Incredibly, with the nerves that used to lead to the patient’s hand now growing into his chest, those muscles became stand-in hands. Hot, cold, sharp, dull and pressure down to a single gram of force can now be ‘felt’ by an extremity that isn’t there any more.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was a blatant example of what’s been dubbed “The Other Internet”, a layer of businesses that work in the background to capture and trade details about what you like and visit online.

It’s not like the cochlear implant or black box flight recorder. The Internet had a long, varied and occasionally ad hoc genesis, as Drew Turney learns. Befitting the tool that revolutionised human communication in the latter years of the 20th century, the Internet wasn’t the result of a lone, dedicated inventor sitting in a lab […]