Earlier this year, Elon Musk announced that the first human patient had received a Neuralink brain implant as part of the company's first clinical trial. Now, the company has shared a brief public demo of the brain-computer interface (BCI) in action. The company briefly live streamed a demo on X with a 29-year-old man named Nolan Arbaugh, who said he was paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident eight years ago. In the video, Arbaugh explains that after receiving the implant -- he said the surgery was "super easy" -- he had to learn how to differentiate "imagined movement versus attempted movement" in order to learn to control a cursor on a screen. "A lot of what we started out with was attempting to move," Arbaugh said.

Elon Musk said on the social media platform X on Monday that the first human patient has received a brain implant developed by his company Neuralink. After years of delays, Neuralink started recruiting patients for a clinical trial in the fall after receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and a hospital ethics board. The company is developing a device called a brain-computer interface. Musk has said that Neuralink's ultimate goal is to "achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence," but for now he's starting with a far more modest aim: allowing paralyzed people to control a cursor or keyboard with their brains. In a brochure about the study, Neuralink says it is recruiting participants with quadriplegia, or paralysis in all four limbs, due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and that are at least 22 years old.

The first human patient has received a Neuralink brain implant, according to Elon Musk. The procedure was apparently successful, with Musk saying the individual "is recovering well" one day after the surgery. Neuralink, which aims to create brain-computer interfaces (BCI), began recruiting human patients for its first clinical trial last fall after getting the green light from the FDA. At the time, Neuralink said that people "who have quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)" may qualify for the study. "The initial goal of our BCI is to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone," the company wrote in a statement.

University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have developed a more accurate, less invasive technology that allows amputees to move a robotic arm using their brain signals instead of their muscles. Many current commercial prosthetic limbs use a cable and harness system that is controlled by the shoulders or chest, and more advanced limbs use sensors to pick up on subtle muscle movements in a patient's existing limb above the device. But, both options can be cumbersome, unintuitive, and take months of practice for amputees to learn how to move them. Researchers in the University's Department of Biomedical Engineering, with the help of industry collaborators, have created a small, implantable device that attaches to the peripheral nerve in a person's arm. When combined with an artificial intelligence computer and a robotic arm, the device can read and interpret brain signals, allowing upper limb amputees to control the arm using only their thoughts. The researchers' most recent paper is published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, a peer-reviewed scientific journal for the interdisciplinary field of neural engineering.

Neuralink plans to test its brain machine interface technology with 4 of its N1 chips installed under patients' skin. Elon Musk believes that hooking our brains up to computers can help humans overcome disabilities and injuries and eventually compete with ever-smarter artificial intelligence. The billionaire said Sunday that his side startup Neuralink will show off an update to its developing brain-computer interface technology later this year that will be, in a word, "awesome." Last July, Musk said that the tech has already allowed a monkey to control a computer with its brain in tests and that he hoped "aspirationally" to have the device in a human patient with brain or spinal cord injuries, or congenital defects, by the end of 2019. That didn't pan out, and Musk now says it could happen "as soon as this year." He chimed in Sunday on a Twitter thread from noted tech investor and Tesla Motors true believer Cathie Wood that was originally published in mid-January.

F. Allen et al., "Predicting the mutations generated by repair of Cas9-induced double-strand breaks," Nat Biotechnol, 37:64–72, 2019. During gene editing with CRISPR technology, the Cas9 scissors that cut DNA home in on the right spot to snip with the help of guide RNA. The way the genetic material is stitched back together afterward isn't terribly precise, though; in fact, scientists have long thought that without a template, the process is random. However, "there's been anecdotal evidence that cells don't repair DNA randomly," geneticist Richard Sherwood of Brigham and Women's Hospital tells The Scientist. A 2016 paper also suggested patterns in the repairs. Sherwood wondered if artificial intelligence could predict these outcomes.