"Biohackers took one small but important step toward the science fiction dystopia depicted in William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic," reports The Parallax, in an article shared by a Slashdot reader: The Four Thieves Vinegar biohacking collective has not figured out how to precisely mimic the memory data transfer scenario Gibson conjured, but it has built a device to enable people to store and transfer data wirelessly in their bodies. Using off-the-shelf parts and focused efforts, the biohacking group has designed and built a networked hard drive, coated in a biosafe resin, to be subcutaneously implanted in the human body. It's powered by an external battery that connects to the device via an induction coil, and its storage capacity is limited only by the size of the microSD card it contains. Michael Laufer, who founded Four Thieves Vinegar, calls it the Pegleg.

In the small hours of August 8, in an operating room within the small house, two patients received the second version of the Pegleg implant, which Laufer says is the world's first subcutaneous networked drive... To make Pegleg v2, Laufer and his team removed from the Raspberry Pi both Micro USB connectors (one for power, one for data), the Mini HDMI connector, and the camera connector. They then soldered on a second Wi-Fi chip to enable it to transfer data to another Pegleg and allow other devices to connect to it, as well as an induction coil to enable it to be powered by a wireless battery resting in a contiguous sports armband or pants pocket. They enabled Bluetooth for future functionality, inserted a 512GB microSD card for storage, and updated the firmware. Finally, they coated the hacked device in a biocompatible acrylic resin to prevent it from interacting with the recipient's body and to diffuse the heat it emanates.

At 11:44 a.m. on the same day, Laufer -- an implant newbie who has three small tattoos but no piercings -- took a seat in the surgical room... During the procedure, Laufer passed out for a few seconds and vomited a little bit. But 32 minutes later, he had a functional "Pegleg" implant.

"As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce," reports The Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader shares excerpts from the report: Across industries, engineers are building atop work done a generation ago by designers of military drones. Whether it's terrestrial delivery robots, flying delivery drones, office-patrolling security robots, inventory-checking robots in grocery stores or remotely piloted cars and trucks, the machines that were supposed to revolutionize everything by operating autonomously turn out to require, at the very least, humans minding them from afar. Until the techno-utopian dream of full automation comes into effect -- and frankly, there's no guarantee that will ever happen -- there will be plenty of jobs for humans, just not ones their parents would recognize. Whether the humans in charge are in the same city or thousands of miles away, the proliferation of not-yet-autonomous technologies is driving a tiny but rapidly growing workforce.

Companies working with remote-controlled robots know there are risks, and try to mitigate them in a few ways. Some choose only to operate slow-moving machines in simple environments -- as in Postmates's sidewalk delivery -- so that even the worst disaster isn't all that bad. More advanced systems require 'human supervisory control,' where the robot or vehicle's onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn't dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator. For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same. Phantom Auto is betting the shift to remote operation might become an important means of employment for people who used to drive for a living. Other requirements for our remote-controlled future include "a tolerance for working for a lower wage, since remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets," the report adds.

"Another might be a youth spent gaming. When Postmates managers interview potential delivery-robot pilots like Diana Villalobos, they ask whether or not they played videogames in their youth. 'When I was a kid, my parents always said, 'Stop playing videogames!' But it came in handy,' she says."

Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that uses porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), to suck water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and then release it as liquid water. Science Magazine reports: One recent market report predicted that sales of MOFs for applications including storing and detecting gases will balloon to $410 million annually over the next 5 years, up from $70 million this year. "Ten years ago, MOFs showed promise for a lot of applications," says Omar Farha, a MOF chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Now, that promise has become a reality." One application is Yaghi's, which he hopes will help provide drinking water for the estimated one-third of the world's population living in water-stressed regions. Yaghi and his colleagues first developed a zirconium-based MOF in 2014 that could harvest and release water. But at $160 per kilogram, zirconium is too expensive for bulk use. So, last year, his team came up with an alternative called MOF-303, based on aluminum, which costs just $3 per kilogram. In the desert of Arizona, Yaghi and his team placed their MOF in a small, clear plastic container. They kept it open to the air at night, allowing the MOF to absorb water vapor. They then closed the container and exposed the MOF to sunlight, which drove liquid water from it -- but the harvest was only about 0.2 liters per kilogram of MOF per day.

