For nearly the first year of her life, her parents and doctors were unaware of the NF, and the brittleness had contributed to multiple bone fractures of the lower leg, unbeknownst to anyone. These early bone breaks resulted in her left leg being 7cm shorter than the other, and as a bright, precocious and athletic child, she adapted to her leg imbalance incredibly well. I felt like I could have been looking at myself as a five-year-old. Unlike me, however, who didn’t have a clue about an aesthetic style in outward appearance until university, she already had been bitten by the fashion bug, and was particularly excited by the prospect of a new holiday dress or her first-day-of-school outfit. Her source of distress lay in the fact that the vast majority of little girls’ shoes were off-limits for her, as there were only a few companies that made shoes that could be adapted with a special lift to even out her walking planes. These shoes had to work within the structure of the external leg brace she grew up wearing.

Her parents were impressive in their own right, first by not imposing labels or limits on her, and then making this medical journey of decisions for their child a collaborative process that included her, appraising her of new options in technology that had arisen as they became aware of them. Unfortunately, technology in her case — a successive series of operations to try and stretch the brittle leg using internal rods and pins to fuse the bone — hadn’t progressed as fast they would have hoped. After the first two of what they knew would be many surgeries, her parents and doctors had made the decision to proceed with this rod approach until she reached the age of five. Then they would re-evaluate the process, considering any advancements in technology. If it hadn’t advanced past this type of treatment, they would consider “other options”.

Shortly after her sixth birthday, her mother told me, “She downloaded all these images of you off of the internet, and she’s always asking ‘When, when can I get rid of my bad leg, when can I get a new leg?’” She even did her show-and-tell at school about prosthetics!

That is decidedly not what I would have expected a six-year-old to do.

Amazingly, because of technological progress in prosthetics, amputation was now an attractive option for this family. Amputation and subsequent fittings with prosthetics was simply seen as liberation from a leg that didn’t function.

After a few months, the child’s mother called me, telling me that she, her spouse and the doctors collectively made the decision to amputate, and that they would be telling the child this news that very night. My reaction was visceral and very surprising to me: I felt my breath grow short and my heart pounded, and I felt ill as waves of stress and worry pummelled me. I panicked at what role I might have played in this chain of events, and how I couldn’t guarantee that this child would have anywhere near the same experiences I had had as an amputee? I found myself having doubts I had never had about myself or, indeed, most any amputee: “Would she be OK? Would her life be happy and full of opportunity?”

I spoke to the mother one last time before the surgery, and she informed me of the surgeon’s decision to do an amputation through the ankle, the common thinking to be to “save as much of the flesh and bone leg” as possible. I couldn’t be sure about this and hesitated even mentioning it, but I asked the mother if she had consulted with the child’s would-be prosthetist about this “Syme’s” style amputation, because I had heard reports of resulting limitations in people being able to obtain the latest prosthetic technology.

Ironically, by keeping more of the residual limb, you negate more options for different prosthetics, as there is no physical room to put the components (think of the shock absorber and spring leg). An incredible facet of this story for me was learning that, at no time before this rather momentous surgery of this child, did the paediatric surgeon and the prosthetist ever have even one conversation.

Her mother investigated with the prosthetist who confirmed that, by leaving as much of the limb as possible, the child wouldn’t be able to get any of the legs in the images she downloaded from the web. The surgeon was shocked to learn this. He had never considered that it might actually be better to amputate a few inches higher, increasing the future mobility options of the child.

This past April, while walking through a street fair hosted by the Tribeca Film Festival, I felt a tug on my shirt. It was this little girl, six months after her amputation, with coloured paints on her face and in her hair, and a plastic tee-ball bat in her hand. She was jumping up and down (post–fairy floss) and she wanted to show me her new High School Musical 3 “tattooed” leg. She asked me if I knew Zac Efron and “could I get him to autograph her leg?” (I don’t, but I’m working on hooking this up.)

She pulled me a few metres over to the batting cage stand, where she deftly used her prosthetic leg to press the foot pedal, launching a whiffle ball pitch that she smacked as hard as she could. On her feet, she proudly sported dress shoes covered with red sequins. Seven months ago, she was as active as a child could be with a leg brace and tremendous pain; here, she ran and jumped and cartwheeled and tackled her little brother, who tackled her back. Even I, who rarely doubts the incredible ability of human beings to adapt to their adversity, was awe-struck.

