GoKawiilA brain implant can help people with severe paralysis to move their hands. Plus, a US court has blocked RFK Jr’s attempt to rewrite the country’s vaccine recommendations and a call from the chief exec of Microsoft AI to stop programming chatbots to hijack human empathy.
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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.
Nature | 5 min read
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.
Nature | 5 min read
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