One step ahead

"THE human body is a machine that winds its own springs," wrote Julien Offray de La Mettrie, a French physician-philosopher, in 1748. While La Mettrie's primitive ideas on physiology have long since been supplanted, the idea that the human machinery is particularly finely tuned, particularly when it comes to locomotion, remains. A clever bit of kit described this week, however, suggests that the tuning is not quite perfect.

People have been engaged in a quest to improve upon the bodies nature gave them for about as long as there have been engineers. Nicolas Yagn, a Russian inventor, got a patent in 1890 for his "Apparatus for facilitating walking, running and jumping", an unwieldy wearable contraption of bendy bow-springs that would in modern parlance be called an exoskeleton.