The revolution will be prosthetized

It's October at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., and Jonathan Kuniholm is playing "air guitar hero," a variation on Guitar Hero, the Nintendo Wii game that lets you try to keep up with real musicians using a vaguely guitarlike controller. But the engineer is playing without a guitar. More to the point, he's playing without his right hand, having lost it in Iraq in 2005. Instead he works the controller by contracting the muscles in his forearm, creating electrical impulses that electrodes then feed into the game. After about an hour he beats the high score set by Robert Armiger, a two-armed Johns Hopkins University engineer who modified Guitar Hero to train amputees to use their new prostheses.