Word: limbed
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...shiny metal friends as forces for good. Last week Seiji Uchida, who has been paralyzed from the neck down since 1983, came within 150 m of summiting the 4,164-m Breithorn, in the Swiss Alps, with the help of a robotic power suit named HAL (for Hybrid Assistive Limb, not to be confused with the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in 2001). Starting at 3,800 m, he hitched a ride up the mountain on the back of his friend, climber Takeshi Matsumoto, who wore the computerized exoskeleton built by Japanese tech firm Cyberdyne (not to be confused with...
...shrapnel wounds"), execution ("Their hands are usually tied behind their back, and they've been shot in the head"), garroting and beheading. He buries victims of U.S. air strikes, some of whose bodies have been fused together by the heat of the explosion "so you can't tell which limb belongs to which head." Every now and again, he will get a body bag with charred-black body parts, dismembered by massive explosions. Those are the remains of suicide bombers. "When you explode a bomb strapped to your chest," he says, "it tears up your body in a particular...
Horses are undeniably born to run, a survival strategy that befits a prairie herbivore with neither fangs nor claws. While a lot of animals are fleet of foot, horses achieve their speed more elegantly than most, starting with their disproportionately long legs. Limb length usually means bulk, since it takes a lot of muscle to move long bones. But muscles add weight, and weight reduces speed. The horse solves that problem by packing its musculature in its upper body, then transferring that power down to the legs with an elaborate rope work of tendons and ligaments that absorb shock...
...Hospital on hand. As would any doctor, one of the first things surgeon Dean Richardson did when Barbaro arrived was feel his patient's pulse--in several spots along the injured leg. Weak pulses or a cold foot would have meant that blood-vessel injury had occurred and the limb was lost. "He had good, strong pulses, and his foot was warm," says Richardson. "I was thrilled...
...after the surgery that repaired his limb, Barbaro was standing--gingerly--with the aid of a cast, but his situation is still touch and go. Infection remains a risk, as does laminitis, injury to the tissue between hoof and bone that can affect the healthy left hind leg, which now bears more weight. To minimize the risk of reinjury, Barbaro will be confined in his stall for several months. The goal is not to get him fit enough to race; that option ended shortly outside the gate at Pimlico. What he does need is an ankle strong enough to support...