June 7: The first Neuralink patient describes what it's like, why it took decades to ban asbestos, and women may be more susceptible to drug-resistant infections. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Noland Arbaugh is the first person to have a Neuralink brain-computer-interface implanted in this brain. "I have no sensation of it—no way of telling it's there unless someone goes and physically pushes on it," the 30-year-old Arizona resident, who has been paralyzed below the middle of his neck since a 2016 swimming accident, told Scientific American reporter Lauren Leffer. Click here to read her full story.
How it works: Neuralink is an intracortical device. Sixty-four superfine threads containing 1,024 electrodes are woven into the brain's motion-controlling motor cortex. The electrodes transmit compressed neural data via Bluetooth, and an algorithm tuned to Arbaugh's unique neural patterns translates the data into action. A month after January's implantation, the device stopped working, and Neuralink technicians determined that 85 percent of the threads had migrated away from where they had been placed in Arbaugh's brain. They reprogrammed the remaining threads and successfully restored functionality.
New horizons: Despite the technical setback, Arbaugh continues to break speed records for moving a cursor across a screen with his mind. He uses his device for hours at a time to browse the Web, send text messages, scroll social media, navigate apps and—perhaps most importantly—play video games. Online chess and the world-building strategy game Civilization VI have been his favorites. Above all, everything he's gone through–good and bad–is for the overall improvement of the technology and he's glad about it, he says. "The whole point of this study was to find out what does and doesn't work." | | | For more than 100 years, scientists have known that asbestos was a dangerous substance. Today it's well-accepted that the material, a naturally occurring, fibrous mineral that is resistant to heat and flame, increases rates of lung, pleura, stomach, colon and rectal cancers, with no safe level of exposure. Though exact numbers are hard to come by (because of the lag between exposure and disease), "the cumulative number of occupational deaths that were caused by asbestos over the course of the 20th century may be something on the order of 17 million," writes Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes, in the June issue of Scientific American. But it wasn't until this past March that the government officially banned the use of asbestos. What the heck took so long?
How it happened: Since the 1980s, companies using asbestos in their products have pushed back against repeated nationwide efforts by the EPA to ban the substance, aided by antiregulatory attitudes that have dominated in the U.S. for decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, industry groups pursued a similar tactic to the tobacco industry, by attempting to cast doubt on the (STRONG) science behind the carcinogenic effects of asbestos, and discredit the scientists who did the studies. In 2016, Congress amended the Toxic Substances Control Act to give the EPA new authority to evaluate and regulate chemicals. The asbestos ban is the EPA's first new rule under the amended act.
What the experts say: "America was once a leader in occupational health and safety," Oreskes writes. "Now we are laggards. It took 126 years for us to heed [the first] warning about the dangers of asbestos. We need a better way to translate science into policy." | | | • There's an 80 percent chance that global average temperatures will exceed the 1.5 C threshold in the next five years. But there's still time to act. | 4 min read | | | Drug-resistant Escherichia coli--one of many bacteria that women might be more likely to encounter than men in some regions, owing to gendered divisions of labor. Cavallini James/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images | | | • A new way to look for life in the cosmos other than identifying "habitable zones" may be to search for the "computational zones" of the universe, whether in RNA translation or in digital 1s and 0s, or something else altogether, writes Caleb Scharf, senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. "If computation is universally constrained by the Landauer limit, which depends on temperature, as well as by how much energy and matter can be given over to computing, we can begin to chart out the prospects for computation on planets and elsewhere," he says. | 4 min read. | | | MOST POPULAR STORIES OF THE WEEK | | | • 500-Pound Prehistoric Bird Was a 'Giga-Goose,' Fossils Reveal | 3 min read | • COVID's Six-Foot Rule Made Scientific Sense at the Time | 2 min read | • Surprising Supernova Scars Cover the Earth | 5 min read | | | Oyster mushrooms, like the above heart-shaped summer variety, use a nerve gas to paralyze and knock off fungus-eating roundworms called nematodes. When nematodes touch the mushrooms, the toxin is released from microscopic, lollipop-shaped structures on the mushroom's surface. Read more about research on this mushroom here. | | | • Don Pettit and two Russian cosmonauts are slated to lift off on a Soyuz spacecraft from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in September. Pettit, at age 69, is NASA's oldest active astronaut. He's also a chemical engineer, inventor and science communicator. Read more in this fascinating Q & A with him. | 9 min read | | | • From the archive: As of 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens shared this planet with at least four other species of hominid. How did we survive when the others perished forever? Evolutionary anthropologists argue that it was our friendliness that gave us the competitive edge. | 13 min read | | | Remarkable milestones in science, whether a brain-computer implant or the launch of a commercial spacecraft, are built on the collective knowledge of all scientists in that particular field. Core principles and even experimental techniques can be traced back to visionaries like Isaac Newton and lesser-known explorers like Alessandra Giliani (a 14th-century anatomist). The future of scientific discovery is novel innovation, yes. But it is also a tribute to the past. | Thank you for being part of our circle of science-curious readers! If you're enjoying Today in Science, consider forwarding this email to a friend.
| —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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