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If you've ever read comic books or watched the Marvel movies, it is easy to dream about

how cool it would be to have extra mechanical limbs, you know, to soar through the sky with

the metal wings of Falcon, or to climb a building with the extendable arms of Dr. Octopus.

But even if we had that technology, there's a question that fuels the neuroscientist

Tamara Megan.

Can we handle extra body parts or different body parts from those we were designed to

have through evolution?

Tamara runs the plasticity lab at the University of Cambridge.

Her research on how the brains of amputees adapt to the loss of a limb and the use of prosthetics

let her to ask how our brains might adapt to an additional body part we never had before.

So we were shopping for an augmentation technology that was mature enough to just give the

participants to take home and try out and kind of just make it a part of their routine.

But we couldn't find a good enough collaborator because technologies were just failing whenever

they would come to our lab.

And then one day someone sent me one of Danny's YouTube videos and we saw this gorgeous

device that looked so functional and so flexible and could do a lot many more things than all

the technologies we were trying in the lab.

Danny is Danny Clod, an augmentation and prosthetics designer.

And she and Tamara joined us on stage for one of the live shows we recorded at the Big

American Association for the Advancement of Science or AAAAS conference earlier this

year.

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