“In the first couple of weeks after returning home, Arbaugh had members of Neuralink’s team in his living room and kitchen to test the device. In research settings, brain implant patients usually need to rest after two to four hours because of mental and physical strain, but Arbaugh would go for up to 10 hours. The device also outperformed its predecessors. From Day 1, he began breaking speed records on the typical battery of tests used to benchmark the performance of brain-computer interface implants.

The world began to reopen for Arbaugh. He could play games like Sid Meier’s Civilization and chess with relative ease. He could hop between websites and audiobooks on his computer. And he could do all of this while lying in bed, which was far more comfortable and less spasm-inducing than sitting in his wheelchair and trying to get his mouth stick aligned just so with his iPad.

In the early days, Arbaugh had to learn how to tune Neuralink’s software to his brain patterns and get the gist of turning thoughts into action. As the weeks went by, the process became second nature. Arbaugh could carry on a conversation with someone while playing chess at the same time. It seemed like he’d developed a superpower.”

From Bloomberg.

“Prior research has shown that no matter how quickly brain matter is frozen, the freezing and thawing process always causes tissue damage. This has made it more difficult for researchers to study brain matter because research must be conducted immediately after obtaining a tissue sample. In this new effort, the team in China found a way around this problem by soaking the tissue in a special solution before freezing.

The work involved dipping or soaking brain organoids (brain tissue grown from stem cells) in candidate compounds and then freezing and thawing them to see how they fared. After many attempts, they found one combination of solutions that worked best—a mix of ethylene glycol, methylcellulose DMSO and Y27632. They named the solution mix MEDY.”

From Medical Xpress.

“Google will use artificial intelligence to return summarized responses to search engine queries from US users as it continues to infuse generative AI into its most widely used products.

The company has been testing ‘AI overviews’ that appear at the tops of search results, summaries created by its Gemini AI model that appear alongside the traditional link-based search results.

The featured has also been tested in the UK but will be rolled out across the US beginning on Tuesday, Google announced at its annual I/O developer conference Tuesday in California. Google Search head Liz Reid said AI Overviews would become available to ‘more than a billion people’ by the end of the year.”

From The Guardian.

“Virtually nothing has gotten better and cheaper faster over the past 30 years than LEDs. From 2010 to 2019 alone, LEDs went from accounting for 1 percent of the global lighting market to nearly 50 percent, while their cost has declined ‘exponentially,’ as much as 44 percent a year, one government report found. And as LEDs have improved, so, too, have any number of technologies reliant on or related to them: tablets, at-home-hair-removal devices, televisions, smartphones, light-up toys, cameras.

LEDs have also transformed cultural events involving creative lighting. They’re why stadium shows and EDM festivals look so freaking awesome, to fangirl for a minute, and why even many just-getting-started bands have pretty neat light displays. They’re why so many parks and zoos are lit up like Burning Man at night. They’re an integral element of today’s underground-dance-party revival, and why our cities are all of a sudden studded with rave caves.”

From The Atlantic.