed him. Obama takes a solid answer that was used to cover up a crime against man and God and then uses Cain’s lie to introduce a new understanding of man that is neither faithful to God nor America nor mankind.Cain’s answer to God captures the truth of a brother’s relationship with his brother, man to man, and a government to its citizens. We are not the keepers of our brothers. We are neither created nor intended to be one another’s keeper. Abel was supposed to be his own man and his own keeper. And the same goes for the rest of us.Of course, a brother in need deserves our help, but this assistance — under normal circumstances — should be temporary, not a way of life. The exception has become the rule and the new purpose of the keeper state.Obviously, not everyone can be kept. A brother’s keeper state requires a sizable keeper class — a new administrative aristocracy — whose claim for the privileged status of keeper is rooted in its deep concern and service to the least of its brothers. The keepers of our brother’s state have grown powerful by pouring new meaning into our shared language that defines us as a people. The Bible — the great liberator of man — has been and continues to be used and abused against its plain intent. The same with our Declaration of Independence and its “all men are created equal.” The keepers purposefully leave it all vague and rhetorical, casting it as a struggle between good and evil.Once upon a time, we all knew what “equality” meant and didn’t mean. Appealing to it and living up to it are what fueled our country’s upward arc. Today, “equality” and the new holy keeper trinity of diversity, equality, inclusion is indistinguishable from an angry, leveling, racist egalitarianism. The brother’s keeper state is, in reality, a plantation state. Intergenerational dependency is the soil the brother’s keeper plantation cultivates.Keeper plantation equality requires turning social safety nets into a hammock that creates dependency by design. The goal is not to get you off it but to keep you on it — and voting for it.You never hear Obama or any keeper quote St. Paul’s admonition that “a man who will not work, will not eat.”And let’s not forget the signal it sends to those who are working hard and honestly for what welfare gives to others without condition or effort. Acting white, chumps.Keeper plantation equality means depriving black and Latino children the possibility of achieving a decent education by protecting failing tax-funded schools and foreclosing any means of escape.Keeper plantation equality means eliminating “gifted and talented” programs in schools because not every child is gifted and talented.Keeper plantation equality also means not prosecuting crimes because doing so would have a “disparate impact” on “communities of color.” Never mind that the victims of these crimes tend to be overwhelmingly black and brown.Adding further insult to injury, this anti-American vision of America is justified in the name of black America, and yet in the end, it hurts its “beneficiaries” the most. To point this out, however, is to be deemed racist, or worse, an Uncle Tom or Aunt Tammy.Everything this party of slick talkers says is a falsehood dressed up as truth and held up as gospel. It hurts the head to follow their inverted, anti-American, and anti-common sense reasoning. But once you think through it, it all starts making sense.The conditions that sustain a free people are obstacles to their brother’s keeper purpose. As we are seeing unfold in real time — and as we have seen long before now — progressive keeper dreams, put into action, are black, brown, and middle-class nightmares. Continue to vote for it, and the rich will get still richer, the middle class will shrink, and those who are black and brown will drown.Americans need to wake up to this leveling con and reject it root and branch. We are not the keepers of our brothers. We are our own keepers.

In a free society, politics cannot dictate what people are allowed to say and write or squelch scientific findings.

Instead of advancing U.S. interests, VOA has drifted toward being just another left-leaning news outlet that sanitized Hamas.

The record suggests that wholehearted support of markets can be a winning electoral strategy — as well as good policy.

Joe Biden was never going to win.

It appears that nothing short of economic ruin will force Washington to change course.

The choice before us is much larger than whether to support Trump or Biden.

Under scrutiny, the prosecution’s central evidence against the presumed ‘killer nurse’ may be unreliable.