Tag: networking

IP satellite

Although satellites have been passively relaying IP traffic since the 1970s, the use of an orbiting satellite as an active part of the Internet is a more recent development. Once you have smarter satellites, you can treat them as not completely separate but as part of your IP network and manage them as you do your IP networking assets on the ground.

Hidden Interfaces to “Ownerless” Networks

We contacted all major manufacturers of Wifi chipsets in the US (2000-04) and requested interface documentation. We had little success and found unsupportable rationales for secrecy. We contend that constellations of private part 15 equipment should be considered as an “ownerless” whole network where interfaces should be compelled using a procedure similar to Sec. 68.110.

how the unavailability of hw docs slows down mesh networking r&d (and how the FCC is used as a scapegoat for secrecy)

RFID Firewall

a device that sits on your person and jams the signals from all your personal wireless tags (transit passes, etc), then selectively impersonates them according to rules you set. Your contactless transit card will only send its signal when you authorize it, not when some jerk with an RFID scanner snipes it as you walk down the street.

Fungi

Frog Lifeboat

They’re on the run from a vicious fungus that has already wiped out as many as 120 species of amphibians in Central America.

2007-01-02: Tomentella is a brain-eating fungus that creates zombie ants. it does not get much better than this.

2008-09-27: This remains one of my favorite TED talks of all time. mycelium++

2011-12-24: Psychedelic Santa Claus. The origins of this most holy of retail holidays. Praise GDP!

Although most people see Christmas as a Christian holiday, most of the symbols and icons we associate with Christmas celebrations are actually derived from the shamanistic traditions of the tribal peoples of pre-Christian Northern Europe. The sacred mushroom of these people was the red and white amanita muscaria mushroom, also known as “fly agaric.” These mushrooms are now commonly seen in books of fairy tales, and are usually associated with magic and fairies. This is because they contain potent hallucinogenic compounds, and were used by ancient peoples for insight and transcendental experiences. Most of the major elements of the modern Christmas celebration, such as Santa Claus, Christmas trees, magical reindeer and the giving of gifts, are originally based upon the traditions surrounding the harvest and consumption of these most sacred mushrooms.

2013-10-29: Peak Phosphorus: it’s a thing, and mushrooms are the solution (cf: Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world)

2013-11-27: Fungi are vicious. Using poisons and flesh-dissolving enzymes (think: mycological “meat” tenderizers), they can defend their turf from incursions by other fungi.

Battles between mushrooms don’t make a sound, but they’re violent. Good fighters can kill the less-good ones and take over their territories. There are battles royal going on all the time.

Combat between fungal individuals is a bit like war between heaps of spaghetti. The main bodies of fungi are networks of long, thin strands called hyphae that insinuate themselves into anything they can eat: tree trunks, plant roots, dung and so on. Defending a food source or wresting a few more millimeters of turf away from a rival can prolong life. So fungi don’t let a lack of teeth, claws or eyes diminish their ferocity. Boddy studies toadstool-forming basidiomycetes, a group rife with combatants that poison opponents or release enzymes that dissolve their flesh.

2015-06-01: Fungus genders

The picture below may give you a hint about how the bird’s nest fungus got its name. But what it doesn’t show you is the rather fascinating love life that they have, and what this might tell us about where our own sexual preferences come from.

Bird’s nest fungi live in places like rotting trees, dung piles, mulched woodpiles, nursery pots, and various other places; they’ve done quite well in human habitats, and so several species are thriving. When it first sets up shop, a fungus will grow out long filaments all through the body of whatever it’s growing on, gradually digesting it with enzymes that transform wood (or whatever) into simple sugars. The fungus keeps growing until it touches a prospective mate: at this point, the 2 fungi will grow into each other, exchanging not just DNA but entire cell nuclei. The resulting “dikaryotic” (“2-nuclear”) fungus then grows the fruiting bodies that give it its name: little cups with spores in them that look like eggs in a bird’s nest.

These spores aren’t firmly attached: in fact, they’re designed to fly. When a raindrop hits a cup, it will propel the spores outwards (using the cup as a ramp) in all directions. The spores trail long, sticky filaments behind them, which get caught on branches; the (very lightweight) spores then wind around the branch grappling-hook style, leaving them firmly attached and ready to start their new life. The parent, meanwhile, will keep manufacturing more bird’s nests for as long as it has the food and water to keep going.

