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Using a brain computer interface, the man cut and ate food with thought-controlled robotic hands. A man paralyzed from the neck down has used two robot arms to cut food and serve himself — a big step in the field of mind-controlled prosthetics.

Robert “Buz” Chmielewski, age 49, has barely been able to move his arms since a surfing accident paralyzed him as a teenager. But in January of 2019, he got renewed hope, when doctors implanted two sets of electrodes in his brain, one in each hemisphere.

The goal was that this brain computer interface would help Chmielewski regain some sensation in his hands, enable him to mentally control two prosthetic arms, and even feel what he is touching. man paralyzed from the neck down has used two robot arms to cut food and serve himself — a big step in the field of mind-controlled prosthetics.

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Scientists have been trying to find ways to predict an epileptic seizure for decades, with little success. They are almost always unpredictable. The best techniques we have now — machine learning and self-awareness — give us only minutes notice ahead of the seizure.

Now, for the first time, a study has shown that brain activity could be used to forecast the onset of epileptic seizures several days in advance.

A New Hope

A team of researchers looked into data from brain implants designed to monitor and prevent seizures. Buried in the data, they found patterns of brain activity that predicted seizure risk a day or more in advance. The researchers say this could be used to create an epileptic seizure forecasting tool — giving new hope to patients with epilepsy.

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Here’s how often it goes off.

Just like you, our planet has a ticker that keeps time: Earth’s geological “heartbeat” goes off on a regular schedule, albeit with millions of years in between, says a new study in Geoscience Frontiers.

When scientists from New York University and the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington D.C. analyzed 260 million years of geological feedback, they found “global geologic events are generally correlated,” and seemingly come in pulses every 27.5 million years.

Those events include everything from “times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations,” the authors write. They considered a total of 89 such major events from the last 260 million years, from which the 27.5 million-year cycle emerged.

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Elon Musk—via Starlink, a division of SpaceX—is in talks with “several” airlines to provide in-flight WiFi for passengers. His plan is to use Starlink’s ever-growing megaconstellation of satellites to equip customers with better WiFi while they fly the friendly skies.

Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink and commercial sales, gave out details on the ambitious plan during a panel at the Connected Aviation Intelligence Summit on Wednesday.

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With the help of robotics specialists, we can separate the truth from the hype.

Elon Musk has announced his plans for a new Tesla humanoid robot that will excel at “mundane tasks,” but he’s making some common robotics mistakes with his grand plans.

What does the future of a Tesla robot look like? With the help of a couple of robotics specialists, we can separate the truth from the hype in Musk’s claims.

What can we expect from a true humanoid robot?

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Tesla Robots Have a Place Where Humans Would Be in Danger” | >

Researchers explored the evolution of metal-binding proteins across billions of years.

Addressing one of the most profoundly unanswered questions in biology, a Rutgers-led team has discovered the structures of proteins that may be responsible for the origins of life in the primordial soup of ancient Earth.

The study appears in the journal Science Advances.

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We now know of almost 5,000 planets outside the Solar System. If you were to picture what it would be like on one of these distant worlds, or exoplanets, your mental image would probably include a parent star—or more than one, especially if you’re a Star Wars fan.

But scientists have recently discovered that more than we thought are floating through space all by themselves—unlit by a friendly stellar companion. These are icy “free-floating planets,” or FFPs. But how did they end up all on their own and what can they tell us about how such planets form?

Finding more and more exoplanets to study has, as we might have expected, widened our understanding of what a planet is. In particular, the line between planets and “brown dwarfs”— that can’t fuse hydrogen like other —has become increasingly blurred. What dictates whether an object is a planet or a brown dwarf has long been the subject of debate—is it a question of mass? Do objects cease to be planets if they are undergoing nuclear fusion? Or is the way in which the object was formed most important?

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A tsunami advisory has been issued for Hawaii and parts of the U.S. Pacific coast after an undersea volcano erupted in spectacular fashion near Tonga on Saturday.

California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and the Canadian province of British Columbia could all be affected, the National Tsunami Warning Center said in a bulletin.

Residents living near beaches, harbors, marinas and other coastal areas should move away from the shore and make their way inland or uphill, the bulletin added.

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