There has been a number of breakthroughs in prosthetic limbs connected directly to the brain.  Here are a few related articles.  None of them happen to be the one I was looking for, but oh well.

Robotic Arms Allow Paralyzed Patients to Grasp Objects

Maybe my future is to easy with synthetic animal skins, I guess the haute couture version will be custom bio-designed animal skins.

•• update **
after posting this last May, I just brought it up as a reference with an illustrator, who clued me that it is a hoax. Well at least it makes good sci-fi reference.

via Takepart.com read the full article here.

“the doctors harvested enough cartilage from her chest wall to create an entire new ear. They carved and stitched this cartilage together to match her other ear. Then they implanted it, still skinless, near the wrist so skin and blood vessels could grow into it.”

via Takepart.com read the full article here.

More from the the New York Times series.

Last fall, Dr. Rubin cut out the scar tissue from Sergeant Strang’s leg and stitched a sheet resembling a thick piece of parchment paper — extracellular matrix from a pig urinary bladder, which had shown excellent results in lab studies — into the remaining healthy thigh muscle.

His body immediately started breaking down the matrix, which consists largely of collagen and other proteins. But the doctors expected, and wanted, that to happen — by degrading into smaller compounds, the matrix started the signaling process, recruiting stem cells to come to the site where they could become muscle cells.

 

via Fast Company

read the full article here.

Envisioning Technology, the firm behind the massive infographic explorations of the future of emerging technology and the future of education technology, is, as you might guess, run by a futurist: Michell Zappa. His most recent visualization maps the next three decades of health technology, charting how regeneration, augmentation, diagnostics, treatments, biogerontology, and telemedicine will change over time. According to ET, the stuff of science fiction–from cryogenics to all-out life extension, from robot health care to 3-D-printed synthetic organs–will be very real before too long.

The world of The Gatecrashers takes place 30 years into the future.  Technology like the organ growth profiled in this New York Times Article on organ transplant, has trickled down to the street, where regular citizens use this sort of technology not only for homegrown medical procedures, but also for back alley cosmetic reconstruction.

In Mr. Beyene’s case, an exact copy of his windpipe was made from a porous, fibrous plastic, which was then seeded with stem cells harvested from his bone marrow. After just a day and a half in a bioreactor — a kind of incubator in which the windpipe was spun, rotisserie-style, in a nutrient solution — the implant was stitched into Mr. Beyene, replacing his cancerous windpipe.

From the New York Times Article:
“A First: Organs Tailor-Made With Body’s Own Cells”
by HENRY FOUNTAIN

I decided it’s finally time to start drawing the real map. I grabbed a trial copy of Ortelius by Map Diva. It is going to be a long road to getting it all in, but I got a good start over the weekend.

This one in via The Verge. This is where it all starts, in the garage (or at least mom’s basement).

Ok I would have embeded the video, but it would only embed at about 900 pixels wide. So here’s the link.

http://vrge.co/P3ggv5

In a nutshell, these guys are doing some pretty invasive body modification.

Well, it isn’t everyday that PR web videos bring tears to my eyes, but this one struck a chord.