There’s just one catch: because the spores get distributed by rain, they don’t fly very far, and that means that children of the same parents will end up close by. This means that the fungus has to have some way to avoid inbreeding. (Inbreeding causes bad mutations to build up, in the sort of way that dubious X-Files episodes parodied, and that makes the fungus less able to survive. The non-silly version of this is called “inbreeding depression”

The fungi achieve this by being very picky about their mates. Humans come in 2 genders, and these are our “mating compatibility groups.” These fungi, on the other hand, use what’s called a “tetrapolar mating system.” What it means is this: instead of their being one category of gender, each fungus has 2 kinds of gender, with the poetic names “MAT-A” and “MAT-B.” 2 fungi can only mate if both their MAT-A and MAT-B genders are different. And each of these doesn’t just come in 2 varieties – they can have 10s, or even 100s.

(For what comes next, if you want to know the details I highly recommend this paper)

Take Cyathus stercoreus, the “dung-loving bird’s nest” (don’t you love fungus names?), which is one of the most widespread of the bird’s nest fungi. It has 39 different possible MAT-A’s, and 24 MAT-B’s. This means that there are a total of 936 (39×24) different genders, and an arbitrary fungus will be able to mate with 874 (38×23) of them. The children of this mating will be one of 4 possible genders (getting their MAT-A’s and MAT-B’s independently from each parent), and each child would only be physically able to mate with one in 4 of its siblings – the ones which have both a different MAT-A and MAT-B. That means that there’s a 25% chance of successful mating with a relative, compared to a 94% chance with a random fungus it meets in the street. (Or rather, “in a pile of dung,” but that seems a little less romantic) (Unless you’re a fungus)

But to maintain 936 different genders, you need a lot of fungi, and in species that don’t have as many individuals around, we indeed find that the number of distinct genders goes down in time, as various MAT-A and -B variations are no longer present. Cyathus striatus, the fluted bird’s nest, only has 3 MAT-A’s and 11 MAT-B’s – giving strangers only a 61% chance (2×10/3×11) of being able to mate, with siblings still having that 25% chance. And in fact, C. striatus has been showing increased trouble breeding.

There’s one other important difference between fungi and people: these 100s of different genders (the technical term is “mating compatibility groups”) don’t have any differences in their large-scale physical shape. To tell the genders apart, you need genetic testing.

This may give us a hint as to how gender started out in the first place. At the simplest end, we have asexual reproduction: creatures that divide via mitosis and leave it at that. Next, we have creatures that can penetrate each other’s cell walls and exchange nuclei, like these fungi do; that gives them the advantages of cross-breeding. Compared to them, every asexual species is suffering from permanent inbreeding depression, as each creature only “mates” with itself. Then you see the development of things that quickly kill off any attempt to mate with excessively similar creatures, like this system of genders. You could easily imagine the next stage: the genetic variation between the genders starts to get used in building the physical structure of the creature. This opens up the possibility of different genders specializing in various ways, including in parts of the reproductive process – and the rest, as they say, is (pre)history.

But even we mammals haven’t given up on the old systems of genders! Studies in a wide range of species have shown that everything from butterflies to rats will actively avoid mating with anything that smells too much like them. Scents come from a variety of sources, but significantly, many of these scent components are inherited. What we have is a collection of genetic variants that make people who are too closely related to us not smell like prospective mates. This doesn’t physically prevent mating, but as you’ll have noticed above, even the fungi’s rather elaborate system only reduces the inbreeding rate to 25%; an imperfect system is a lot better than no system at all.

So the next time you smell your relatives, think about the mating habits of fungi, and how your pattern of scents may well be the evolutionary remnant of a system of 1000s of different genders that let our earliest ancestors know their kin.

Many thanks to John Baez for the original article (shared below) which sparked my curiosity with its talk of “mating compatibility groups.” Who would have known that fungi could do that? Well, apart from mycologists, I guess.

2014-02-06: MOMA PS 1 will have a mushroom tower this summer. beats a cloud.

opening in late june, 2014 the scheme integrates biological technologies alongside advanced computer-based engineering. using a pioneering method of bio-design, the structure is formed entirely of organic matter. through diverting the natural carbon cycle, the scheme requires no energy, and produces zero CO2 emissions.

