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Oct 29, 2024 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
Manu Prakash spoke with IEEE Spectrum shortly after returning to Stanford University from a month aboard a research vessel off the coast of California, where he was testing tools to monitor oceanic carbon sequestration. The associate professor conducts fieldwork around the world to better understand the problems he’s working on, as well as the communities thatwill be using his inventions.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
Neuralink’s visual prosthesis Blindsight has been designated a breakthrough device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which potentially sets the technology on a fast track to approval. In confirming the news, an FDA spokesperson emphasized that the designation does not mean that Blindsight is yet considered safe or effective.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
For the first time, a small group of patients with amputations below the knee were able to control the movements of their prosthetic legs through neural signals—rather than relying on programmed cycles for all or part of a motion—and resume walking with a natural gait. The achievement required a specialized amputation surgery combined with a non-invasive surface electrode connection to a robotic prosthetic lower leg.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
evdriven.com | Greg Uyeno
For the first time, a small group of patients with amputations below the knee were able to control the movements of their prosthetic legs through neural signals—rather than relying on programmed cycles for all or part of a motion—and resume walking with a natural gait. The achievement required a specialized amputation surgery combined with a non-invasive surface electrode connection to a robotic prosthetic lower leg.
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May 20, 2024 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
In 2010, Melanie Reid fell off a horse and was paralyzed below the shoulders. “You think, ‘I am where I am; nothing’s going to change,’” she said, but many years after her accident, she participated in a medical trial of a new, non-invasive rehabilitative device that can deliver more electrical stimulation than similar devices without harming the user. For Reid, use of the device has led to small improvements in her ability to use her hands, and meaningful changes to her daily life.
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Dec 20, 2023 | 
daily.jstor.org | Greg Uyeno |Louise Robinson |Eugene Tang |John-Paul Taylor
The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Draw a clock. Start with a round face. Make sure it’s large enough for all the numbers. Then, add hands, setting the time to ten after eleven. Those are typical instructions for a clock drawing test, a widely-used clinical technique for evaluating cognitive impairment and screening for dementia.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
Neuroscience is going high-def. Researchers have developed a series of technological improvements that dramatically increase the spatial resolution of an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The improvements allow an fMRI to image voxels—the 3D equivalent of pixels—that are less than half a millimeter on each side. In doing so, they have passed an important threshold relative to the structure of the human brain, to roughly match the scale of functional clusters of neurons.
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
Is there a better way for scientists to shine a light on nerve cells throughout the body? When researchers Xinyue Liu and Siyuan Rao first began their collaboration at MIT, they treated this question literally. is an interdisciplinary branch of science in which cells are genetically altered to be light-sensitive, making it possible to inhibit or excite cells, and study their function by applying colored light.
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Sep 4, 2023 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
Sensory sciences have come a long way in explaining how some physical phenomena—a particular wavelength of light, for example, or a column of air vibrating at a set frequency—correspond to a typical perceptual experience. The sense of smell, however, has proven elusive. Until recently, there was simply no way to take the physical properties of a compound or the structural formula of a molecule and have any sense of what it might smell like.
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Jun 3, 2023 | 
spectrum.ieee.org | Greg Uyeno
A hospital visit can be boiled down to an initial ailment and an outcome. But health records tell a different story, full of doctors’ notes and patient histories, vital signs and test results, potentially spanning weeks of a stay. In health studies, all of that data is multiplied by hundreds of patients. It’s no wonder, then, that as AI data processing techniques grow increasingly sophisticated, doctors are treating health as an AI and big-data problem.
