I’ll post, and we’ll talk about, some amazing prosthetics that can give almost a normal life back to people who have lost limbs from disease or trauma, but this just might be going to far.

At MIT they have developed a set of prosthetic fingers for people who still have all their fingers. And the prosthetic only offers two additional digits. It’s so you can have seven fingers instead of five. Why would you need this? Well, to stir your coffee for one, as the image below, blatantly stolen from the source using only five fingers, shows. Or perhaps if you have an especially troublesome itch, or perhaps if you have to poke 3 1/2 people in the eye all at once.

They are neat in their way; they’re controlled by a glove worn over the hand, so they exert the same amount of force and grip that the other fingers are exerting. I suppose there could be real applications for this, I just can’t think of what they might be. Still, progress.