2014-04-05: Mushroom packaging

did you know that there are better alternatives to asbestos, like mushrooms? me neither.

2014-12-16: The Mushroom Man. 6000 species in a garage.

Herbarium Rooseveltensis Amanitarum may contain more distinct species than any university or museum. I have well over 6000 collections of Amanita alone

2016-03-05: Fungi withstand Mars

After a year-and-a-half long voyage aboard the International Space Station, a group of fungi collected from Antarctica has proven its ability to withstand harsh, Mars-like conditions. 60% of the cells remained intact, providing new insight for the possibility of life on Mars.

2016-08-07: Fungal networks

The implications of the Wood Wide Web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, however. The fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources—sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus—between one another. A dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbors. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of airborne hormones. But such warnings are more precise in terms of source and recipient when sent by means of the myco-net.

2018-08-02: Amphetamine Parasite

Imagine emerging into the sun after 17 long years spent lying underground, only for your butt to fall off. That ignominious fate regularly befalls America’s cicadas. These bugs spend their youth underground, feeding on roots. After 13 or 17 years of this, they synchronously erupt from the soil in plagues of biblical proportions for a few weeks of song and sex. But on their way out, some of them encounter the spores of a fungus called Massospora.

2019-09-03: Bees Need Meat

Ask an entomologist what makes a bee a bee, and you’ll likely get some version of “bees are just wasps that went vegetarian.” New research shows that isn’t true. Bees are actually omnivores, and their meat is microbes. This finding may open a new window on why bees are in trouble: Anything that disrupts the microbial community in a bee’s food, whether it is high heat linked to climate change, fungicides or another stressor, could be causing developing bees to starve.” “For most people, the idea that microorganisms can qualify as meat is radical. In the past 4 years, Steffan has published a series of papers laying out evidence that microbes are an important part of a variety of food webs, including those that involve bees. Their findings confirm that fungi, bacteria and other microscopic players can fit anywhere in the food web, upending our vision of predator and prey, carnivore and herbivore—and what makes a bee a bee.”

2019-12-28: Dandruff

there is some indication that this fungus can migrate to the pancreas, where it is implicated in the pathogenesis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common kind of pancreatic cancer (95%), as deadly as an 88 millimeter shell to the head.

2020-01-04: Freedom From Fungus

Why Don’t Humans Have Chestnut-Style Blights and White Nose-Style Syndromes? fungi are responsible for 72% of the local extinctions of animals and 64% among plants. White nose syndrome in bats and Dutch elm disease are 2 high-profile examples of extremely deadly fungal diseases gaining wider ranges through global trade. While each fungus itself is unique, many fungal pathogens share several special abilities that make them especially lethal. Fighting off fungus may be 1 reason why our body temperature is fastened at 37° C.

2020-04-02: Fungus Meat. This is of course not new. Quorn has been around since the 80s.

Fast-growing meshworks of mycelial filaments can replicate meat’s texture, and it’ll eat pretty much any carbon source, including waste from various industrial processes. Decades ago, British-based Quorn was the beginning of this idea, but this year the number of startups planning to put fungus-based alternative proteins in stores and on plates is mushrooming.

2020-08-10: Fungi emit 8x as much CO2 as humanity.

fungal decomposition is one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions, emitting 85 gigatons every year. In 2018, the combustion of fossil fuels by humans emitted 10 gigatons.

2020-08-11: Fungus economics

the fungus coordinated its trading behavior across the network. Kiers identified a strategy of “buy low, sell high.” The fungus actively transported phosphorus — using its dynamic microtubule “motors” — from areas of abundance, where it fetched a low price when exchanged with a plant root, to areas of scarcity, where it was in higher demand and fetched a higher price. By doing so, the fungus was able to transfer a greater proportion of its phosphorus to the plant at the more favorable exchange rate, thus receiving larger quantities of CO2 in return.

