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Brain chips get smarter. Elon Musk’s Neuralink gets competition

Recent advances suggest the technology is hitting its stride. The UC Davis team’s speech synthesis system represents a fundamental shift from previous approaches. Rather than translating brain signals into text and then synthesizing speech — a process that created significant delays — UC Davis’ system converts thoughts directly into sounds with near-instantaneous 10-millisecond latency.

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Meanwhile, researchers at Carnegie Mellon achieved real-time control of individual robotic fingers using non-invasive EEG technology, wearing a cap that reads brain signals through the skull. This suggests that future brain interfaces might not require surgery at all for certain applications.

A signal that never repeats—how the brain creates bookmarks to map time

The brain doesn’t merely register time—it structures it, according to new research from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience published in Science.

The research team led by NTNU’s Nobel Laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser, from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, is already known for their discovery of the brain’s sense of place.

Now they have shown that the brain also weaves a tapestry of time: The brain segments and organizes events into experiences, placing unique bookmarks on them so that our lives don’t become a blurry stream, but rather a series of meaningful moments and memories we can revisit and learn from.

AI model analyzes speech to detect early neurological disorders with high accuracy

A research team led by Prof. Li Hai from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a novel deep learning framework that significantly improves the accuracy and interpretability of detecting neurological disorders through speech. The findings were recently published in Neurocomputing.

“A slight change in the way we speak might be more than just a slip of the tongue—it could be a from the brain,” said Prof. Hai, who led the team. “Our new model can detect early symptoms of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Wilson disease, by analyzing voice recordings.”

Dysarthria is a common early symptom of various neurological disorders. Since speech abnormalities often reflect underlying neurodegenerative processes, voice signals have emerged as promising noninvasive biomarkers for the early screening and continuous monitoring of such conditions.

AI That Thinks Like Us: New Model Predicts Human Decisions With Startling Accuracy

A new AI model mimics human thinking with striking accuracy, even in unfamiliar scenarios. Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have created an advanced artificial intelligence system capable of mimicking human decision-making with impressive precision. The model, named Centaur, was trained using data f

AI Maps the Mood of Your City — And It’s Surprisingly Accurate

What if a city’s mood could be mapped like weather? Researchers at the University of Missouri are using AI to do exactly that—by analyzing geotagged Instagram posts and pairing them with Google Street View images, they’re building emotional maps of urban spaces.

These “sentiment maps” reveal how people feel in specific locations, helping city planners design areas that not only function better but also feel better. With potential applications ranging from safety to disaster response, this human-centered tech could soon become part of the city’s real-time dashboard.

Human-Centric City Vision

Zelensky: Ukraine agrees deals for ‘hundreds of thousands’ of drones

Ukraine has concluded deals with European partners and a US defence company to step up the production of drones, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday. Zelensky said Kiev has “reached an agreement with one of the leading American companies to significantly increase our joint efforts” on drones, which have become central to Ukrainian defence efforts against Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Milgram shock-study imaginal replication: how far do you think you would go?

Online adult participants (N = 414) read a gripping first-person account of the classic 1963 Milgram shock study and were asked to predict the responses of both themselves and “the average person”. Prior to making predictions, half were told that 65% of participants exhibited complete obedience throughout the duration of the original study, whereas another half were given no information about the results. In general, participants predicted much less obedience than was shown in the actual Milgram study. In addition, consistent with the better-than-average effect, participants predicted significantly more personal disobedience in response to the scenario compared to their average person predictions. Prior knowledge of the Milgram study did not significantly impact participants’ predictions about their own behavior in an identical scenario. These results suggest that adults are unable or unwilling to incorporate social scientific research, specifically the Milgram obedience findings, into perceptions of their own likely behavior.

Need to send a handwritten note? You can hire a robot to write it instead

In order to make sure the letters don’t look too perfect, Wachs said the robots vary letter shapes, line spacing, the left margin, and the strokes that join letters together.

“We do all this stuff to try to create the most accurate human writing, without falling into that uncanny valley,” Wachs said.

Using robots that can write in nearly three dozen styles of penmanship — some of which carry alliterative names like Enthusiastic Erin and Slanty Steve — the company sends about 20,000 cards a day to customers or, more often, directly to the recipient.