At last week's meeting of the American Chemical Society and in the 27 August issue of ACS Central Science, Yaghi reported that his team has devised a new and far more productive water harvester. By exploiting MOF-303's ability to fill and empty its pores in just minutes, the team can make the new device complete dozens of cycles daily. Supported by a solar panel to power a fan and heater, which speed the cycles, the device produces up to 1.3 liters of water per kilogram of MOF per day from desert air. Yaghi expects further improvements to boost that number to 8 to 10 liters per day. Last year, he formed a company called Water Harvesting that this fall plans to release a microwave-size device able to provide up to 8 liters per day. The company promises a scaled-up version next year that will produce 22,500 liters per day, enough to supply a small village. "We're making water mobile," Yaghi says. "It's like taking a wired phone and making a wireless phone."

Zimbabweans are relying on Tesla to help them pay their bills. From a report: Amid power outages of as long as 18 hours a day, Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe's biggest mobile-phone operator, is turning to the Palo Alto, California-based automaker and storable-energy company for batteries that can keep its base stations running. The southern African country faces chronic shortages of physical cash, so almost all transactions are done digitally, and many via mobile phones. "Telecommunications have become the lifeblood of the economy," said Norman Moyo, the chief executive officer of Distributed Power Africa, which installs the batteries for Econet. "If the telecom network is down in Zimbabwe, you can't do any transactions."

The installation of 520 Powerwall batteries, with two going into each base station, is the largest telecommunications project in which Tesla has participated to date, Moyo said. With Econet having about 1,300 base stations in the country and two other mobile-phone companies operating there, Distributed Power intends to install more batteries and could eventually roll the project out to other power-starved countries in Africa, such as Zambia, Lesotho and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he said. Base stations in Zimbabwe often use diesel-fired generators as backup, but fuel is also scarce in the country. The Powerwalls, which cost $6,500 each, will step in when solar panels aren't generating enough electricity because it's night or when heavily overcast. The lithium-ion batteries can power a station for as long as 10 hours, according to Econet. They are charged by the sun.

Wi-Fi 6, the consumer-friendly new name for the tech standard actually called 802.11ax, won't just boost data-transfer speeds -- though it'll do that, by a factor of three or so. It'll also reach into corners of our house farther away from network gear, better handle the crush of people at airports and stadiums, and sidestep interference from your neighbors' noisy network. On your phone or laptop, it should save your battery life, too. From a report: No wonder wireless chip designer Qualcomm is betting big on Wi-Fi 6. The company on Tuesday showed off a quartet of processors that'll bring Wi-Fi 6 to a new range of network equipment -- and a number of partnerships designed to telegraph its clout with the technology. "Wi-Fi is ubiquitous and widely accepted," said Rahul Patel, leader of Qualcomm's Wi-Fi chip division in an exclusive interview with CNET ahead of Qualcomm's Wi-Fi event. But with more devices in our houses, and activities like gaming and streaming video putting new demands on networks, there's a network traffic jam, he said.

"Cord cutting is real. What was typically one TV in the average home is now five or six different screens," Patel said. "There's a tremendous amount of content sourced through the home that wasn't before. There's a congestion problem." One of Wi-Fi 6's biggest advances is OFDMA -- orthogonal frequency division multiple access, if you must know -- an efficiency-boosting technology purloined from mobile networks. Another is MU MIMO, short for multiple user, multiple input, multiple output. And then there's 1024 QAM -- quadrature amplitude modulation -- which bumps up data rates by 30%.

Verizon on Tuesday said it'll begin automatically enrolling eligible Android phones in its free Call Filter service. The company said it's making the move after the Federal Communications Commission in June voted to give wireless carriers greater power to "aggressively block" unwanted robocalls. From a report: "We know our customers are sick and tired of the endless onslaught of robocalls," Ronan Dunne, Verizon executive vice president, said in a release. "Our team is committed to developing and enhancing the tools that will help bring relief to our customers. This is another major step in that process." The free version of Call Filter will block robocalls, sending them automatically to voicemail, and put a warning label on potential spam calls. Verizon said auto-enrollment will begin Tuesday for postpaid customers with eligible devices. Prepaid Android customers and iPhone users can enroll in the free service by downloading the Call Filter app. Verizon started offering a free version of its spam- and robocall-blocking tools to customers in March. The wireless carrier also offers a paid version called Call Filter Plus, which costs $2.99 a month per line. The paid service offers additional tools like the ability to identify unknown callers by name and a spam number lookup feature.