2020-09-27: Saving the Bees with fungi. Adding a 1% extract of amadou and reishi to bees’ sugar water reduced deformed wing virus 80x.
2021-05-18: Fungus problemsolvers

Mycelium not only grows into economical networks, it also reshapes itself in response to its environment. From a block of colonised wood, teeming hyphae initially grow out in all directions in search of more food. But when 1 part of the network finds something new to consume – another block of wood, for instance – the rest of the mycelium stops searching, withdraws from fruitless areas and begins thickening the links to the new food source. What’s more, if the hyphae that connect the original block of wood to the newly discovered one are stripped away, and the 2 blocks are placed in a new container to prevent the re-establishment of old pathways, the regrowing mycelium will nevertheless start out of the original block in the direction of the other one: it appears to ‘possess a directional memory, although the basis of this memory is unknown’.

With a decentralized body that grows independently at every extremity, how does a fungus know when to change itself? When a hyphal tip discovers a tasty block of wood, how is this information conveyed to the rest of the network-body? Through chemical transport, perhaps? Fungi are known to produce and respond to chemicals that can act as cues, and mycelial networks transport water and nutrients rapidly through their hyphae in microtubules, which function hydraulically and are highly pressure-sensitive. They can also direct the flow towards particular areas: when it is time to produce a mushroom, for instance, the mycelium propels water into the growing fruit, sometimes under great pressure. A fruiting stinkhorn mushroom can crack through asphalt, exerting a force sufficient to lift 130 kg.

2021-05-22: Antifungal vaccines

Surveillance that identifies serious fungal infections is patchy, and so any number is probably an undercount. But 1 widely shared estimate proposes that there are possibly 300M people infected with fungal diseases worldwide and 1.6M deaths every year—more than malaria, as many as tuberculosis. Just in the US, the CDC estimates that more than 75K people are hospitalized annually for a fungal infection, and another 8.9M people seek an outpatient visit, costing about $7.2B a year. For physicians and epidemiologists, this is surprising and unnerving. Long-standing medical doctrine holds that we are protected from fungi not just by layered immune defenses but because we are mammals, with core temperatures higher than fungi prefer. The cooler outer surfaces of our bodies are at risk of minor assaults—think of athlete’s foot, yeast infections, ringworm—but in people with healthy immune systems, invasive infections have been rare. The best counter to the ravages of fungi is not treatment but prevention: not drugs but vaccines. Right now no vaccine exists for any fungal disease. But the difficulty of treating patients long term with toxic drugs, combined with staggering case numbers, makes finding 1 urgent. And for the first time, 1 might be in sight if not in reach.


2022-08-19: A free textbook on fungi

fungi lack the functionally important terminal sialylation of the glycans that occurs in mammalian cells. So, without engineering, filamentous fungi, despite their other advantages, are not the most suitable microbial hosts for production of recombinant human glycoproteins for therapeutic use. Nevertheless, strategies to prevent proteolysis have already met with some success and new scientific information being generated through genomics and proteomics research will extend the biomanufacturing capabilities of recombinant filamentous fungi, enabling them to express genes encoding multiple proteins, making filamentous fungi even better candidates to produce proteins and protein complexes for therapeutic use

2022-11-14: How Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis spread widely in amphibians

Since the 1970s, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) has spread globally amongst amphibian populations, wiping out entire species and decimating others. While the fungus maintained a consistent set of housekeeping genes, Bd tailored the expression of other genes to each host, allowing it to pursue multiple infection strategies. For example, in more-vulnerable species, genes essential for attaching to and invading leukocytes, cells that defend a host from pathogens, were upregulated. In more-resistant species, genes promoting quicker reproduction, perhaps to evade or overwhelm a host’s defenses, were elevated.

Brain Communication

A game where you compete in relaxation. The players’ brainwaves control a ball on a table, and the more relaxed scores a goal over the opponent.

2006-11-15: Slow but steady progress

Hitachi has successfully tested a brain-machine interface that allows users to turn power switches on and off with their mind. Relying on optical topography, a neuroimaging technique that uses near-infrared light to map blood concentration in the brain, the system can recognize the changes in brain blood flow associated with mental activity and translate those changes into voltage signals for controlling external devices. In the experiments, test subjects were able to activate the power switch of a model train by performing mental arithmetic and reciting items from memory.

2007-05-29: National Neurotechnology Initiative

We’ve learned more about the brain in the last 5 years than we did in the last 50 years. Lynch is working on a proposal for a 5-year National Neurotechnology Initiative with a budget of $200 million a year. It would identify projects to fund, such as the development of a “brain interface” device that would route signals from the muscles and sensory organs; technology that would allow nerves to control prosthetic devices; and a brain-simulation project that would replicate the way the brain works.