I wondered how her childhood, her adolescence, her adult years would collude to shape how she saw herself. Would she struggle through various identities, wanting to be “normal” as I did, only to find eventual freedom of self-expression in the absence of normalcy? Barring puberty, which is probably awful for everyone, I think this girl is going to skip over ever wanting to be “normal”. Why be normal when you can have Zac Efron and Friends staring up at you every day from your ankle?

The generation of children growing up today has a distinct advantage in this realm of identity, thanks to their daily interaction with the internet and video games. It’s commonplace for them to create avatars and parallel representations of themselves, and they see their ability to change, transform and augment those bodies to best suit their surroundings as beneficial.

That kind of fluid thinking was once solely the domain of those whose imaginations were heavily influenced by both technology and science fiction. Talk about seeing evolution speed up before your eyes. My being able to embrace the art in my artifice, to change my identities — how I perceive myself and how others respond to that perception — has profoundly changed the way I see the world and my opportunities in it. But I didn’t possess that ability at age six.

I keep thinking of how long it takes for most of us to go through the process of first accepting ourselves as we are, strengths and weaknesses, then celebrating that self and starting to have fun with your strengths and weaknesses, then transforming ourselves as architects of our own identities, redefining what our strengths and weaknesses actually are. I think kids today are able to do this faster than previous generations.

I’ve noticed a progression from how kids used to respond to my wooden legs to responses toward a prosthetic limb today. Quite simply, the fear-at-first-response has all but disappeared; I do not experience children who are afraid to meet me and in fact, I haven’t recently met any child who, when I’m sporting obvious prosthetics like the RoboCop legs, wasn’t drawn like a magnet to me, accompanied by a list of very astute questions.

For the most part, it’s adults who rein kids in, in an attempt to not have them stare or offend with their natural curiosity.

But curiosity is necessary; it is the foundation of imagination and innovation. It’s tremendously important to allow children to see the diversities of human experience and understand how their own lives relate to it, so we can acknowledge how much more similar we are as human beings than different… even if what makes us different is where we discover and engage our rare and valuable qualities, offering them to society.

When I was a child, I watched plenty of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Where some see Professor Xavier, I secretly know he’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. And thanks to airport security, I admit that I often daydream of being able to molecularly transport around the world. I think about that other little girl and wonder to what extent her ability — and that of her peers — to Google the word “prosthetic” and come up with tons of imagery to inspire their imaginations marks a marvellous shift in our society.

There’s plenty of evidence that connects our visualisation of what we dream to be possible to what we eventually create as a new reality. Gene Rodenberry’s imagination in Star Trek and that of Arthur Clarke’s, Marvin Minsky’s and Stanley Kubrick’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey had a direct impact on funding certain projects at NASA because scientists and researchers had “seen” this whole imaginary world, and they sought to make it real.

For my own childhood inspiration, I had the Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man (to this day, the sombre phrase “we can rebuild him” makes my heart pound wildly!), and even Inspector Gadget cartoons made me draw third grade pictures of legs with rocket jet packs flaming from the heels.

This “entertainment” not only asks questions but encourages more of them, replete with inherent timelines for answers: “When are we going to do molecular transport? We’ve been seeing it for 40 years on Star Trek!” It’s within the scope of our imagination.

I remember in high school seeing Forrest Gump when they convincingly transformed Lt. Dan — Gary Sinise, an actor with two flesh and bone leg s— into an amputee. A budding actress, I thought “Oh my God, if they can do this with CGI, couldn’t they do the opposite? Could they create an image of me on screen with full flesh and bone legs?” I was intrigued by the imaginary visual of a different version of myself, and I suspect it provided something tangible when asked if now, at this point in my life, I would trade my prosthetics for flesh and bone legs. (I wouldn’t.)

The transformative power of films lay in engaging how I imagined myself and my “realities”, giving me licence to re-imagine them as I desire. Now that many people, starting from an early age, are creating and choosing their own identities in a virtual world — or in multiple virtual worlds — this self-malleable perspective has a lot of power. People can align themselves with global groups of their own choosing, and see themselves as their ideal selves without many of the social constraints present just a generation ago.

