
Flesh and bone triumphed in the first ever man-versus-machine battle of brawn–an arm wrestling contest between robots and humans in California on Monday. The champion, beating all three robotic arms each in matter of seconds, was a 17-year-old girl called Panna Felsen, a high school student from San Diego, US. The contest was set up by Yoseph Bar-Cohen at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, US, in an attempt to encourage the development of polymer-based artificial muscles. The aim, he says, is to improve on existing actuators–or muscles–currently used in prosthetics and robots.