Making perfume is an art that can be traced back to ancient Greece but now modern-day perfumiers are beginning to look beyond their noses to develop the scents most likely to appeal to us. They are, instead, turning to AI. Perfumes can now be designed to trigger emotional responses using ingredients known as neuroscents – odours shown by biometric measures to arouse different positive feelings such as calm, euphoria or sleepiness. Hugo Ferreira, a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering in Lisbon, is mapping brain activity and response to perfumes to build a database of neuroscents. He says the sense of smell is fascinating. "With sight and hearing, you can imagine the face of a loved one or favourite tune. It's hard to imagine a smell even though [it] can provoke a torrent of emotions and memories."

For years now, Hakwan Lau has suffered from an inner torment. Lau is a neuroscientist who studies the sense of awareness that all of us experience during our every waking moment. How this awareness arises from ordinary matter is an ancient mystery. Several scientific theories purport to explain it, and Lau feels that one of them, called integrated information theory (IIT), has received a disproportionate amount of media attention. He's annoyed that its proponents tout it as the dominant theory in the press.

The occasion of Musk's post was the announcement by Neuralink, his brain-computer interface (BCI) company, that it was officially seeking the first volunteer to receive the "N1," an implant comprising 1,024 electrodes able to listen in on brain neurons. This volunteer, the company said, will be someone who has ALS or has been paralyzed due to a spinal cord injury. The point of the experiment is to let them "control external devices with their thoughts"--specifically, move a computer cursor, or control a phone app. There's little doubt they can do it. Such experiments have been going on for decades.

Gert-Jan Oskam, paralyzed for 12 years, is able to walk again thanks to the brain-spine "digital bridge" interface developed at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). For the first time ever, a human has successfully received an implanted device to enable movement of the arms, hands and fingers after a paralyzing spinal cord injury. Onward Medical NV, a medical technology company based in the Netherlands, announced on Wednesday the surgical implant of its ARC-IM Stimulator, which is designed to restore function to the upper extremities of paralyzed patients. The patient, a 46-year-old man, suffered a spinal cord injury nearly two years ago, which left his left side almost fully paralyzed, doctors told Fox News Digital. The ARC-IM implantation took place on Aug. 14 at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Humans could soon have'brainternet' thanks to a wireless implant that will let people control computers and smart devices with their minds. Scientists at Purdue University designed a device smaller than a dime that sensed and transmitted data to a pair of over-the-ear headphones. Unlike current brain chips, Purdue's implants do not need to connect to a computer or device to capture the user's brain waves. The team foresees their innovation letting people connect to the internet, computers and other smart devices no matter where they are. While there have been many attempts to link brain signals with an external device, the latest research is the first to demonstrate high-bandwidth wireless communication between neural implants and wearable devices.

Bending down to pick up the final package of his day's round, delivery driver Richard Fuller felt a sudden stabbing pain in his lower back. 'It was as if someone had stuck a knife into my kidney,' recalls Richard, now 57, who managed to drive home but was'in absolute agony'. Assuming he'd pulled a muscle, he took some paracetamol and went to bed, hoping rest might help. The next day, however, his back was so stiff and painful that he could barely get up. 'I live alone, so my parents came over to help me as I could only get around bent over and shuffling about,' says Richard, who lives in Canterbury, Kent.

Source: OpenAI's DALL·E 2 with prompt "a hyperrealistic picture of a robot reading the news on a laptop at a coffee shop" Welcome to the 5th edition of Robo-Insight, a robotics news update! In this post, we are excited to share a range of new advancements in the field and highlight robots' progress in areas like human-robot interaction, agile movement, enhanced training methods, soft robotics, brain surgery, medical navigation, and ecological research. In the realm of human-robot interactions, researchers from around Europe have developed a new tool called HEUROBOX to assess interactions. HEUROBOX offers 84 basic and 228 advanced heuristics for evaluating various aspects of human-robot interaction, such as safety, ergonomics, functionality, and interfaces. It places a strong emphasis on human-centered design, addressing the vital connection between technology and human factors.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Jellyfish could be much smarter than scientists previously thought, asserts a new study published in the journal Current Biology. Poisonous Caribbean box jellyfish can learn at a far more complex level than ever imagined, despite only having 1,000 nerve cells and no centralized brain, according to new research from the University of Copenhagen. Scientists say their findings change the fundamental understanding of the brain -- and could reveal more about human cognitive functions and the process of dementia.

On the same day Elon Musk announced that his brain implant device company Neuralink is preparing for its first human trials, a damning new report featuring insight from a former Neuralink employee shed new light on the brutal conditions that Neuralink's test monkey's underwent before being euthanized. Inquiries and investigations have previously been launched regarding potential animal welfare violations at the company. However, the issue was once again thrust into the spotlight last week after Musk claimed that no monkeys had died as a result of the Neuralink implant. "No monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant," Musk said in a post on X. Regarding early implants, Musk made the claim that, "to minimize risk to healthy monkeys, we chose terminal [monkeys] (close to death already)." Ten days later, Musk would share a Neuralink post about how the company would soon roll-out human trials.

Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk's claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. They claim, based on veterinary records, that complications with the implant procedures led to their deaths. Musk first acknowledged the deaths of the macaques on September 10 in a reply to a user on his social networking app X (formerly Twitter). He denied that any of the deaths were "a result of a Neuralink implant" and said the researchers had taken care to select subjects who were already "close to death."