Although it took surviving high-school, I evolved myself to the point where I decided against measuring myself to “normalcy”, deciding instead to self-determine what was cool, who was cool, and the transformation subsequently happened in how other people treated me. “Cogito, ergo sum.” It’s one of the simplest truths we revealed for ourselves, right? “I think, therefore I am.” If you think you can pull it off, you can. Or as Henry Ford put it, “Whether you think you ‘can’ or you think you ‘can’t': either way, you’re right.”

I’d postulate that technology is innately teaching today’s children that very same lesson, and they’re learning it much earlier.

This confident perspective, one perpetually shifting from imagination to invention — be it a personality, a human figure or a new technology — would not have happened a hundred years ago. If I had been born back then, I doubt I would have been enabled by society to do much, even with a self-ignited fire of human spirit, as being a woman was as much of a disability as anything.

Today, I’m grateful for all of my strengths and weaknesses, changing and morphing as they are, and I’m especially grateful for technology’s advancements to prosthetics, as my life has been successful because of having had them, not in spite of having had them.

Aimee Mullins is an athlete, speaker, actress and model we met at TEDMED. She’s also the guest editor for our theme week This Cyborg Life. Read her bio here.

[Lead Image:
Matthew Barney
CREMASTER 3, 2002
©2002 Matthew Barney
Photo: Chris Winget
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery]

The Amazons, after all, amputated their left breast so it wouldn’t impede their skill in archery. Though athletes have taken some truly crazy stuff to have an advantage, nobody’s gone so far as elective amputation.

I’ve spent the better part of my lifetime trying to get out from under an idea of being “disabled”, and the baggage that comes with that label. (Look it up in a thesaurus if you want a taste of what I mean.) As of yet, the best prosthetic available is not as efficient and not as capable as what Mother Nature gives us — or, what she was supposed to give me and South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius. The revolutionary design of the woven carbon-fibre Cheetah Leg, nicknamed for its design inspiration, has been in existence for nearly 15 years — and after my initial triumphs with them in the mid 1990s, it has been the leg of choice for nearly all elite amputee sprinters. But in one instant, after Pistorius entered a summer 2007 track meet in Rome and placed second in a field of runners possessing flesh and bone legs, he and I were deemed too abled.

Commence the comical nightmare of being told that we now possess an “unfair advantage” in wearing prosthetic limbs to run. The scores of amputee sprinters who had competed with the limbs for the previous 13 years — and were still comfortably categorised as “disabled” — were virtually ignored. What is fascinating is the immediate shift in society’s regard of a disabled athlete as an “inspiration” (cue the patronising “awwwww”) to a legitimate threat to other athletes (”Uh, what the hell do we do now?”).

The first obvious issue for me was the deliberate ignoring of the truly excellent athletic feat performed by Pistorius and the insistence that if he could beat able-bodied athletes, “it must be the legs”. Look, I also beat a few able-bodied athletes when I ran Division I track in university, and so have plenty of other well-trained amputees in the last decade. The difference is, none of us have ever posted his times. Bottom line: If it were just the legs making us super-fast, I would have done a decade ago what he’s doing now and so would others. Oscar’s not running with any different technology than what I ran with 14 years ago.

The modern sports ethos that we’ve constructed is based upon increasing advantages. Because certainly, in so many sports, we have pushed past natural human function to facilitate a more exciting game — better times, better performance. But where does an advantage become unfair? The crux of that question lays under the umbrella of ethics, which should indeed govern our rule structure within the competitive arena, but there’s something in this story which specifically points toward a deep-seated fear, one we don’t want to talk about in polite conversation, one which parallels historical instances of racial integration of sport and gender integration of sport. If we allow a person, one who we view as our inferior (in whatever way), to play with us, and then that person beats us what does that say about us?

In the 1930s, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis blew the lid off common thinking of how “capable” an athlete of African descent was compared to an athlete of European descent, although the beginning of league integration took a decade more to achieve, and in some sports another three decades. It was as recent as 2003 when some members of the PGA balked at Annika Sorenstam’s quest to compare her talent to the best men in the world, admitting their fear of how it might feel to have a woman beat them, an embarrassing display of archaic thinking.

