Lifeboat Foundation

Brain-computer interfaces have become a practical (if limited) reality in the US. Synchron says it has become the first in the country to implant a BCI in a human patient. Doctors in New York’s Mount Sinai West implanted the company’s Stentrode in the motor cortex of a participant in Synchron’s COMMAND trial, which aims to gauge the usefulness and safety of BCIs for providing hands-free device control to people with severe paralysis. Ideally, technology like Stentrode will offer independence to people who want to email, text and otherwise handle digital tasks that others take for granted.

Surgeons installed the implant using an endovascular procedure that avoids the intrusiveness of open-brain surgery by going through the jugular vein. The operation went “extremely well” and let the patient return home 48 hours later, according to Synchron. An ongoing Australian trial has also proven successful so far, with four patients still safe a year after receiving their implants.

It may take a long time before doctors can offer Synchron’s BCIs to patients. The company received FDA approval for human trials in July 2021, and it’s still expanding the COMMAND trial as of this writing. Still, the US procedure represents a significant step toward greater autonomy for people with paralysis. It also represents a competitive victory — Elon Musk’s Neuralink has yet to receive FDA permission for its own implant.

In a new world record, China’s “artificial sun” project has sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 minutes, reports Anthony Cuthbertson for the Independent. In the latest experiment, superheated plasma reached 126 million degrees Fahrenheit—that’s roughly five times hotter than the sun, which radiates a scorching 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface and about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core.

Coal and natural gas are the primary energy sources currently used around the world, but these materials come in limited supply. Nuclear fusion could be the cleanest energy source available because it replicates the sun’s physics by merging atomic nuclei to generate large amounts of energy into electricity. The process requires no fossil fuels, leaves behind no radioactive waste, and is a safer alternative to fission nuclear power, per the Independent.

“The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor,” says Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a statement.

Babies rapidly develop this ability by soaking up data from their external environments, forming a sort of “common sense” about the dynamics of the physical world. When things don’t move as expected—say, in magic tricks where objects disappear—they’ll show surprise.

For AI, it’s a completely different matter. While recent AI models have already trounced humans from game play to solving decades-old scientific conundrums, they still struggle at developing intuition about the physical world.

This month, researchers at Google-owned DeepMind took inspiration from developmental psychology and built an AI that naturally extracts simple rules about the world through watching videos. Netflix and chill didn’t work on its own; the AI model o nly learned the rules of our physical world when given a basic idea of objects, such as what their boundaries are, where they are, and how they move. Similar to babies, the AI expressed “surprise” when shown magical situations that didn’t make sense, like a ball rolling up a ramp.

Astronomers hope to explain how galaxies like this one can grow magnetic fields that stretch for thousands of light-years — and what affect they have on galactic evolution.

The finding came out of a project to study radio signals from spiral galaxies that are tilted so we see them edge-on from Earth’s point of view. For these galaxies, astronomers can more easily separate what’s happening outside of the galaxies’ disks, in the gas-filled “haloes” that surround them.

Using observations from a radio telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large Array, the astronomers measured properties of the radio emission coming from the halo of the galaxy NGC 4631. They’d known from past observations that there were large-scale magnetic fields that extended out of the disk into the halo of this galaxy.

Continue reading “Astronomers find surprisingly complex magnetic fields in a galaxy’s halo” »

Some animal neuropeptides have been around longer than nervous systems.

Researchers from China have developed a powerful new adhesive that grips strongly in extreme temperatures, from the deep freeze of liquid nitrogen to the sweltering heat of an oven. Better yet, it can be broken back down into its component parts and reused without losing strength.

The new adhesive belongs to a class known as supramolecular adhesives, which are made up of molecular components specially designed to self-assemble into strong bonds during curing. One is a ring-shaped molecule called a crown ether, which can wrap around the second component, a small protein produced by bacteria.

When these are combined and the mixture is heated, the crown sticks to the surface of the protein tightly, strengthening the bond through several molecular interactions, including their opposite charges. The team described it as “welding” the molecules together, giving them an incredibly strong interlocking structure.

A new exhibit from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association showcases the simple visualizations of complex ideas that have changed how we live.

According to longtime bee researcher Lars Chittka, we “now have suggestive evidence that there is some level of conscious awareness in bees.”

What Gran Turismo Sophy learned on the racetrack could help shape the future of machines that can work alongside humans, or join us on the roads.