GoKawiil
Tech News
Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman disclosed at the Fast Company Innovation Festival that he intends to tear down the Upper West Side building associated with Saturday Night Live to build a brain research institute. He shared the plan publicly, joking that the show's staff had not yet been informed of the demolition.
Researchers analyzed human brain tissue samples from people with and without Alzheimer's disease and identified more than 1,000 microproteins that had previously gone undetected. Dozens of these small proteins showed different expression levels in Alzheimer's-affected brains compared with healthy ones. Separately, a mouse study found that immune cells activated by gut infections can travel to the brain's protective membrane and remain there as a lasting defensive memory.
Researchers grafted lab-grown human brain tissue into mice that were bred without a cortex, and the transplanted tissue integrated and took root in the animals' brains. The study demonstrates that human neural tissue can survive and develop within a living rodent brain that lacks its own corresponding structure.
Researchers led by Sergiu Pașca at Stanford transplanted lab-grown human brain tissue into newborn mice missing part of their brains, and the tissue expanded to fill much of that space while forming functional connections with the host nervous system. Published in Nature on September 16, the study represents the most extensive fusion of human neural tissue into a living animal achieved to date, though behavioral tests showed the mice did not gain enhanced cognitive abilities.
Researchers analyzed post-mortem human fetal brain tissue collected across periods 13 to 24 weeks post-conception, sourced from multiple US and UK tissue banks under ethical approval, to study how the prefrontal cortex becomes distinct from motor regions. They identified a self-regulating retinoic acid signaling loop active during the mid-fetal stage that appears to guide this regional specialization as the cortical plate consolidates and thalamocortical connections form.
Scientists at the Salk Institute and collaborators combined multiple detection techniques to identify over 4,300 previously unrecognized 'microproteins' in postmortem brain tissue from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, comparing samples from people with and without Alzheimer's disease. Dozens of these tiny proteins, each under 150 amino acids, showed altered levels in Alzheimer's patients, and the findings were published in Nature Aging on September 14.
A commentary argues that tech companies are increasingly designing AI products to make it effortless for people to offload cognitive tasks, drawing a parallel to how fast food chains capitalized on consumers' desire for convenience. The author recounts a personal anecdote involving their accountant that revealed how deeply AI-driven automation has quietly crept into everyday professional decisions without public awareness.
A new brain-computer interface has for the first time simultaneously decoded a paralyzed user's intended speech and movement, converting brain signals into on-screen text while animating a personalized avatar within seconds, according to a Nature Neuroscience study. Separately, a review published in Psychological Medicine finds that reading for pleasure correlates with structural brain changes, better mental health, and lower risk of cognitive decline, with benefits strongest when reading starts young and is enjoyable rather than obligatory.
A mouse study led by Cambridge researcher Menna Clatworthy found that immune cells activated during intestinal infections, such as those caused by Citrobacter rodentium bacteria and the parasitic worm Schistosoma mansoni, travel to the meninges surrounding the brain. There, the cells take up long-term residence and mount a faster, stronger response when the same infection recurs more than a month later, indicating they retain a memory of the original illness.
Researchers at UC San Francisco tested a surgically implanted 253-electrode array that reads brain activity to simultaneously produce on-screen text and animate a personalized avatar's movements. The system, tested with two participants with severe paralysis, is described as the first brain-computer interface to handle verbal and non-verbal communication together within seconds of intent.
Software engineer Alex Wormuth built a simulated fruit fly brain using Google and HHMI Janelia's newly released connectome data, then wired it to control Doom frame by frame. Each frame generates thousands of brightness and color inputs that feed into the simulated brain's 25.6 million connections, translating neural activity into in-game controls, including a pain response modeled on real dopamine receptors.
A Coinbase engineer created 'Stonkfly,' an open-source simulation of a male fruit fly's brain and eyes containing 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million synaptic connections, and set it loose reading candlestick charts to buy, sell or hold cryptocurrencies. The virtual fly perceives price charts as raw pixel data through simulated photoreceptors, acts roughly every 500 milliseconds, and receives a dopamine-like reward signal for profitable trades and an aversive signal for losses, with trading fees also counted as losses.