Not exactly a brain chip per se by a bit of nanotech.
While companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are hard at work on brain-computer interfaces that require surgery to cut open the skull and insert a complex array of wires into a person’s head, a team of researchers at MIT have been researching a wireless electronic brain implant that they say could provide a non-invasive alternative that makes the technology far easier to access.
They describe the system, called Circulatronics, as more of a treatment platform than a one-off brain chip. Working with researchers from Wellesley College and Harvard University, the MIT team recently released a paper on the new technology, which they describe as an autonomous bioelectronic implant.
As New Atlas points out, the Circulatronics platform starts with an injectable swarm of sub-cellular sized wireless electronic devices, or “SWEDs,” which can travel into inflamed regions of the patient’s brain after being injected into the bloodstream. They do so by fusing with living immune cells, called monocytes, forming a sort of cellular cyborg.
Microrobots—tiny robots less than a millimeter in size—are useful in a variety of applications that require tasks to be completed at scales far too small for other tools, such as targeted drug-delivery or micro-manufacturing. However, the researchers and engineers designing these robots have run into some limitations when it comes to navigation. A new study, published in Nature, details a novel solution to these limitations—and the results are promising.
The biggest problem when dealing with microrobots is the lack of space. Their tiny size limits the use of components needed for onboard computation, sensing and actuation, making traditional control methods hard to implement. As a result, microrobots can’t be as “smart” as their larger cousins.
Researchers have tried to cover this limitation already. In particular, two methods have been studied. One method of microrobot control uses external feedback from an auxiliary system, usually with something like optical tweezers or electromagnetic fields. This has yielded precise and adaptable control of small numbers of microrobots, beneficial for complex, multi-step tasks or those requiring high accuracy, but scaling the method for controlling large numbers of independent microrobots has been less successful.
Lockheed Martin is partnering with Google Public Sector to integrate Google’s generative AI technologies, including the Gemini models, into its AI Factory.
Google’s AI tools will be introduced within Lockheed Martin’s secure, on-premises, air-gapped environments, making them accessible to personnel throughout the company.
In a move that could redefine the web, Google is testing AI-powered, UI-based answers for its AI mode.
Up until now, Google AI mode, which is an optional feature, has allowed you to interact with a large language model using text or images.
When you use Google AI mode, Google responds with AI-generated content that it scrapes from websites without their permission and includes a couple of links.
Microscopic bioelectronic devices could one day travel through the body’s circulatory system and autonomously self-implant in a target region of the brain. These “circulatronics” can be wirelessly powered to provide focused electrical stimulation to a precise region of the brain, which could be used to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.
Developed at Caltech, a new robot is a humanoid that can launch an M4 drone, switching between different modes of motion, with wheels that can become rotors.
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Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue says all the attention is on LLMs, but smaller, specialized models will make sense in many use cases going forward.
