Mitchell follows Jesse Sullivan, a former Tennessee power lineman who was the first male to receive this type of prosthetic arm in 2002.

Four other men have become bionic with this type of arm since Sullivan.

The device is revolutionary because it is controlled by the person's brain, say the prosthesis' developers.

For Mitchell, it is revolutionary because she now has part of her life back.

"What I had before was very frustrating," Mitchell said, referring to a previous artificial arm.

"Now I can do many of the daily activities I was unable to do following my injury, like pick up a cup, open a jar, and peel a banana."

The Science of the Bionics

How exactly does Mitchell do those activities?

Surgeons move nerves from the shoulder - nerves that used to be attached to the arm - and reconnect them to skin and muscles in the chest.

After those nerves are in place, the brain still thinks they are attached to the missing arm.

When Mitchell thinks about moving her arm, special sensors that have been placed over the rerouted nerves pick up the signals from the nerves and muscles, translating them into movement in the artificial arm.

The arm moves with the help of the former shoulder nerves that are now attached to the chest muscles.

The nerves rerouted to the skin of the chest let Mitchell feel what her prosthetic arm feels, including hot and cold sensations.

The rewiring does not happen overnight, though.

"It takes about three to five months from the time of surgery for the nerves to grow in," said Dr. Todd Kuiken, director of the Neural Engineering Center for Artificial Limbs and Center for Bionic Medicine at the Chicago institute.

Kuiken led the team that developed the bionic arm with support from the National Institutes of Health.

A New Lease on an Arm

For Mitchell, who now can use her bionic arm to pick up objects, eat, and dress, her long journey has been worth it.

"People don't know how lucky they are until faced with the difficulties of losing an arm," she said.

The current version of the prosthesis has three motors located within the prosthetic arm that work together to carry out commands.

Future models will use six motors. The goal is to produce more natural movements and allow recipients to perform more complex tasks.

Scientists hope that this technology will eventually lead to even more functional models, including legs through which the person can actually feel where they are walking.

Mitchell is trying to give a little bit back, because she has been given a sort of second chance with her arm.

She currently serves as a mentor for new Marine officers and as an active supporter to other amputees returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

"This new planet, if you could imagine putting it in a cosmic water glass, it would float," said Robert Noyes, a research astrophysicist with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The planet, a gas giant, is probably a puffed up ball of hydrogen and helium.

HAT-P-1 is an oddball planet, since it orbits its parent star at just one-twentieth of the distance that separates Earth from our own sun. While Earth takes a year to orbit the sun, the newly found planet whips around its star once every 4.5 days.

Astronomers believe HAT-P-1 may belong to an entirely new class of planets, along with a second, smaller distant world that's also puffier than theories would have predicted, Noyes said.

Astronomers used a network of telescopes in Arizona and Hawaii to discover the planet. Its parent star is too faint to see with the naked eye but can be spied with binoculars.

Bush's estimated IQ is about 20 points below that of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, "a disparity that may have created a contrast effect that made any intellectual weaknesses all the more salient".

Simonton has drawn up a table of estimated presidential intelligence by amassing data created by other researchers. Writing in the journal Political Psychology he says that estimates of Bush's IQ range between 111.1 and 138.5, with a mean of 120, "which is about the average for a college graduate in the United States".

Clinton's IQ ranged between 135.6 and 159, and Ronald Reagan's between 118 and 141.9. John Quincy Adams, president from 1825-9, was the cleverest with a range of 165 to 175, well into genius territory.

The data used by Simonton was created by the filtering and analysis of personality descriptions from biographical sources - an academically recognised system known as a "historiometric" study.

Bush may be "much smarter" than the findings imply, says Simonton, but he scores particularly unimpressively for "openness to experience, a cognitive proclivity that encompasses unusual receptiveness to fantasy, aesthetics, actions, ideas and values. In the general population this factor is positively associated with intelligence".

Bush's openness score of zero - compared with 82 for Clinton and John F Kennedy, 95 for Abraham Lincoln and 99.1 for Thomas Jefferson - "placed him at the very bottom of US presidents".

This assessment can only be considered tentative because of lack of available evidence on a sitting president, but it is corroborated by a measure of Bush's "integrative complexity". Simonton says: "Low scorers on integrative complexity can only see things from a single perspective - their own."

Bush's score, he says, is comparable to "extremist Islamic fundamentalists in the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leadership - with the notable exception of Osama Bin Laden, who is lower still".

Trevor McCrisken, lecturer in American politics at Warwick University, said: "This is going to give added ammunition to those who dislike Bush, and who particularly dislike his folksiness, and his apparent lack of intellectual vigour. A major part of his public persona, to some extent, I think deliberately, is that he is not an intellectual. But he went to Yale, he has had an exclusive upbringing and he is by no means a dimwit."

The hotel will be issued a $240 fine for failing to display signage about the Smoke-Free Ontario Act, which bans smoking in enclosed places across the province. The hotel will also be fined $365 for not informing Penn he could not smoke.

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The fines can be fought in court, like a parking or speeding ticket.

Investigation found Penn was not informed

An individual is fined if there is proof that he or she was informed but chose to ignore the bylaw. This was not the case with Penn, a spokeswoman for Toronto Public Health told CBC Arts Online Friday morning.

Toronto Public Health, which is responsible for enforcing the bylaw, initially conducted routine spot checks in hotels across the city in August, but the Penn incident drew them back to the Sutton Place Hotel this week, said spokeswoman Rishma Govani.

Public health inspectors investigated the incident and determined that, ultimately, responsibility lay with the hotel. But the acclaimed actor should still expect some mail from health officials.

"We're writing a letter to Sean Penn," Govani said. "We'd love to see him again in the city and to make sure he's aware of what the bylaws are. We also hope he's kicked the habit [by then]."

Smoking photos featured prominently in media

Many newspapers and media outlets, including CBC Arts Online, published images of the Oscar-winning actor lighting up during the press conference for his film All the King's Men, which had its world premiere in Toronto on Sunday evening and hits North American theatres Sept. 22.

The festival press conferences are held in a Sutton Place Hotel ballroom.

On Wednesday, Jim Watson, Ontario's Minister of Health Promotion, criticized Penn for the smoking incident and said festival organizers should remind their Hollywood guests about Ontario's smoking laws.