The US Department of Defense has a good reason to fund research in advanced bionic limbs—in fact, it has a couple thousand good reasons. In the last thirteen years, 2,000 men and women have lost a limb in military service. And of course, military amputees are hardly the only amputees. Far from it.

Advanced prosthetic research in clinical settings is providing a ray of hope for all these folks—military or civilian—as participants in DARPA’s Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) program continue to make progress in the realm of brain-interfacing prosthetic devices.

Two recently released DARPA videos demonstrate just how far researchers have come. In the first video (below) a man manipulates a prosthetic arm using targeted muscle re-innervation (TMR) developed by Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. TMR allows direct manipulation of the prosthetic with thoughts alone.

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