2007-08-25: Brainloop, Google Earth controlled by a brain computer interface.

2008-02-20: EEG startup.

Emotiv has created technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind.

I think I have future shock with this one.

Between this and haptic interfaces… woah.

2008-10-23: An update on the neuro cyborgs

He inserts a 4 sq. mm array of 100 neural probes into the M1 arm knob of the cortex. With a random sample of neural signaling from that region of the brain, and some Kalman filtering, patients can instantly control the cursor on screen (unlike biofeedback or sensory remapping which require training). They can deduce motor intent from a sample of an average of 24 neurons. When connected to a robot hand for the first time, and asked to “make a fist” the patient exclaimed “holy shit” as it worked the first time. Prior to the experiments, open questions included: Do the neurons stay active (other work indicates that the motor cortex reorganizes within minutes of decoupled sensory input)? Can thinking still activate the motor neurons? The test patients had been in sensory deprivation for 2-9 years prior. Will there be scarring and degradation over time? 1 patient is 3 years in. What are the neural plasticity effects?

2012-07-01: Brain in a vat is here!

The first real-time brain-scanning speller will allow people in an apparent vegetative state to communicate

2012-12-21: HCI chocolate

Researchers described the brain-computer interface that allowed Ms. Scheuermann to move an arm, turn and bend a wrist, and close a hand for the first time in 9 years. Less than 1 year after she told the research team, “I’m going to feed myself chocolate before this is over,” Ms. Scheuermann savored its taste and announced as they applauded her feat, “1 small nibble for a woman, 1 giant bite for BCI.”

2013-03-01: Brain to brain communication

Even though the animals were on different continents, with the resulting noisy transmission and signal delays, they could still communicate. This tells us that we could create a workable, network of animal brains distributed in many different locations.

2013-03-17: Hive mind privacy. One of the most interesting arguments for privacy in our (near) hive mind: to cut down on the quadratic communication overhead. Even our brain isn’t fully connected, rather sparsely in fact.
2014-03-04: I had somehow missed this 2 years ago. In the estimation of Mary Lou Jepsen: Could future devices read images from our brains? It should be possible to increase resolution 1000x in the next few years.

2014-04-27: Vegetative patients may be aware

a significant proportion of patients who were classified as vegetative in recent years have been misdiagnosed – Owen estimates perhaps 20%. Schiff, who weighs up the extent of misdiagnosis a different way, goes further. Based on recent studies, he says 40% of patients thought to be vegetative are, when examined more closely, partly aware. Among this group of supposedly vegetative patients are those who are revealed by scanners to be able to communicate and should be diagnosed as locked-in, if they are fully conscious, or minimally conscious, if their abilities wax and wane. But Schiff believes the remainder will have to be defined another way altogether, since being aware does not necessarily mean being able to use mental imagery. Nor does being aware enough to follow a command mean possessing the ability to communicate.

Another story:

For 12 years, Scott had remained silent, locked inside his body, quietly watching the world go by. Now, the fMRI had revealed a person: a living, breathing soul who had a life, attitudes, beliefs, memories and experiences, and who had the sense of being somebody who was alive and in the world – no matter how strange and limited that world had become.

On many occasions in the months that followed, we conversed with Scott in the scanner. He expressed himself, speaking to us through this magical connection we had made between his mind and our machine. Somehow, Scott came back to life. He was able to tell us that he knew who he was; he knew where he was; and he knew how much time had passed since his accident. And thankfully, he confirmed that he wasn’t in any pain.

Neuroethics / when you are declared brain dead are in for an upheaval.

After a major injury, some patients are in such serious condition that doctors deliberately place them in an artificial coma to protect their body and brain so they can recover. That could be a mistake. An extreme deep coma — based on the experiment on the cats — may actually be more protective. “Indeed, an organ or muscle that remains inactive for a long time eventually atrophies. It is plausible that the same applies to a brain kept for an extended period in a state corresponding to a flat EEG. An inactive brain coming out of a prolonged coma may be in worse shape than a brain that has had minimal activity. Research on the effects of extreme deep coma during which the hippocampus is active is absolutely vital for the benefit of patients.”

