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Jul 29, 2021

FDA clears Synchron’s brain-computer interface device for human trials

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, Elon Musk, finance, neuroscience

A company that makes an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) has been given the go-ahead by the Food and Drug Administration to run a clinical trial with human patients. Synchron plans to start an early feasibility study of its Stentrode implant later this year at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York with six subjects. The company said it will assess the device’s “safety and efficacy in patients with severe paralysis.” https://www.engadget.com/fda-brain-computer-interface-clinic…ml?src=rss


A company that makes an implantable has been given the go-ahead by the Food and Drug Administration to run a clinical trial with human patients. Synchron plans to start an early feasibility study of its Stentrode implant later this year at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York with six subjects. The company said it will assess the device’s “safety and efficacy in patients with severe paralysis.”

Synchron received the FDA’s green light ahead of competitors like Elon Musk’s. Before such companies can sell BCIs commercially in the US, they need to prove that the devices work and are safe. The FDA will provide guidance for trials of BCI devices for patients with paralysis or amputation during a webinar on Thursday.

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Jul 28, 2021

NASA detects water vapor on Jupiter’s Ganymede — the largest moon in the solar system

Posted by in category: space

Reviewing the images of Ganymede’s aurora, the team discovered that, as the moon’s surface temperature rises and falls throughout the day, it becomes warm enough around noon near the equator for sublimation to occur, releasing water molecules.

“In a wider sense, this discovery shows that often one needs to know what to focus on when analyzing data. The signal from H2O was present in the HST images since 1998,” said lead author Lorenz Roth. “Only with additional information through new data and predictions from theoretical studies, we knew what to look for and where to search for it. There are likely many more things to discover in the gigantic dataset that the Hubble Space Telescope has accumulated over its three decades in space.”

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Jul 28, 2021

LHCb — Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment

Posted by in category: alien life

Yesterday, LHCb presented results consistent with the presence of charm content in the proton.

See our news: #IC

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Jul 28, 2021

DeepMinds AlphaFold Will Solve Most Protein Structures

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

A transformative artificial intelligence (AI) tool called AlphaFold, which has been developed by Google’s sister company DeepMind in London, has predicted the structure of nearly the entire human proteome (the full complement of proteins expressed by an organism). In addition, the tool has predicted almost complete proteomes for various other organisms, ranging from mice and maize (corn) to the malaria parasite.

The more than 350000 protein structures, which are available through a public database, vary in their accuracy. But researchers say the resource — which is set to grow to 130 million structures by the end of the year — has the potential to revolutionize the life sciences.

Jul 28, 2021

CRISPR breaks ground as a one-shot treatment for a rare disease

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

CRISPR reached a big milestone this year by treating a disease inside the body—here’s what’s next for the technology.

Jul 28, 2021

AI and the military: Friend or Foe? | Project Force

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

“Killer Robots” may seem far fetched, but as @AlexGatopoulos explains, the use of autonomous machines and other military applications of artificial intelligence are a growing reality of modern warfare.

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Jul 28, 2021

Berkeley Lab’s CAMERA leads international effort on autonomous scientific discoveries

Posted by in categories: information science, mathematics, robotics/AI

Experimental facilities around the globe are facing a challenge: their instruments are becoming increasingly powerful, leading to a steady increase in the volume and complexity of the scientific data they collect. At the same time, these tools demand new, advanced algorithms to take advantage of these capabilities and enable ever-more intricate scientific questions to be asked—and answered. For example, the ALS-U project to upgrade the Advanced Light Source facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will result in 100 times brighter soft X-ray light and feature superfast detectors that will lead to a vast increase in data-collection rates.

To make full use of modern instruments and facilities, researchers need new ways to decrease the amount of data required for and address data acquisition rates humans can no longer keep pace with. A promising route lies in an emerging field known as autonomous discovery, where algorithms learn from a comparatively little amount of input data and decide themselves on the next steps to take, allowing multi-dimensional parameter spaces to be explored more quickly, efficiently, and with minimal human intervention.

“More and more experimental fields are taking advantage of this new optimal and autonomous data acquisition because, when it comes down to it, it’s always about approximating some function, given noisy data,” said Marcus Noack, a research scientist in the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) at Berkeley Lab and lead author on a new paper on Gaussian processes for autonomous data acquisition published July 28 in Nature Reviews Physics. The paper is the culmination of a multi-year, multinational effort led by CAMERA to introduce innovative autonomous discovery techniques across a broad scientific community.

Jul 28, 2021

This 20-person biotech firm just beat Elon Musk’s Neuralink in getting the OK to test brain chip implants in humans with paralysis

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, Elon Musk, neuroscience

Synchron has beat rival Neuralink to human trials of its “implantable brain computer interface.”

The chip will be studied in six patients later this year as a possible aid for paralyzed people.

Elon Musk previously used Neuralink’s chip in a monkey, which then played video games with its mind.

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Jul 28, 2021

Elon Musk says population collapse could be ‘greatest risk to the future of civilization’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, Elon Musk

He is absolutely correct. If anything he down played the danger.

In addition to fewer people being born than dying, it’s that, with life spans now far greater than ever before, the percentage of the population MOST in need of medical services will increase at the same time, with fewer doctors, fewer nurses, fewer researchers, and far more resources needed for all of it.

To put it in a more cinematic way, think less “Soylent Green” and more “I Am Legend”.

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Jul 28, 2021

SpaceX: NASA Europa deal reveals the tricky politics of space rockets

Posted by in category: space travel

The future of NASA’s Space Launch System is in question after another contract win for SpaceX.


NASA has selected the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the Europa Clipper in 2024, putting the future of NASA’s own flagship rocket into question.