Olympic Drone Swarm

First Ever Cyborg Olympics Brought to you by...DARPA

Couple the Defense Research Projects Agency’s major and well-funded interest in prosthetics with the grit shown by amputee veterans to excel in sports and you’ve got a heck of start for building a U.S. team for the first-ever bionic Olympics.

The Cybathlon, an international competition for athletes using advanced prosthetics, is to be held in October 2016 in Zurich, Switzerland.

“The competitions are comprised by different disciplines that apply the most modern powered knee prostheses, wearable arm prostheses, powered exoskeletons, powered wheelchairs, electrically stimulated muscles and novel brain-computer interfaces,” according to the games’ official website.


The games are being organized on behalf of the Swiss National Competence Center of Research in Robotics.

DARPA has a number of programs that ultimately, benefit not only the active-duty soldier, but the injured veteran who remains determined live with as few limitations as possible. DARPA has been hot at work on advanced prosthetics – legs, arms, hands – and exoskeletons.

Could hardly be a better opportunity to field test some of these technologies than a kind of Olympics specifically for men and women using them.

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Adventures in Sochi's Hotels

Journalists at Sochi are live-tweeting their hilarious and gross hotel experiences

Amid continued debate over whether or not Sochi is prepared to host the 2014 Olympics (here are 15 alarming signs that Russia might not be ready) reporters from around the world are starting to check into local hotels — to their apparent grief. Some journalists arriving in Sochi are describing appalling conditions in the housing there, where only six of nine media hotels are ready for guests. Hotels are still under construction. Water, if it’s running, isn’t drinkable. One German photographer told the AP over the weekend that his hotel still had stray dogs and construction workers wandering in and out of rooms.

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