Liam Shaw

Robert Schumann’s teenage ambitions of virtuosity were undone by the onset of debilitating pain in his right hand. ‘It came to such a point that whenever I had to move my fourth finger, my whole body would twist convulsively,’ he wrote to a friend. Trying to make his fingers stronger he experimented with mechanical devices that probably banjaxed them irreparably. A new paper in Science Robotics reports a device that Schumann would have jumped at the chance to try: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand.

While normal life must compete with a whole ecosystem, a mirror bacterium might behave like the only real thing in a world of phantom reflections. Normal organisms are kept in check by an ecological balance between their death and growth rate. But without any predators, mirror bacteria that escaped a laboratory might grow exponentially, even with a lower growth rate than normal bacteria.

At some point in the past, humans and other apes lost their tails. Research recently published in Nature proposes a mechanism to explain how.