2014-09-11: Brain coupling

intriguing new possibilities for computer-assisted communication of brain states between individuals. The brain-to-brain method may be used to augment this mutual coupling of the brains, and may have a positive impact on human social behavior

2015-07-10: Rat onemind.

Brainet uses signals from an array of electrodes implanted in the brains of multiple rodents in experiments to merge their collective brain activity and jointly control a virtual avatar arm or even perform sophisticated computations — including image pattern recognition and even weather forecasting

2015-09-26: Unaided paraplegic walking

A novel brain-computer-interface has allowed a paraplegic man to walk for a short distance, unaided by an exoskeleton or other types of robotic support.

2016-06-01: Remote controlled insects. This is an improvement over the robo cockroach:

The rapid pace of miniaturization is swiftly blurring the line between the technological base we’ve created and the technological base that created us. Extreme miniaturization and advanced neural interfaces have enabled us to explore the remote control of insects in free flight via implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating systems

2016-08-04: Neural Dust

UC Berkeley researchers are developing “Neural Dust,” tiny wireless sensors for implanting in the brain, muscles, and intestines that could someday be used to control prosthetics or a “electroceuticals” to treat epilepsy or fire up the immune system. So far, they’ve tested a 3 millimeter long version of the device in rats. “I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader. Having access to in-body telemetry has never been possible because there has been no way to put something supertiny superdeep. But now I can take a speck of nothing and park it next to a nerve or organ, your GI tract or a muscle, and read out the data.”

2016-09-11: Do we really want to fuse our brains together?

If a rat can teach herself to use a completely new sensory modality – something the species has never experienced throughout the course of its evolutionary history – is there any cause to believe our own brains will prove any less capable of integrating novel forms of input?

2016-10-04: CCortex

Artificial Development is building CCortex, a massive spiking neural network simulation of the human cortex and peripheral systems. Upon completion, CCortex will represent up to 20b neurons and 20t connections, achieving a level of complexity that rivals the mammalian brain, and making it the largest, most biologically realistic neural network ever built. The system is up to 10k times larger than any previous attempt to replicate primary characteristics of human intelligence.

2017-03-23: Our Future Cyborg Brains

2017-09-05: 100x smaller Antennas

Antennas 100x smaller could lead to tiny brain implants, micro–medical devices, or phones you can wear on your finger. The antennas are expected to have sizes comparable to the acoustic wavelength, thus leading to orders of magnitude reduced antenna size compared to state-of-the-art compact antennas. These miniaturized ME antennas have drastically enhanced antenna gain at small size owing to the acoustically actuated ME effect based receiving/transmitting mechanisms at RF frequencies.

2018-02-27: EEG image reconstruction:

The new technique “could provide a means of communication for people who are unable to verbally communicate. It could also have forensic uses for law enforcement in gathering eyewitness information on potential suspects, rather than relying on verbal descriptions provided to a sketch artist.”

2018-05-14: Tetraplegics win race

But what about letting patients actively participate with AI in improving performance? To test that idea, researchers conducted research using “mutual learning” between computer and humans — 2 severely impaired (tetraplegic) participants with chronic spinal cord injury. The goal: win a live virtual racing game at an international event. After training for several months, in Oct. 8, 2016, the 2 pilots participated in Cybathlon in Zurich, Switzerland — the first international para-Olympics for disabled individuals in control of bionic assistive technology. 1 of those pilots won the gold medal and the other held the tournament record.

2018-09-11: DARPA Neurotechnology

DARPA is funding development of high resolution brain interfaces. At the same time there are 2 companies who have breakthrough technology for higher resolution brain interfaces. The 2 companies are Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Mary Lou Jepsen’s Openwater red light scanner.

2019-02-09: 75% Thought to Speech

A system that translates thought into intelligible speech. Devices monitor brain activity and Artificial Intelligence reconstructs the words a person hears. This breakthrough harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence. It could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. The DNN-vocoder combination achieved the best performance (75% accuracy), which is 67% higher than the baseline system (Linear regression with auditory spectrogram).


