My close encounter with the bionic man

In a room piled high with scaffolding and cardboard boxes, two members of staff at London’s Science Museum are peering up a man’s nose. A few minutes later, they’re squatting on the floor to examine his feet. Then, very carefully, one reaches a gloved hand into his thorax and prods his kidney.

The man does not flinch. But then it would have been very surprising if he had, because Rex is not a biological life form, but an artificial “bionic” man.

Created for a Channel 4 documentary to prove just how closely technology can emulate the human body, Rex – short for “robotic exoskeleton” – has been put together by the Shadow robotics company using artificial limbs and organs borrowed from the laboratories of leading scientists from as far afield as New Zealand and San Francisco.

more here: TeleGraph