Qualcomm has won a partial stay against the enforcement of a sweeping antitrust ruling in a lawsuit brought by the FTC. "The company on May 21 lost in an antitrust lawsuit and has been fighting to have the ruling put on hold while it pursued an appeal," reports Reuters. "The San Diego-based company argued that letting the ruling stand could upend its talks with phone makers over chips for 5G, the next generation of wireless data networks." From the report: In the ruling issued on Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold the provisions of the earlier ruling that required Qualcomm to grant patent licenses to rival chip suppliers and end its practice of requiring its chip customers to sign a patent license before purchasing chips. The earlier ruling would have required Qualcomm to renegotiate all of its existing chip and patent deals, as well as make new deals conform to the requirements. The stay granted Friday puts on hold the effect of parts of the ruling while the appeals process, which could take a year or more, plays out. The company has not formally filed its appeal in the FTC lawsuit. After Qualcomm files its arguments, the appeal will take place in January.

An anonymous reader writes: Apple will launch three new iPhone models in an event next week. Two will be called "Pro" models and will replace the iPhone XS and XS Max. A third phone will replace the iPhone XR and will include dual cameras, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The Pro iPhones will feature triple rear cameras that will include a wide-angle lens, support for higher resolution photos, better low light performance, and better video recording capabilities. These Pro phones will also support reverse wireless charging similar to what Samsung offers with the Galaxy S10. This will allow the phones to charge the AirPods when used with their wireless charging case. Other details include a new, multi-angle, Face ID sensor which will allow the phone to sense your face while lying flat on a table, better waterproofing, and new shatter-resistance technology. Bloomberg doesn't specify which of the new models these features will come to. All the phones will reportedly include a faster A13 processor, as well as a new Matrix chip that could benefit computer vision and augmented reality performance. Outside of a new matte-colored finish, the Pro phones will look broadly similar to last year's models. 3D Touch has reportedly been dropped from all of this year's models and replaced with the Haptic Touch system that debuted with the iPhone XR last year.

Apple is also planning to release new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros this year. Bloomberg says these will feature "upgraded cameras," although it doesn't mention whether they will have more than one camera on their rear. Faster processors are also expected, but their overall appearance will apparently remain the same. Bloomberg claims that Apple will discontinue its existing entry-level 9.7-inch iPad in favor of a new 10.2-inch model. Apple's 2019 MacBook Pros Bloomberg's report also corroborates previous rumors about Apple launching a new 16-inch MacBook Pro this year. The new laptop will reportedly be similar in size overall to the existing 15-inch MacBook Pro, but will be able to include a bigger screen because of a reduction in the size of its screen bezels.

Americans are spending ever more for blazing internet speeds, on the promise that faster is better. Is that really the case? For most people, the answer is no. From a report: The Wall Street Journal studied the internet use of 53 of our journalists across the country, over a period of months, in coordination with researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. Our panelists used only a fraction of their available bandwidth to watch streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube, even simultaneously. Quality didn't improve much with higher speeds. Picture clarity was about the same. Videos didn't launch quicker. Broadband providers such as Comcast, Charter and AT&T are marketing speeds in the range of 250, 500 or even 1,000 megabits a second, often promising that streaming-video bingers will benefit. "Fast speeds for all of your shows," declares one online ad from Comcast. But for a typical household, the benefits of paying for more than 100 megabits a second are marginal at best, according to the researchers. That means many households are paying a premium for services they don't need.

To gauge how much bandwidth, or speed capacity, households need, it helps to look at an extreme scenario. Our users spent an evening streaming up to seven services simultaneously, including on-demand services like Netflix and live-TV services like Sling TV. We monitored the results. Peter Loftus, one of our panelists, lives outside Philadelphia and is a Comcast customer with a speed package of 150 megabits a second. Peter's median usage over 35 viewing minutes was 6.9 Mbps, 5% of the capacity he pays for. For the portion when all seven of his streams were going at once, he averaged 8.1 Mbps. At one point, for one second, Peter reached 65% of his capacity. Did his video launch faster or play more smoothly? Not really. The researchers said that to the extent there were differences in video quality such as picture resolution or the time it took to launch a show, they were marginal.

