WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 5, 2023--

Elon Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink said on Thursday that it now has regulatory approval in the US to test its implants in human subjects. Neuralink has been building chips to be implanted into the skull for a brain-computer interface, claiming their development has the potential to help restore vision in the blind, and even help paralysed people walk again. While Mr Musk has said on several occasions since 2019 that the company is ready to go for experiments in humans to treat paralysis and blindness, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had however rejected proposals by the company to begin human clinical trials. For instance, in early 2022, when Neuralink applied for human testing, the FDA rejected the proposal saying there were “dozens of issues the company must address”. These issues flagged by the FDA included the use of lithium batteries in Neuralink’s device and the likelihood of the implant’s wires interfering with the brain. The federal agency also expressed concerns about whether the firm’s implants can be removed without causing brain damage. Neuralink has also come under the scanner of at least one US government probe after animal rights watchdogs accused the firm of “inadequate care” of its research monkeys. Reuters previously reported that the brain chip company killed about 1,500 animals, including over 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys since 2018. The US Department of Agriculture also began investigating Neuralink’s potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Responding to the animal abuse complaints, the company said in a blogpost that it was “absolutely committed to working with animals in the most humane and ethical way possible”. “The use of every animal was extensively planned and considered to balance scientific discovery with the ethical use of animals,” it said. In a tweet in November last year, Mr Musk said he was confident that Neuralink’s device was “ready for humans”, adding that the timing for beginning human trials was a “function of working through the FDA approval process”. “We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human but we’ve submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA and probably in about six months we should be able to upload Neuralink in a human,” the Tesla and SpaceX chief said. On Thursday, the company said it has finally received approval from the federal agency to begin trials in humans. “We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!” the brain chip company said. The FDA approval “represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people”, Neuralink said, adding that it would soon announce more information on the recruitment of people for clinical trials. FDA hasn’t immediately responded to The Independent‘s queries on the Neuralink approval claim. Read More What is superintelligence? How AI could replace humans as the dominant lifeform on Earth Elon Musk’s Neuralink probed over shipment of ‘contaminated’ devices from ‘infected’ monkey brains When sci-fi becomes reality: could brain-machine interfaces be right around the corner?

Action movies have long hypothesised the inevitability of the technological singularity, the war between once-sentient

The university says it is "important" to end the policy, seen as a perk for the white and wealthy.

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 1, 2023--

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 22, 2023--

Sony is discontinuing its integrations with X (previously known as Twitter) for both the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles.

Nasa has received a signal from a spacecraft 10 million miles away. The message, delivered using a distant laser, could “transform” communications with spacecraft, the space agency has said. It represents a successful test of Nasa’s Deep Space Optical Communications or DSOC experiment. It is also the first time that data has been successfully relayed through a laser from further away than the Moon – and marks a rapid increase, at more than 40 times the distance from the lunar surface. At the moment, almost all communications with craft in deep space is achieved through radio signals, sent and received from vast antennas on Earth. They have proven reliable but their bandwidth is limited, meaning that it is slow or impossible to send large files such as high-definition photos and videos. Nasa’s work on DSOC is an attempt to use optical communications through lasers instead. The technology could improve data rates by as much as 100 times, the space agency says. The first attempt to test the technology beyond the Moon left the Earth on Nasa’s Psyche mission, which left Earth last month on a mission to study a distant asteroid. The spacecraft is carrying a laser transceiver than can both send and receive laser signals in near-infrared. Last week, that equipment locked onto a Nasa laser beacon in California. Nasa says that “first light” breakthrough is one part of a host of experiments that they hope will prove the laser technology can work. “Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at Nasa Headquarters in Washington. Nasa likens the precision pointing of the laser signal to trying to point a light at a coin from a mile away. What’s more, the laser and its target are constantly moving: in the 20 minutes it will take for the light to travel to Earth from Psyche’s furthest distance, both the planet and the spacecraft will have moved significantly. The team will now work to refine the systems that ensure the spacecraft is pointing its lasers in the right direction. When that happens, Nasa will try an experiment to demonstrate that the spacecraft is able to maintain high-bandwidth data transfer at different distances from Earth. It will do so by breaking the data into bits that can be encoded in the photons of light sent by the spacecraft. That light then arrives at the telescope on Earth and can be reassembled into images or other important data that will be sent by spacecraft – and perhaps humans – in the future. Read More SpaceX hints next Starship launch attempt could be soon SpaceX to launch world’s biggest rocket again after first attempt ended in explosion Nasa spots collection of shocking materials on distant planet

