Makin’s work has focused on developing a better understanding of how the brain can best accommodate artificial limbs that operate in the most efficient manner possible—hence her interest in determining whether embodiment is a real thing. And she would like to eventually go beyond replacing body parts and try enhancing still intact ones. Her laboratory has been collaborating with the prosthesis designer Dani Clode to study how people learn to adapt to a “third thumb”—a robotic finger that users strap to their hand and control remotely with their big toes. A paper published this week in Science Robotics shows that people can learn to use the thumb to augment their hand function—but it also raises questions about whether such “plastic” changes in the brain could alter, for better or worse, a person’s neural representation of their biological hand. Makin and her graduate student Hunter Schone, who was co-lead author of the London litter pickers study, talked to Scientific American about what they have been doing recently—even while the pandemic gripped the world.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
