FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) recently wrapped up its BODY FORWARD Challenge. Teams were asked to explore bio-engineering possibilities and discover innovative ways to improve and maximize the body’s potential.

The winning team, known as the “Flying Monkeys,” will receive up to $20,000 from the X PRIZE Foundation to patent their invention, the BOB-1 — a prosthetic device that allowed a 3-year-old, born without fingers on her dominant hand, to use a pencil.

If the name strikes you as eccentric, things might make a little more sense after you learn that the team was made up of Girl Scouts, ages 11 to 13. Not only that, take a look at these other young inventors’ submissions.

Feeling inspired? There’s still time to enter the 2011 Create the Future design contest — and you won’t even have to compete with the likes of the Flying Monkeys: Entrants must be 18 years of age or older.

A research team led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has developed a prototype of the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provides sensory feedback, and allows for eight degrees of freedom. Proto 1 is a complete limb system that also includes a virtual environment used for patient training, clinical configuration, and to record limb movements and control signals during clinical investigations.

The natural control and integrated sensory feedback demonstrated with Proto 1 are enabled by Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR), a technique that involves the transfer of residual nerves from an amputated limb to unused muscle regions in appropriate proximity to the injury. During clinical evaluation, a patient demonstrated substantial improvements in functional testing, such as the ability to reposition the thumb for different grips, remove a credit card from a pocket, and stack cups while controlling grip force using sensory feedback versus vision.

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