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Montana has become the first US state to announce an outright ban of TikTok, however questions have been raised about both the legality and the practicality of the new law. State legislators signed the bill into law on Wednesday, making it illegal for TikTok to operate in the state from January 2024. Some claim such a ban is unconstitutional, as it challenges the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and the press, while others note that it would be “impossible” to enforce. “Montanans are indisputably exercising their First Amendment rights when they post and consume content on TikTok,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Independent. “Because Montana can’t establish that the ban is necessary or tailored to any legitimate interest, the law is almost certain to be struck down as unconstitutional.” Montana’s 200,000 TikTok users will not face any repercussions for using the app, however TikTok and other companies face a $10,000 daily fine for each time someone accesses the app or is “offered the ability” to download it. Apple and Google have not spoken out against the law, but a representative for TechNet, the trade group that counts the two tech giants as its members, has said app stores don’t have the ability to “geofence” apps in different states and it would be impossible to prevent TikTok from being downloaded in Montana. The group has also said the responsibility should be on an app to determine where it can operate, not an app store. Telecoms analyst Roger Entner, of Recon Analytics, said he believes the app stores could have the capability to enforce the law, but it would be cumbersome to implement and full of loopholes. Apple and Google’s address-linked billing could be bypassed with prepaid cards and IP geolocation easily masked by using a VPN service, which can alter IP addresses and allows users to evade content restrictions, said mobile security expert Will Strafach, the founder of Guardian, which makes a privacy protection app for Apple devices. Oded Vanunu, head of products vulnerability research at the cyber security firm Check Point, agreed it would be difficult for app stores to isolate a single state from downloading an app. He suggested it would be more feasible for TikTok to comply since it controls the software and can “adjust the settings based on the geographical location or IP addresses” of users. TikTok could technically block any people from Montana using the app by tracking their location, and disable the app if they are within a certain area, however this type of restriction can be easily bypassed with VPN technology. A legal battle is likely to follow, with TikTok hinting that a legal challenge will be launched in the coming weeks and months. A spokesperson said: “We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.” Additional reporting from agencies Read More TikTok ban in numbers: Charting the controversial rise of the world’s most popular app Shou Chew: How a Facebook intern became the boss of TikTok

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For centuries we’ve been told that the Moon is made of cheese but now, it turns out, the Earth is more like butter. Or, at least, its inner core is. A new study led by experts at the University of Texas (UT) and collaborators in China found that iron atoms at the very centre of our world move around much more than previously thought, and the implications could be huge. Scientists have long sought to dissect the insides of our planet but it isn’t easy, given that we have no way of directly exploring its core. The deepest hole humans have ever dug – branded the "entrance to hell" – extended an impressive 12,263m (40,230ft) down, but even that doesn’t come close to breaking through the crust to the layers beneath. Still, thanks to techniques like seismic tomography – which analyses how waves of energy travel through different materials during earthquakes – we’ve been able to map out the world’s interior. Now, researchers have used lab experiments and AI algorithms to shed a striking new light on the heart of the planet. "Seismologists have found that the centre of the Earth, called the inner core, is surprisingly soft, kind of like how butter is soft in your kitchen," Youjun Zhang, a Sichuan University professor who co-led the investigation, said in a statement shared with Phys.org. "The big discovery that we've found is that solid iron becomes surprisingly soft deep inside the Earth because its atoms can move much more than we ever imagined. This increased movement makes the inner core less rigid, weaker against shear forces." The findings are significant because they could help explain the role that the inner core plays in generating the world’s magnetic field. They could also help us understand a number of the inner core’s key properties, which have long flummoxed experts. "Now, we know about the fundamental mechanism that will help us with understanding the dynamic processes and evolution of the Earth's inner core," Jung-Fu Lin, one of the study's lead authors, explained. Given that it is impossible for scientists to directly extract specimens from the inner core, Lin and his colleagues recreated it in miniature. They took a small iron plate, shot it with a fast-moving projectile, and collected the resulting temperature, pressure and velocity data, which they then fed into an AI computer model. Using this machine learning system, they were able to scale up the sample iron atoms configuration to mimic the atomic environment within the inner core. At this beefed-up scale, the researchers observed groups of atoms moving about while still maintaining their overall structure. Inner Core iron atom motion model University of Texas This movement could explain why seismic measurements of the inner core reveal an environment that's softer and more malleable than would be expected at such pressures, Prof Zhang explained. Around half of the energy that goes into generating the Earth's magnetic field can be attributed to the inner core, with the rest coming from the outer core, according to the UT team. Thanks to Zhang, Lin and their colleagues, we now have a clearer understanding of the inner core’s machinations at an atomic level, which could help inform how energy and heat are generated at the heart of the planet. This could also shed light on how the inner and outer core work together to generate the Earth’s magnetic field – a key ingredient in making a planet habitable. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.