In 2001, golfer Casey Martin, who played with a degenerative circulatory leg condition that made it nearly impossible to walk an 18-hole course, successfully won a Supreme Court decision allowing him to use a cart as an acceptable assisted medical device. The PGA Tour fought Martin for years, saying all pro golfers must walk because uniform rules are essential for the integrity of the sport. “Accommodating Martin with a golf cart will not fundamentally change the game,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for a 7-2 majority.

What keeps percolating for me is this perceived discrepancy between advantage and “unfair” advantage. It’s absurd to look at a star line-up of athletes and think that they all have an equal shot. We don’t cry foul play when an athlete from the United States, with the best access to training facilities, coaching staffs and nutritional science is up against someone from say… Uzkbekistan. It’s tough luck that 180cm Tyson Gay has to line up against a 195cm Usain Bolt.

It makes me twitch when we talk about “a level playing field”. No two athletes are the same genetically and environmentally, and the mental and emotional factors they’ve endured in their life are relevant in their performance, too. The only reason athletes today are better than those of decades ago is because of science and technology: We know exactly what and when to feed our bodies for maximum energy, we have lighter shoes and better bikes and new rubberised track surfaces and (legal) supplements and altitude training. We are upping the ante each Olympic year with “smarter” design of an athlete’s tools, both inside and outside the body.

A whopping 74 world records were broken last year between March and November with the Speedo Fastskin LZR Racer suit. Do you wonder if Mark Spitz is annoyed that his times are compared to those of athletes using something he didn’t have the opportunity to use or wear?

My interest was piqued in the latest version of the Fastskin LZR suit, an R&D collaboration with NASA. From the initial press releases to subsequent monthly articles, whatever I could find describing it was overwhelmingly celebratory: Writers cooed about the sharkskin-inspired biometric fibre panels for less drag in the water, and its corset-like torso construction, enabling a swimmer to compress their physique and keep better, more supported form during fatigue, making them markedly more efficient in the water.

Very, very few writers brought up any kind of ethical concern of such a tool like this suit until after the Beijing Olympics, choosing to focus on the race between swimwear companies to develop their own supersuit. Even then, the majority of articles on swimming were marvelling at how Michael Phelps says he “literally felt like a rocket coming off the wall” using the device. Jason Rance, the lead designer on this Speedo suit, commented, “It’s part of the evolution of the sport, and it’s really exciting for swimmers. They say they feel like Superman.”

After the ensuing arms-race to outdo the performance of the Speedo, the Americans and Australians led a protest to FINA, the governing body of swimming. In July of this year, FINA banned the full-length suit, having the suit stop at the knee instead, and mandated that all must be constructed of a “textile”, which is in itself an incredibly ambiguous, vague rule. The ban will take effect in January 2010, and — most intriguing — FINA will allow all records set with the suits to stand.

Let’s think about Tiger Woods having not one, but two LASIK surgeries to achieve 20/15 vision, when what we consider the best of natural vision to be is a mere 20/20. Before his first LASIK surgery, Woods had lost 16 straight tournaments. Immediately following the surgery, he won seven of his next 10. Advantage through technology, or not?

On a company website he endorses, there’s a quote from Tiger after his first LASIK surgery, and I found what he said remarkable on a few levels. He said:

For years I played golf with an invisible handicap, invisible to everyone but me. It was my contact lenses. My eyes would sting burn and water all the while I was trying to concentrate on championship golf. I had the Lasik procedure with a TLC laser eye centre surgeon and the results were fabulous. I’m 20/20 with no contacts. My vision is so crisp I feel I can read all the subtleties of the green and look down the fairway hundreds of yards and focus perfectly on the fly. I’m very happy with the results, and grateful for my TLC centre experience.

The first remarkable aspect of this is that for him, the “handicap” was the ineptitude of the contact lenses, and not the fact that he was visually impaired. (He suffered from -11 nearsightedness, considered the worst 1 per cent, legally blind without corrective glasses or contacts.) The second is his own literal description of being able to now clearly see — without the impediment of burning, stinging eyes — hundreds of yards down the fairway thanks to his technological altering. He himself declares the advantage.

“Invisible to everyone but me.” So is that why nobody’s up in arms, the fact that you can’t see his augmentation? Is that why nobody’s challenging this medical method which assists him in achieving dominance in golf? Of course, in the same way that my running legs don’t power themselves, Tiger’s new eyes don’t power and execute a beautiful swing. His athletic talent is further revealed and enabled than what it would have been under the limits of nature, thanks to technology.

