DARPA is helping five groups create neural interfaces for our brains

DARPA announced on Monday that it has selected its five grant recipients for the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program, which it began at the start of this year. Brown University, Columbia University, The Seeing and Hearing Foundation, the John B. Pierce Laboratory, Paradromics Inc and the University of California, Berkeley will all receive multi-million dollar grants to help develop various aspects of the emerging technology. The goal of the NESD program is to develop "an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world," according to a DARPA release. Also known as "wetware", these brain-computer interfaces would effectively convert the chemical and electrical signals from the brain into machine readable data, and vice versa. Ultimately, the program's operators hope that neural interfaces will be able to communicate with up to 100 million neurons in parallel (though still a far cry from the 86 billion that our brains use in total).