Scott Hanselman: Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It stopped shipping in 2009 on DVD. I recently found a disk and was impressed that it installed just perfectly on my latest Window 10 machine and runs nicely. Encarta existed in an interesting place between the rise of the internet and computer's ability to deal with (at the time) massive amounts of data. CD-ROMs could bring us 700 MEGABYTES which was unbelievable when compared to the 1.44MB (or even 120KB) floppy disks we were used to. The idea that Encarta was so large that it was 5 CD-ROMs (!) was staggering, even though that's just a few gigs today. Even a $5 USB stick could hold Encarta - twice!

My kids can't possibly intellectualize the scale that data exists in today. We could barely believe that a whole bookshelf of Encyclopedias was now in our pockets. I spent hours and hours just wandering around random articles in Encarta. The scope of knowledge was overwhelming, but accessible. But it was contained - it was bounded. Today, my kids just assume that the sum of all human knowledge is available with a single search or a "hey Alexa" so the world's mysteries are less mysteries and they become bored by the Paradox of Choice. In a world of 4k streaming video, global wireless, and high-speed everything, there's really no analog to the feeling we got watching the Moon Landing as a video in Encarta - short of watching it live on TV in the 1969! For most of us, this was the first time we'd ever seen full-motion video on-demand on a computer in any sort of fidelity - and these are mostly 320x240 or smaller videos!

U.S. wireless carriers have long said they may slow video traffic on their networks to avoid congestion and bottlenecks. But new research shows the throttling happens pretty much everywhere all the time. From a report: Researchers from Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than 650,000 tests in the U.S. and found that from early 2018 to early 2019, AT&T throttled Netflix 70% of the time and Google's YouTube service 74% of the time. But AT&T didn't slow down Amazon's Prime Video at all. T-Mobile throttled Amazon Prime Video in about 51% of the tests, but didn't throttle Skype and barely touched Vimeo, the researchers say in a paper [PDF] to be presented at an industry conference this week.

Alphabet' Google has shut down a service it provided to wireless carriers globally that showed them weak spots in their network coverage, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, because of Google's concerns that sharing data from users of its Android phone system might attract the scrutiny of users and regulators. From the report: The withdrawal of the service, which has not been previously reported, has disappointed wireless carriers that used the data as part of their decision-making process on where to extend or upgrade their coverage. Even though the data were anonymous and the sharing of it has become commonplace, Google's move illustrates how concerned the company has become about drawing attention amid a heightened focus in much of the world on data privacy. Google's Mobile Network Insights service, which had launched in March 2017, was essentially a map showing carriers signal strengths and connection speeds they were delivering in each area. The service was provided free to carriers and vendors that helped them manage operations. The data came from devices running Google's Android operating system, which is on about 75% of the world's smartphones, making it a valuable resource for the industry. [...] Nevertheless, Google shut down the service in April due to concerns about data privacy, four people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Some of them said secondary reasons likely included challenges ensuring data quality and connectivity upgrades among carriers being slow to materialize.

A survey of more than 6,000 firmware images spanning more than a decade finds no improvement in firmware security and lax security standards for the software running connected devices by Linksys, Netgear and other major vendors. The Security Ledger reports: "Nobody is trying," said Sarah Zatko, the Chief Scientist at the Cyber Independent Testing Lab (CITL), a non-profit organization that conducts independent tests of software security. "We found no consistency in a vendor or product line doing better or showing improvement. There was no evidence that anybody is making a concerted effort to address the safety hygiene of their products," she said. The CITL study surveyed firmware from 18 vendors including ASUS, D-link, Linksys, NETGEAR, Ubiquiti and others. In all, more than 6,000 firmware versions were analyzed, totaling close to 3 million binaries created from 2003 to 2018. It is the first longitudinal study of IoT software safety, according to Zatko. CITL researchers studied publicly available firmware images and evaluated them for the presence of standard security features such as the use of non-executable stacks, Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and stack guards, which prevent buffer overflow attacks.

