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China wants brain-computer interfaces to be a future industry for the country. Credit: Li He/VCG via Getty
China has approved a brain–computer interface (BCI) for people with severe paralysis to help restore their hand movements — the first in the world to be available outside of a clinical trial. The coin-sized implant will be available for people aged between 18 and 60 years old who have paralysis that affects all of their limbs and that was caused by an injury to the neck area of the spinal cord. The approval is a milestone for BCI research, and represents a step towards effective treatments for people with spinal-cord injuries, experts say.
A US judge has blocked sweeping changes to the country’s childhood immunization schedule brought in by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The case was brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, among others. The judge called Kennedy to task for replacing the members of a prominent vaccine-advisory panel with people who largely lacked expertise in vaccines, and reversed all of the panel’s decisions. The ruling opens with a quote from astronomer Carl Sagan: “‘Science,’ like law, ‘is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge’,” it says. “Nevertheless, science is still ‘the best we have’.”
The New York Times | 8 min read
Reference: US court ruling
The AlphaFold protein-structure database — which contains the predicted structure of almost every protein on Earth — just got an upgrade. The freely available repository now includes predictions of protein complexes, with the addition of 1.7 million ‘homodimers’ that comprise two interacting copies of the same molecule. Adding complexes to the AlphaFold database is an important step to understanding how many proteins work, says computational biologist Gemma Atkinson. But experts caution that not all of these predictions will be accurate, and that researchers might want to independently validate them before use.
Forty-six percent of roughly 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature reader poll have or had a side hustle during their PhD to supplement their income — many because their PhD stipends were insufficient to cover their cost of living. Some commented that side hustles enabled them to develop beneficial skills, such as science communication, or to keep passion projects alive. But these second occupations come with a risk of burnout, and reduces the time PhD students have to pursue professional-development opportunities, says Ian Wereley, executive director of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies.
Features & opinion
It has been one of neuroscience’s most cherished ideas for decades: that bursts of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain provide a potent signal of reward. But now, the supremacy of the reward prediction error (RPE) hypothesis is under fire. In the past 10 years, new research has suggested that dopamine has functions that go way beyond reward, including in cognition and even social behaviours. The RPE theory struggles to explain these functions, and neuroscientists are wrangling over whether the hypothesis needs to be amended — or even completely scrapped.
“Humans have evolved to imagine the possibility of agency everywhere,” notes Mustafa Suleyman, the chief executive of Microsoft AI. “Seemingly conscious AI weaponizes this biological instinct.” As artificial-intelligence systems increasingly ape the structure of human language, we need design norms and laws that prevent them from being mistaken for sentient beings, he argues. “They must remain fundamentally accountable to humans, and subservient to humanity’s well-being,” writes Suleyman. “AI agents should have no more rights or freedoms than my laptop.”
On this day in 1958, the United States launched Vanguard 1, the fourth artificial satellite and the oldest that still remains in orbit. In an excerpt from her 2005 paper The archaeology of orbital space, space archaeologist Alice Gorman considers how we might think about preserving the heritage that is slowly accruing in the darkness of space.
Today I’m revising my opinion on the appendix — which, far from being a vestigial organ good only for inconveniently exploding, apparently evolved independently something like 32 times across hundreds of mammalian species. The evolutionary pressures that once favored the appendix have largely disappeared, write biologists Phil Starks and Lilia Goncharova, but it’s “not an IKEA spare part included ‘just in case’”. Apologies for underestimating you, appendix.
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