Eight people have reliably used a mind-controlled robotic third arm to do two things at once. The technology could be used give a helping hand when lifting heavy objects or for tasks that require more than two arms.

Participants in the experiment had to learn to control a robotic arm using a brain-machine interface. The robotic arm was placed next to the participants, and they wore two electrodes on the outside of their head to capture  brain activity. The arm was then calibrated to pick up on the differences in brain patterns when participants imagined the arm grasping and releasing a bottle.

To test their skills, participants had perform two tasks simultaneously. The first was to hold and release a bottle using the robotic arm, and the second was to use their two real arms to move a ball around on a tray.

The team found that eight out of the fifteen participants could reliably roll the ball to target points on the tray while grasping and releasing the bottle with the robotic arm, but the other seven struggled and were only successful about half the time.

“The two groups didn’t differ by their ability to control the arm, but probably by their ability to concentrate on multiple tasks at once,” says Shuichi Nishio at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan. In other words, he believes people who were better at the task were simply better at multitasking.

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Robotic arms like this could be used for people who work in factories, for example, by helping to lift very heavy objects or just providing an extra hand when needed. This contrasts with other projects that have focused on using robotic arms for prosthetics.

Beyond multitasking, experimenting with a mind-controlled robotic arm could act as a form brain training. The authors propose that practicing with the robotic arm could improve people’s general ability to concentrate on multiple things at once.

Earl Miller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees that this may improve the ability of participants to concentrate, but no more than any other activity requiring focus.

“Practicing sustained focus, concentration, will make you better at doing it,” he says. It is sort of like meditation, only with a mind-controlled robotic arm.

Risky research

We need to re-think the origins of one of the most iconic dinosaurs.

Diplodocoids are a group of sauropod dinosaurs that includes famous species like Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. They were previously thought to have evolved after the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea, but fossils of a previously unknown dinosaur found in China are forcing a re-think.

The early diplodocoid has been named Lingwulong shenqi, literally “amazing dragon of Lingwu”, after the town near where it was found.

Xing Xu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and his team found the fossils in Ningxia Autonomous Region in northwest China, and date them from about 174 million years ago. This makes it 15 million years older than the earliest members of this family known until now – and changes the story of how sauropod dinosaurs everywhere evolved.

“Previously we thought that advanced sauropods arrived in the late Jurassic and quickly became dominant on this planet, but this suggests that these dinosaurs evolved earlier and spread slower,” says Xu.

Until now, there had been a consensus that different dinosaur groups lived in different parts of the world by this time. But the presence of diplodocoids in China at this time adds to an argument that dinosaurs were more similar throughout the globe. The apparent geographic diversity might be just down to an incomplete fossil record.

Xu thinks this proves it’s important for researchers to continue investing time and effort in these digs. “My experience in China suggests that there are still lots of unexplored areas, so there’s still lots of potential. It’s been explored for half a century, but we still find new results.”

Read more: New dinosaur fossil explains how Diplodocus evolved to be so massive