2019-04-24: 43% Thought to speech

An implanted brain-computer interface (above) coupled with deep-learning algorithms can translate thought into computerized speech. The researchers asked native English speakers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace to transcribe the sentences they heard. The listeners accurately heard the sentences 43% of the time when given a set of 25 possible words to choose from, and 21% of the time when given 50 words. Although the accuracy rate remains low, it would be good enough to make a meaningful difference to a “locked-in” person, who is almost completely paralyzed and unable to speak.


2019-05-02: HCI Superpowers

The new documentary I Am Human chronicles how neurotechnology could restore sight, retrain the body, and treat diseases—then make us all more than human.

2019-08-01: Facebook has a 76% system:

Here, human participants listened to questions and responded aloud with answers while we used high-density electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings to detect when they heard or said an utterance and to then decode the utterance’s identity. Because certain answers were only plausible responses to certain questions, we could dynamically update the prior probabilities of each answer using the decoded question likelihoods as context. We decode produced and perceived utterances with accuracy rates as high as 61% and 76%, respectively (chance is 7% and 20%). Contextual integration of decoded question likelihoods significantly improves answer decoding. These results demonstrate real-time decoding of speech in an interactive, conversational setting, which has important implications for patients who are unable to communicate.

2019-10-30: Brain-to-Brain communication for group problem-solving

The interface combines electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain signals and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deliver information noninvasively to the brain. The interface allows 3 human subjects to collaborate and solve a task using direct brain-to-brain communication. 2 of the 3 subjects are designated as “Senders” whose brain signals are decoded using real-time EEG data analysis. The decoding process extracts each Sender’s decision about whether to rotate a block in a Tetris-like game before it is dropped to fill a line. The Senders’ decisions are transmitted via the Internet to the brain of a third subject, the “Receiver,” who cannot see the game screen. The Senders’ decisions are delivered to the Receiver’s brain via magnetic stimulation of the occipital cortex. The Receiver integrates the information received from the 2 Senders and uses an EEG interface to make a decision about either turning the block or keeping it in the same orientation. A second round of the game provides an additional chance for the Senders to evaluate the Receiver’s decision and send feedback to the Receiver’s brain, and for the Receiver to rectify a possible incorrect decision made in the first round.

2021-05-14: 94% Thought to text

Using an implant, a paralyzed individual achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect. Despite working with a relatively small amount of data (only 242 sentences’ worth of characters), the system worked remarkably well. The lag between the thought and a character appearing on screen was ~500ms, and the participant was able to produce 90 characters per minute, easily topping the previous record for implant-driven typing, which was ~25 characters per minute.

2022-04-15: EEG are terrible sensors. In-ear may fix that, and allow for continuous readings, and perhaps writing too.

But while the immediate uses of NextSense’s earbuds are medical, Berent hopes to eventually build a mass-market brain monitor that, if enough people start using it, can generate enormous quantities of day-to-day brain performance data. The catch, of course, is that since no one has ever done that, it’s not yet obvious what most people would get out of the information. That’s also what’s exciting. “We don’t necessarily know what we would learn because we’ve never had access to that type of data”.

Berent and his team envision a multipurpose device that can stream music and phone calls like AirPods; boost local sound like a hearing aid; and monitor your brain to provide a window into your moods, attention, sleep patterns, and periods of depression. He also hopes to zero in on a few sizes that would fit a vast majority of people, to dispense with all the ear-scanning.

Far along on the NextSense road map is something unproven, and kind of wild. If AI can decode tons of brain data, the next step would be to then change those patterns—perhaps by doing something as simple as playing a well-timed sound. “It’s almost a transformative moment in history,” fascinated by the prospect of using audio to nudge someone into a deeper sleep state. “It’s so convenient, it doesn’t bother you. People are wearing stuff in the ear typically anyway, right?”


2023-01-24: Faster speech to text

Our BCI decoded speech at 62 words per minute, which is 3.4x faster than the prior record for any kind of BCI and begins to approach the speed of natural conversation (160 words per minute). We highlight 2 aspects of the neural code for speech that are encouraging for speech BCIs: spatially intermixed tuning to speech articulators that makes accurate decoding possible from only a small region of cortex, and a detailed articulatory representation of phonemes that persists years after paralysis. These results show a feasible path forward for using intracortical speech BCIs to restore rapid communication to people with paralysis who can no longer speak.