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Kevin Warwick doesn’t look anything like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he has spent three months of his life as a cyborg, bringing to mind the weird fictional world Schwarzenegger has put on cinema screens. Warwick is, however, a very serious scientist who tested implants to his central nervous system, in his arm, as part of a project to help develop artificial arms that could be moved by its "owner" using brain cells.

Warwick talked at the Lift08 conference in Geneva about his cyborg experience, but he had newer, less headline-grabbing news, that work is progressing on developing electronic implants that can be used to predict, in advance, Parkinson’s tremors and epileptic seizures. The idea is to initially help prevent these, but Warwick’s work at the University of Reading in the UK is also leading to a better understanding of how brain cells can be trained (not his words), to use a simplistic explanation, in order to get them to shift paths. The goal is to eventually reroute them to stave off the tremors and seizures.

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