[jsr]

This is not new technology. A company called cyberkinetics commercialized this 12 years ago and made it work in humans. See their coverage in wired from 2003.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html

[msb]

Of course it's not new, the article (as brief as it is) states that this work builds upon the electrode based efforts that you referenced from 2003.