The results were not encouraging. Time and again, firmware from commonly used manufacturers failed to implement basic security features even when researchers studied the most recent versions of the firmware. For example: firmware for the ASUS RT-AC55U wifi router did not employ ASLR or stack guards to protect against buffer overflow attacks. Nor did it employ a non-executable stack to protect against "stack smashing," another variety of overflow attack. CITL found the same was true of firmware for Ubiquiti's UAP AC PRO wireless access points, as well as DLink's DWL-6600 access point. Router firmware by vendors like Linksys and NETGEAR performed only slightly better on CITL's assessment. CITL researchers also "found no clear progress in any protection category over time," reports The Security Ledger. "Researchers documented 299 positive changes in firmware security scores over the 15 years covered by the study... but 370 negative changes over the same period. Looking across its entire data set, in fact, firmware security actually appeared to get worse over time, not better."

On the bright side, the survey found that almost all recent router firmware by Linksys and NETGEAR boasted non-executable stacks. "However, those same firmware binaries did not employ other common security features like ASLR or stack guards, or did so only rarely," says the report.

The headphone jack is increasingly being omitted from smartphones and tablets, but what about laptops? When Apple launched the redesigned MacBook Pro in 2016, it decided to remove the SD card slot, full-sized USB Type A ports, and Thunderbolt 2 ports -- but keep the 3.5mm headphone jack, even though it axed the headphone jack in the 2016 iPhone 7. The reason, Apple said, had to do with the lack of wireless solutions for pro audio gear that many users use with their MacBooks. "If it was just about headphones then it doesn't need to be there," said Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller. "We believe that wireless is a great solution for headphones." He added: "But many users have set-ups with studio monitors, amps and other pro audio gear that do not have wireless solutions and need the 3.5mm jack."

While most laptops today still retain the headphone jack, that trend doesn't seem like it'll last for too much longer as the industry moves to embrace wireless audio. Laptop alternatives like Apple's iPad Pro and Samsung's Galaxy Tab S5e have both ditched the 3.5mm port, meaning it's only a matter of time until laptops themselves lose the port. Our question to you is: do you use the headphone jack on your laptop? Would you mind if a manufacturer removed the port to make room for a bigger battery or make the device slimmer and more portable? Let us know your thoughts below.

Long-time Slashdot reader trolman scared this scathing editorial by security researcher Brian Krebs: If you are somehow under the impression that you -- the customer -- are in control over the security, privacy and integrity of your mobile phone service, think again. And you'd be forgiven if you assumed the major wireless carriers or federal regulators had their hands firmly on the wheel. No, a series of recent court cases and unfortunate developments highlight the sad reality that the wireless industry today has all but ceded control over this vital national resource to cybercriminals, scammers, corrupt employees and plain old corporate greed...

Incessantly annoying and fraudulent robocalls. Corrupt wireless company employees taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to unlock and hijack mobile phone service. Wireless providers selling real-time customer location data, despite repeated promises to the contrary. A noticeable uptick in SIM-swapping attacks that lead to multi-million dollar cyberheists...

Is there any hope that lawmakers or regulators will do anything about these persistent problems? Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy, said the answer -- at least in this administration -- is probably a big "no."

"The takeaway here is the complete and total abdication of any oversight of the mobile wireless industry," Sohn told KrebsOnSecurity. "Our enforcement agencies aren't doing anything on these topics right now, and we have a complete and total breakdown of oversight of these incredibly powerful and important companies."

Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen have recently disclosed two new additional bugs impacting WPA3. The security researched duo found the new bugs in the security recommendations the WiFi Alliance created for equipment vendors in order to mitigate the initial Dragonblood attacks [found by the same two security researchers]. "Just like the original Dragonblood vulnerabilities from April, these two new ones allow attackers to leak information from WPA3 cryptographic operations and brute-force a WiFi network's password," reports ZDNet.
More from ZDNet: "[The] Wi-Fi standard is now being updated with proper defenses, which might lead to WPA3.1," Vanhoef said. "Although this update is not backwards-compatible with current deployments of WPA3, it does prevent most of our attacks," the researchers said.

But besides just disclosing the two new Dragonblood vulnerabilities, the two researchers also took the chance to criticize the WiFi Alliance again for its closed standards development process that doesn't allow for the open-source community to contribute and prevent big vulnerabilities from making it into the standard in the first place.