Advantage is just something that is part of sports. No athletes are created equal. They simply aren’t, due to a multitude of factors including geography, access to training, facilities, health care, injury prevention, and sure, technology.

I really don’t know how we compare world records of today to those of 50 years ago. A modern climber’s ascent to Everest has innumerable inherent differences than an ascent of a climber who didn’t have access to lighter tanks, comfortable breathable fibres against the skin, medical support at base camp, etc. The competitive benchmarks in that sport have changed from simply being, “Can you climb the mountain?” to “Can you climb it with oxygen, or without?” A wooden tennis racket isn’t the same thing as the graphite ones used now. We wholeheartedly accept titanium golf clubs, LASIK surgery, the invention of new pitches, better injury prevention and repair, titanium knee and hip replacements, and a notable shift in the size of the average footy player.

Where do we draw this ethical line on performance enhancement? I’m not sure I can answer that right now. What I will say is that I don’t think it’s useful to have this discussion around the existing Cheetah Leg, confusing the current non-enhanced technology with future prosthetics that will indeed provide augmentation. As with all evolution in sport, let’s decide the parameters of competition when the technology actually exists, when we have metrics that inform us as to what extent augmentation is a certainty. Conjecture has no place in this discussion.

Maybe our acceptance of Tiger’s LASIK super vision is really answered in the question, “Can everyone have access to it?” In other words, perhaps because the average citizen out there on the street can get laser surgery, it’s OK for Tiger to get it too, whereas the nature of a bionic prosthetic is still viewed as exclusive, and having to wear one isn’t exactly a position the average citizen covets.

What’s going to happen in the future, especially with the rise of more capable prostheses? The human leg is actually a series of internal motors and springs, so the fact that external motors aren’t allowed in track is kind of interesting. (Case in point: Dean Kamen placed 14 motors in his new design of the artificial arm to simulate human function.)

In the not-so-distant future, designers will be able to build a prosthetic leg with a chip in it that they can program to accurately simulate human performance thresholds. (Since we know that no two “able-bodied” athletes have the same bodies, and therefore what they can achieve with their bodies are different, will they average out individual “able-bodied” thresholds to get those metrics? Will they cap how fast they imagine the fastest man on earth to be at 9.58? That time was unimaginable even 18 months ago, when Bolt then set the new WR at 9.72.)

The chip used in a prosthetic that will dictate “acceptable human” metric-based output is what will be allowed in the Olympic standard; meanwhile, the Paralympics will be no holds barred. In an ironic, amazing cultural flip, you will see runners in the Paralympics going faster than those in the Olympics. Now won’t that be an interesting comment on “dis”ability?

Aimee Mullins is an athlete, speaker, actress and model we met at TEDMED. She’s also the guest editor for our theme week This Cyborg Life. Read her bio here.

[LASIK image: Stefan Zaklin/Stringer/Getty; Tiger image: Lucas Dawson/Stringer/Getty Images; LZR image: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images; Aimee image: Greg Kadel]

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

Obviously, the role of a prosthetic is one far more intimate than that of a couch, and being fitted for a prosthetic is much more labour-intensive than just picking out eyeglasses, but the ideas aren’t so dissimilar. From the 1930s to as late as the 1970s, the UK National Health Service mandated only one “choice” for their eyeglasses — considered solely as “medical appliances” — and the standard was a plastic frame formed in a rather horrid pinkish colour, an attempt at “flesh tone”, already problematic in that description… whose flesh tone, exactly?

The NHS believed that people would want discretion in their vision correction — the social humiliation generally thought to be incurred by wearing glasses meant that no-one would want their glasses to stand out. So there was one form of glasses made for everyone. Today, that sounds ludicrous.

Meanwhile, someone has yet to build a leg that does it all &mdash ;I have to change legs when I want to wear high heels; I have to change legs when I want to wear different height high-heels; I have to change legs when I want to swim, take a boxing class at the gym, or sprint on the track. I have 12 pairs in all (though many are housed in museums).

