Takeuchi led a research team that built a full-size, 18 centimeter-long biohybrid human-like hand with all five fingers driven by lab-grown human muscles. Out of all the roadblocks that keep us ...

The research was published in Nature Communications. The human hand, with its 23 degrees of freedom, accounts for about 54% of the body's total movement ability, despite weighing only around 1/150 ...

Japanese researchers have developed the first biohybrid hand capable of performing complex gestures using human muscle tissue grown in a laboratory. This could pave the way for unprecedented uses.

They also made soft polymer hand replicas designed to mimic the elasticity of human skin and used them to generate clapping sounds for comparison. The recorded frequencies matched the predictions ...

This story appears in the May 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. The hand is where the mind meets the world. We humans use our hands to build fires and sew quilts, to steer airplanes, to ...