"This demonstrates that implementing Dragonfly and WPA3 without side-channel leaks is surprisingly hard," the researchers said. "It also, once again, shows that privately creating security recommendations and standards is at best irresponsible and at worst inept."
While these type of feedback might be ignored when coming from other researchers, it means more when it comes from Vanhoef. The Belgian researchers is the one who discovered the KRACK attack that broke the WPA2 WiFi authentication standard and forced the WiFi Alliance to develop the WPA3 standard, which it launched in June 2018.

Have you ever been in a public place and hopped onto a public WiFi network? From a report: We conducted a survey of 1,195 US residents over the past two weeks asking about internet connectivity and one interesting trend stood out. 82% of respondents (980 total) said they connect to any freely available network while out in public. When asked about the security implications of such a decision, the majority of the respondents said they didn't think about such things, and that it wasn't a concern for them.

Security researchers say they can extract a user's phone number from the Bluetooth traffic coming from an iPhone smartphone during certain operations. From a report: The attack works because, when Bluetooth is enabled on an Apple device, the device sends BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) packets in all directions, broadcasting the device's position and various details. This behavior is part of the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol that can work either via WiFi or BLE to interconnect and allow data transfers between nearby devices. Previous academic research has revealed that AWDL BLE traffic contains device identification details such as the phone status, Wi-Fi status, OS version, buffer availability, and others. However, in new research published last week, security researchers from Hexway said that during certain operations these BLE packets can also contain a SHA256 hash of the device's phone number.

Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol installed on over 1.2 billion Apple devices, contains vulnerabilities that enable attackers to track users, crash devices, or intercept files transferred between devices via man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. From a report: These are the findings of a research project that started last year at the Technical University of Darmstadt, in Germany, and has recently concluded, and whose findings researchers will be presenting later this month at a security conference in the US. The project sought to analyze the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol that Apple rolled out in 2014 and which also plays a key role in enabling device-to-device communications in the Apple ecosystem. While most Apple end users might not be aware of the protocol's existence, AWDL is at the core of Apple services like AirPlay and AirDrop, and Apple has been including AWDL by default on all devices the company has been selling, such as Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple watches, Apple TVs, and HomePods. But in the past five years, Apple has never published any in-depth technical details about how AWDL works. This, in turn, has resulted in very few security researchers looking at AWDL for bugs or implementation errors.

CNN tells the story of a new medical breakthrough for Keven Walgamott, who 17 years ago lost one hand and part of his forearm in an electrical accident. Now, Walgamott can use his thoughts to tell the fingers of his bionic hand to pick up eggs and grapes. The prosthetic arm he tested also allowed Walgamott to feel the objects he grasped. A biomedical engineering team at the University of Utah created the "LUKE Arm," named in honor of the robotic hand Luke Skywalker obtains in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" after Darth Vader slices off his hand with a lightsaber.

A new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics explained how the arm revived the sensation of touch for Walgamott. The University of Chicago and the Cleveland Clinic were also involved in the study... The LUKE Arm sends signals to the brain in order to mimic the way a human hand can feel and sense information about an object, like whether it's soft, hard, lightweight or heavy. "We changed the way we are sending that information to the brain so that it matches the human body..." said Jacob George, study author and biomedical engineering doctoral student at the University of Utah. "We're making more biologically realistic signals..."

Utah Emeritus Distinguished Professor Richard A. Normann invented the Utah Slanted Electrode Array, a grouping of 100 microelectrodes and wires implanted in the forearm's nerves and connected to an external computer. The array was able to read signals from the nerves remaining in Walgamott's arm while the computer converted them into digital signals. The signals would act like messages for the arm to move. But in order to be successful, things would have to work the opposite way as well, meaning the LUKE Arm would need to be able to sense objects and understand the necessary pressure needed to hold them. Sensors in the hand of the LUKE Arm send signals through the Array to the existing nerves, communicating the feeling the hand should be receiving when it touches something.
Created by DEKA R&D (founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen), the LUKE arm "was in development for 15 years and is composed of metal motors with a clear silicon overlay that mimics skin," the article points out.

While it currently draws power from an external battery (and is wired to a computer), they're working on creating a wireless version.