paralysis
After revolutionary brain-computer implant, man with paralysis can feed himself
More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Keith Thomas, who has lived with paralysis since a diving accident in 2020, is now able to grasp, lift and drink from a cup on his own. After joining a clinical trial at Northwell Health's Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research that uses brain implants and artificial intelligence to bypass his injury and reconnect his brain with healthy parts of his spinal cord, Thomas has continuously improved, restoring lasting movement and feeling in his arm and hand. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .
Monkeys walk around a virtual world using only their thoughts
Researchers hope the experiments will pave the way for people with paralysis to explore virtual worlds or more intuitively control electric wheelchairs in this one. Peter Janssen at KU Leuven in Belgium and colleagues implanted three rhesus macaque ( Macaca mulatta) monkeys with BCIs. Crucially, each animal got three implants, each consisting of 96 electrodes, positioned in the primary motor, dorsal and ventral premotor cortex. The first area is commonly used in BCI research and relates to physical movement, but the latter two are thought to be involved in planning movement in a higher, more abstract way. Electrical signals from the implants were then interpreted by an AI model and used to control VR avatars as the monkeys watched a 3D monitor.
China Approves the First Brain Chips for Sale--and Has a Plan to Dominate the Industry
While the United States and Europe are moving cautiously forward with clinical trials, China is racing toward the commercialization of brain implants. China has made history by becoming the first nation to approve a commercially available brain chip to treat a disability. NEO, the implant developed by Neuracle Medical Technology, translates the thoughts of a person with paralysis into movements of an assistive robotic hand. After 18 months of testing that proved its safety, China's National Medical Products Administration authorized the implant for people aged 19 to 60 with paralysis caused by neck or spinal cord injuries that prevent them from moving their limbs. According Nature, the implant embedded in the skull is about the size of a coin.
Paralysed man can feel objects through another person's hand
Paralysed man can feel objects through another person's hand Keith Thomas, a man in his 40s with no sensation or movement in his hands, is able to feel and move objects by controlling another person's hand via a brain implant. The technique might one day even allow us to experience another person's body over long distances. Keith Thomas (right) was able to control another person's hand A man with paralysis has been able to move and sense another person's hand as if it were his own, thanks to a new kind of "telepathic" brain implant. "We created a mind-body connection between two different individuals," says Chad Bouton at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York state. The approach could be used as a form of rehabilitation after spinal cord injury, allowing people with paralysis to work together, and may one day even allow people to share experiences remotely, says Bouton.
The Irrational Machine: Neurosis and the Limits of Algorithmic Safety
We present a framework for characterizing neurosis in embodied AI: behaviors that are internally coherent yet misaligned with reality, arising from interactions among planning, uncertainty handling, and aversive memory. In a grid navigation stack we catalogue recurrent modalities including flip-flop, plan churn, perseveration loops, paralysis and hypervigilance, futile search, belief incoherence, tie break thrashing, corridor thrashing, optimality compulsion, metric mismatch, policy oscillation, and limited-visibility variants. For each we give lightweight online detectors and reusable escape policies (short commitments, a margin to switch, smoothing, principled arbitration). We then show that durable phobic avoidance can persist even under full visibility when learned aversive costs dominate local choice, producing long detours despite globally safe routes. Using First/Second/Third Law as engineering shorthand for safety latency, command compliance, and resource efficiency, we argue that local fixes are insufficient; global failures can remain. To surface them, we propose genetic-programming based destructive testing that evolves worlds and perturbations to maximize law pressure and neurosis scores, yielding adversarial curricula and counterfactual traces that expose where architectural revision, not merely symptom-level patches, is required.
Researchers successfully heal rats' broken spines
Health Medicine Researchers successfully heal rats' broken spines A new study paves the way toward developing a treatment for spinal cord injuries. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. There is currently no way to completely reverse the damage and paralysis that results from a spinal cord injury. One of the biggest obstacles is that neurons die and can't regrow across the damage. Now, researchers have developed a biomedical structure that has given impressive functional recovery to lab rats with severed spinal cords.
Mind-reading AI can turn even imagined speech into spoken words
People with paralysis can now have their thoughts turned into speech just by imagining talking in their heads. While brain-computer interfaces can already decode the neural activity of people with paralysis when they physically attempt speaking, this can require a fair amount of effort. So Benyamin Meschede-Krasa at Stanford University and his colleagues sought a less energy-intensive approach. Take control of your brain's master switch to optimise how you think "We wanted to see whether there were similar patterns when someone was simply imagining speaking in their head," he says. "And we found that this could be an alternative, and indeed, a more comfortable way for people with paralysis to use that kind of system to restore their communication."
A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person
Brain-computer interface startup Paradromics today announced that surgeons successfully inserted the company's brain implant into a patient and safely removed it after about 10 minutes. It's a step toward longer trials of the device, dubbed Connexus. It's also the latest commercial development in a growing field of companies--including Elon Musk's Neuralink--aiming to connect people's brains directly to computers. With the Connexus, Austin-based Paradromics is looking to restore speech and communication in people with spinal cord injury, stroke, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS. The device is designed to translate neural signals into synthesized speech, text, and cursor control.