Neuralink Brain Chip Successfully Implanted on Second Patient

Reuters reported that Neuralink's brain chip has been implanted into a second patient as part of early human trials. Elon Musk told podcast host Lex Fridman last 3 August, but has not disclosed when the surgery took place or the name of the recipient.

Musk said 400 of the electrodes on the second patient's brain are working out of 1,024 implanted. "I don't want to jinx it but it seems to have gone extremely well," he said. "There's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It's working very well."

The device allows patients with spinal cord injuries to play video games, use the internet and control electronic devices using their thoughts alone. In May, the company announced that it was "accepting applications for the second participant" in trials following FDA approval.

The original Neuralink implant patient, Nolan Arbaugh, described the surgery as "super easy." In a demo, the company showed how Arbaugh was able to move a cursor around the screen of a laptop, pause an on-screen music device and play chess and Civilization VI.

Arbaugh himself participated in the marathon podcast with Musk and Fridman. He said that the device allows him to make anything happen on a computer screen just by thinking it, helping reduce his reliance on caregivers.

However, problems cropped up shortly after his surgery when some of electrodes retracted from his brain. The issue was partly rectified later on by modifying the algorithm to make the implants more sensitive. Neuralink told the FDA that in a second procedure, it would place the implant’s threads deeper into the patient’s brain to prevent them from moving as much as they did in Arbaugh’s case.

Neuralink previously tested its implant in animals, including chimps, and some of those testing practices have been the subject of federal investigations.

Despite those issues, the company said it had over 1,000 volunteers for its second surgical trial. Musk said he expects Neuralink to implant its chips in up to eight more patients by the end of 2024.

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Are Retro Phones Making a Comeback?

Don’t look now, but in a few more years, you may see some consumers turning their backs on smartphones and go retro.

Market observers in Europe found that old-school Nokias, Ericssons and Motorolas are making a comeback as consumers got tired of fragile and overly-wired smartphones. Consumers are also looking for practical gadgets that can easily fit their pockets with batteries that can last more than 3 days.

Modern-day apps video calls and smiley faces are features that are slowly being shunned at as demand for handsets like the Nokia 3310 or the Motorola StarTec 130 that allows just basic text messaging and phone calls, starts to increase. Demand for retro phones is growing and some of these second-hand models are fetching prices as high as 1,000 euros a piece.

"Some people don't blink at the prices, we have models at more than 1,000 euros. The high prices are due to the difficulty in finding those models, which were limited editions in their time," said Djassem Haddad, who started the site vintagemobile.fr in 2009.

Haddad had been eyeing a niche market, but since last year, sales have taken off, he said.

Over the past two to three years, he has sold some 10,000 handsets, "with a real acceleration from the beginning of 2013".

"The ageing population is looking for simpler phones, while other consumers want a second cheap phone," he said.

Among the top-sellers on the website is the Nokia 8210, with a tiny monochrome screen and plastic buttons, at 59.99 euros.

Ironically, the trend is just starting as the telecommunications industry consigns such handsets to the recycling bins, hailing smartphones as the way ahead.

Finnish giant Nokia, which was undisputedly the biggest mobile phone company before the advent of Apple's iPhone or Samsung's Galaxy, offloaded its handset division to Microsoft this year after failing to catch the smartphone wave. But it was probably also the supposedly irreversible switch towards smartphone that has given the old school phone an unexpected boost.

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Halle Berry Hopes To Clear This Urban Legend

Time to dispel the rumor and correct the urban legend that has been going on for years that said Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton did actually have sex in one scene while filming the 2001 romantic drama "Monster’s Ball."

The now 58-year-old actress appeared on Dax Shepard’s "Armchair Expert" podcast recently and vehemently denied the allegations.

"We had this very explicit love scene," said Berry, whose performance led to her being the first black woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress.

"There’s an urban legend that we really were f–king. I've heard it, and it’s just not true," she went on. "It’s secretly driven me mad all these years."

In "Monster’s Ball," Berry plays grieving widow Leticia Musgrove, who strikes up a romance with corrections officer Hank Grotowski (Thornton). Unbeknownst to them, Hank assisted in executing the man Leticia was married to.

Leticia and Hank connect over their traumas. They go out to dinner and then get drunk at Leticia’s house which leads to them having sex. The raunchy scene is one of the most memorable parts of the film.

On the podcast, Berry complained that her and Thornton’s explicit sex scene caused them to be romantically linked in real life.

Thornton has also spoken out about the rumor that he and Berry did it.

"No we’re actors. We do the job that we’re required to do, and we were both very professional about it," he said on "Sway in the Morning" in 2012, when asked to "dispel the myth" about himself and Berry’s sex scene being real.

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Google And Kairos Agree on Power Supply Deal

On 14 October, Google reportedly signed a deal to get electricity from small nuclear reactors to help power artificial intelligence.

The agreement to buy energy from reactors built by Kairos Power was agreed upon just weeks after it the media was informed that Three Mile Island, the site of America's worst nuclear accident, will restart operations to provide energy to Microsoft.

"We believe that nuclear energy has a critical role to play in supporting our clean growth and helping to deliver on the progress of AI," Google senior director of energy and climate said during a briefing.

"The grid needs these kinds of clean, reliable sources of energy that can support the build out of these technologies."

No financial details were made available yet, but the information may be made public soon for transparency.

At present, several tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are tryig to expand their data center capabilities to meet the AI revolution's computing needs while also scouring the globe for sources of electricity.

The first of a series of small modular reactors (SMRs) developed by Kairos as a result of its deal with Google is projected to be online by the end of this decade, according to the companies.

Additional small reactors are expected to go online through 2035, generating a combined total of 500 megawatts of power.

SMRs are more compact and potentially easier to deploy -- with big investments by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in the sector.

However, the technology is still in its infancy and lacks regulatory approval, leading companies to seek out existing nuclear power options.

"We view this as a really significant partnership," Kairos co-founder and chief executive Mike Laufer said in the briefing.

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High-Res AR Headset from Leap Motion

Leap Motion has been in kind of a weird place for quite a while now. They were able to raise north of US$ 100 million for their tightly focused computer vision work hell-bent on replicating real-time hand movements. Their work has all been very convincing in demos, but after eight years, the company itself still feels like a bit of a demo.

Recently, the SF startup is seemingly expanding its ambitions in the AR/VR space with the announcement of a new augmented reality headset which it likely won't produce. Project North Star is just a prototype reference design, but the company is open-sourcing its schematics and, despite the fact that it makes the wearer look like a giant bug, it seems fairly interesting.

The startup says that the low-cost headset can be built for under US$ 100 at scale. The savings here versus other AR headset systems relies on the simplicity of the optical system which promises a high quality experience in a form factor that's hardly low-key but is on-par with the bulk we're used to seeing in most of today's ugly VR headsets. The dual 1600x1440 LCD displays run at 120 hertz and bring a combined 100 degree field-of-view image into the user's periphery. The headset also integrates the necessary hand-tracking sensors of course.

The scenario basically seems like Leap Motion needed a wide field-of-view headset that integrated the necessary sensors to demo their hand-tracking tech and realized that there wasn't anything out their that fit the bill entirely, so they built their own.

"We hope that these designs will inspire a new generation of experimental AR systems that will shift the conversation from what an AR system should look like,to what an AR experience should feel like," Leap Motion CTO David Holz wrote in a blog post.

The company has released a host of very intriguing videos over the past several weeks that highlight the company's work on adapting its hand-tracking tech for augmented reality. What they've shown off is deeply convincing.

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