While Elon Musk's Neuralink expects to begin human trials in six months, a neurotech company unveiled a device that treats depression and is now in the skull of the first patient. Inner Cosmos's'digital pill' includes two parts: An electrode that sits under the skin of the scalp and the'prescription pod' that snaps onto the users' hair to power the device. The implant sends tiny electrical pulses to the brain region affected by depression - the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - once daily for 15 minutes. And the external device does not need to be on the head when treatment is not being administered. The trial patient from St Louise, Missouri, is scheduled to test Inner Cosmos innovation for one year, and the company has another human trial set to start next month.

Scientists have identified an immune brain cell unique to humans that gives us higher cognitive abilities over other animals, but what makes us specials also leaves us vulnerable to neurological disorders like schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy, a new study finds. A team of neuroscientists from Yale analyzed cells found in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the region involved in executive control functions, which is shared among humans and primates and narrowed it down to just five found only in the human brain, including an immune cell called microglia. Microglia helps maintain the brain rather than warding off diseases and includes a gene, not present in primates, associated with neuropsychiatric diseases. Lead author Nenad Sestan stated that we can'view the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as the core component of human identity, but still we don't know what makes this unique in humans and distinguishes us from other primate species.' Scientists have been on a long quest to find what in the brain gives humans higher cognitive abilities over other animals.

This paper focuses on a preliminary experimental protocol that aims at assessing a robot operator’s behavior when the robot is equipped with what appears as moral decision capabilities. The protocol is derived from the trolley dilemma, a well-known decision making paradigm. Indeed the participants, acting as operators of simulated aerial robots via a computer screen, are faced to impersonal moral dilemmas, i.e. decide to crash a damaged robot on one of two inhabited areas, and to non-moral choices, i.e. decide to crash a damaged robot on one of two uninhabited areas. In each situation, the robot has a default crash behavior which is displayed to the participant who will have to decide whether to follow it or not. The participants are equipped with fNIRS and eye-tracking and answer a post-experimental questionnaire. As some of the behavioral and physiological results do not match the hypotheses we had set, we give the features of the further experiments that we are planning.