Wings: Dr. Joe Rosen "believes in all seriousness that within five years he will be able to graft wings on to a human being's body: 'If I were to give you wings, you would develop, literally, a winged brain.'"

Rats as robots: "After implanting the electrodes and training a "roborat" for eight to 10 days in a figure-eight-shaped maze, the Chapin-led team could steer it through any three-dimensional route. It could induce the animal to climb ladders, descend ramps, walk on a pipe or navigate through uneven terrain. The rat would even climb trees or wander around a brightly lit room -- alien behaviors for the untrained."

Digestion as art: "Cloaca is a 33-foot-long machine that simulates human digestion . . . Museum staff feed Cloaca twice daily with food from local restaurants. The device digests for 22 hours and eliminates once daily, at 2:30 p.m."

Wings from rats and pigs as art: A new art project will "showcase wing-shaped objects made from living pig tissue, wings that will be animated using living muscles grown from rat cells." Pig Wings is part of the Tissue Culture & Art Project, "whose goal is to create a vision of futuristic objects that are partly artificially constructed and partly grown/born."