Eugene Alford just couldn’t get his legs to move, but it wasn’t for want of trying. It was 2012, and he was in a laboratory at the University of Houston in Texas, participating in a study that was designed to see whether people with paralysis could control a robotic exoskeleton with their thoughts. Alford, a plastic surgeon who’d lost the use of his legs when a tree fell on him at his farm, kept trying to walk by willing the electrical impulses in his brain up and into the electrodes on his head, from where they could be translated into movement.Read more here.