Until that functionality is matched with one single prosthetic, you want to be able to have the fullest quality of life as deemed by you. For some people, it will never be important to swim, or wear a pair of high heels, or to have a prosthetic limb with a cosmesis that really replicates humanness. But for others, those things could be very important. For some people, like me, some of those things are important only some of the time.

In my functional daily arsenal, I have a general rotation between what I call the “Robocop” legs (Re-Flex VSP Legs made by Ossur) and my cosmetic, very life-like legs (by Dorset Orthopaedic).

As if we weren’t already aware of the dire state of the American healthcare system, the lack of prosthetic opportunity and choice for most people is due to very limited coverage by insurance companies. To be frank, since my teenage years, I have pursued each and every opportunity to be a guinea pig, trading the use of my body as a testing ground for new technologies for the privilege of using them. Not one pair of my legs is covered by insurance; not one pair of my legs is considered “medically necessary”.

What is considered medically necessary for the insurance standard is whatever gets you from the bed to the toilet. I am not kidding. No other aspect of daily living other than using the bathroom is considered “necessary”, which means your basic prosthetic given to most amputees — a stick with a rubber foot as a leg, or a stick with a hook on the end as an arm, has fundamentally not changed since WWII.

My Ossur legs are constructed of woven carbon fibre. They’ve got a shock absorber, springs and a split-toe foot so I can navigate uneven terrain with a better balance — and basically there’s nothing human-looking about that leg. I don’t mind this aspect. I’m quite happy with this amazing construction looking like what it is: a good prosthetic that enables me to move around very well. I’ve embraced the sci-fi aesthetic of the sleek black carbon fibre, the WD-40 glistening on the shock absorber, and I feel rather cool wearing them. They’re the prosthetic leg version of a motorcycle jacket. However, I am very aware that there are some vets — mostly female, but some male as well — currently coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan who aren’t exactly thrilled about looking like the Terminator, and their consumer desire for choice should be respected.

My Dorset legs are designed more for style than utility. Far lighter than the VSPs, the skeleton or internal frame is made from a hollow carbon-fibre, custom-made tube, and like my sports legs, the sockets are shaped to match my residual limbs exactly so I am able to wear the prostheses all day without discomfort. The carbon is used because it has tremendous strength and weighs very little, approx 300g. The frame is then covered with a polyurethane foam that is then sculpted both to my specific requests and the aesthetic imagination of the prosthetist Bob Watts, who will ask me how I want them to look (my last pair got a super flexed calf muscle; it serves as a reminder to get the rest of my body to the gym.) Finally, the prosthesis is sheathed in a 2mm custom-made silicone cosmesis. The cosmesis is a truly astounding work of art: a Kevlar-backed and vulcanised silicone sleeve is built up of many thin layers of differently coloured silicones that matches my exact skin tone by combing through nearly 500 colour swatches of silicone. You won’t find any standardised pinky-beige hues here. Dorset will even map hairs or just hair follicles (I prefer mine smooth, thank you), capillaries, veins, moles, and yes… tattoos. The cosmesis takes a technician two weeks to build and sculpt. The result: incredible.

When travelling, I try to always wear my Robocop legs mainly because the shock absorber makes traversing the airport halls more comfortable. I can also easily lift the legs of my yoga pants and pop them off easily on a plane, making air travel much more tolerable when sitting trapped in a confined space for a few hours. An additional travel hazard I face is with airport security metal detectors: Wearing legs that look so perfectly human, like the cosmetic pair I have, is not ideal because generally people in airports hear the word “prosthetic” without registering what it means. Being laced with bits of metal, I set off the bells and whistles and it isn’t obvious why, and it leads to a more complicated, lengthier interrogation and inspection for me. Anyone who has ever raced to make a connection in Charles de Gaulle airport knows that every minute counts!

I once wore my cosmetic legs while transiting in Portugal and (predictably) set off the metal detector. They waived me aside — this was right after 9/11 — and in a pathetically muddled hybrid of Spanish and Italian, I was like “no, no, yo tengo…” and “ho due…” struggling to complete the sentence with the Latin root word of “prosthetic”. I said what I thought sounded like a good approximation, and I immediately got hauled off to one of those strip search rooms replete with search dogs, because the whole time I was actually saying, “Leave me alone, I’m with two prostitutes”.

