Cyborgs entered popular culture in the 1980s – remember action hero Jean-Claude van Damme in Cyborg ? New interfaces between surgery, robotic engineering, and electrobiology are helping them become reality. A cyborg, in medical terms, is a person who has robotic parts, such as limbs, that can be controlled by the brain, and in some instances, “felt” in the same way that we feel our arms and legs. Much of the research is still experimental. But Hugh Herr, a professor of media arts and sciences of the Centre of Extreme Bionics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Matthew...