Not eager to revisit my lost-in-translation experience, I’ve learned to keep the cosmetic legs in the suitcase. I wear the Robocop legs, and when I set the metal detectors off, I just show my carbon fibre limbs at the ankle, and it’s automatic: we commence with the wanding, the bomb swab, the pat down. At JFK they have an additional x-ray box with a battery of 10 scans I have to pass — they actually know me by name now.

So I guess that means when travelling, I do anything but try to look like everyone else — which is a bit different from what the UK National Health Service would have ever predicted in 1950. [Image by Nick Knight]

A light, 1kg exoskeleton, the Freedom Leg moves all of your body weight from your injured foot to the prosthesis frame and your upper leg, meaning that you can walk pretty much like you normally would while you heal up. And while I welcome resident doctors to list all of this product’s flaws in the comments, to my pea brain, the idea seems so obvious and simple that it just might work. [Forward Mobility via medGadget via OhGizmo!]

The black angus heifer was bought from the neighbouring ranch they found it on, and operated on by vets and students at Colorado State University.

It’s a sweet story and all but does this seem a wee bit misguided to anyone else? Thousands of dollars to save a cow that was halfway to burgertown? If you want to help out animals, you could spend that money in a way that would save many animals instead of just one. But hey, it does look pretty adorable! [wtop via Neatorama]

And, as an elephant, she weighs three tons. That kind of weight&mdas;excuse me for saying so, ma’am—requires one strong prosthesis. It took a few years of work to get right.

In the interim, Motola was forced to use a temporary prosthesis. This was completely unbecoming of her status as a respected 48-year-old pachyderm.

But she was patient, and today she took her first steps. They were a success. To celebrate the occasion, Motola sucked up some dirt and blew it skyward like dusty fireworks. She has some work to do, but the limb held her massive frame, and she’ll hopefully be walking with some semblance of normalcy for the rest of her days.

We can rebuild her. They did rebuild her. Motola: The Million Dollar Elephant. [SFGate]

Human legs are just so bourgeois. You’ll never catch me wearing the last millennium’s leg fashions again.

These “digitigrade leg extensions” are the work of Seattle-based sculptor Kim Graham. Essentially a fancy pair of stilts, the legs mimic digitigrades (animals including horses that bear weight on their toes). Half this video demonstrates how the legs look on a human. The other half demonstrates how they look on a furry satyr.

Brb, gotta voluntarily vomit up this Kashi and coffee that I consumed about three moments too soon this morning. [Kim Graham via Super Punch]

In 2005, Ellie May Challis lost all of her limbs to meningitis. In 2009, she’s become the youngest person ever fitted with carbon fibre legs.

Her original prostheses never fit perfectly, causing her pain and great difficulty when walking. So, with the financial help of their community, Ellie May’s parents took her to Dorset Orthopaedic where doctors designed an extra small pair of carbon fibre legs—the same type of prostheses used by Olympic sprinters—costing about $US15,000.

She’ll need a new pair of legs every two years as she grows up.

But while doctors were originally worried that she’d have a tough time balancing on her new limbs, Ellie May is moving twice as fast as she did before. And as one specialist put it, “Within seconds of having them on, she was off. It will change her life.” [Echo via Neatorama]

The eye, known as Argus II, is made by American company Second Sight. It works by using a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send captured images to a tiny receiver placed on the outside of a patient’s eye.

73-year-old Ron lost his site in his 40s thanks to retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disorder that causes progressive peripheral vision loss. He is one of 18 patients across the world taking part in Second Sight’s experiment.

“They said let their be light, there was light. For 30 years I’ve seen absolutely nothing at all, it’s all been black. But now light is coming through,” he told the BBC.

“It’s a great privilege and an honour, I think, to be able to take part in an experiment such as this – hoping that the outcome is going to be able to bring sight to people, like myself, that were completely blind.” [BBC via Boingboing]

Infatuated with the idea of being a mermaid, Vessey contacted Weta Workshop—the special-effects team that worked on the Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia series—about creating a prosthetic mermaid’s tail for her. Bibbity-bobbity-boo! Two years later, Vessey now looks and swims like an actual mermaid with a comfortable, fully functional mermaid’s tail—made out of wetsuit fabric, plastic molds, and a digitally printed sock—and attached suit. Magical, isn’t it? [CNet]