(Wired) – California-based startup Sabi is developing a thought-to-text wearable that could usher in the cyborg future.

Speech-to-text capability is now baked into all modern computers. But what if you didn’t have to dictate to your computer? What if you could type just by thinking?

Silicon Valley startup Sabi is emerging from stealth with that goal. The company is developing a brain wearable that decodes a person’s internal speech into words on a computer screen. CEO Rahul Chhabra says its first product, a brain-reading beanie, will be available by the end of the year. The company is also designing a baseball cap version.

The technology is known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, a device that provides a direct communication pathway between the brain and an external device. (Read More)

(NYT) – As artificial intelligence makes many tasks easier, the human work of cajoling, arm-twisting and reassuring appears to be rising in importance.

As A.I. makes the production of knowledge work more and more efficient, the job of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance. And the need for those sometimes messy human tasks may limit the number of people A.I. displaces.

“These were always important skills,” said David Deming, an economist who is the dean of Harvard College. “But as the information landscape becomes more saturated, the ability to tell a story out of it — to take a ton of text and turn it into something people want — is more valuable.” (Read More)

(404 Media) – Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pitching his country as a global leader in robots for war and defense. Will the world listen?

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy praised robots as the future of war in a Defense Industry Worker Day address on Monday. “For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms—ground systems and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and the operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” Zelenskyy said. (Read More)

(New Scientist) – Monkeys with around 300 electrodes implanted in their brain were able to steer avatars around different virtual environments

Monkeys fitted with a brain-computer interface (BCI) successfully navigated a variety of virtual worlds using only their thoughts. Researchers hope the experiments will pave the way for people with paralysis to explore virtual worlds or more intuitively control electric wheelchairs in this one. (Read More)

(Axios) – Black women remain three times more likely than white and Hispanic women to die from pregnancy-related complications, according to the latest maternal mortality rates released last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Why it matters: Advocates fear inconsistent abortion access across the U.S. and anti-DEI efforts by the Trump administration could fuel the continued racial disparities. (Read More)

(NYT) – The review said a certain class of drugs had little clinical benefit, but many Alzheimer’s experts criticized the analysis, saying it unfairly lumped failed drugs with two recently approved treatments.

Since the approval of new Alzheimer’s drugs in recent years, there has been a lingering question: While data indicated that they could modestly slow cognitive decline for some patients, would that effect be meaningful or too slight to make difference?

A new review of research spanning a decade, published on Wednesday, concluded that the clinical benefit of these and similar drugs is negligible. But the way the review was conducted spurred heated criticism from many Alzheimer’s experts, including some who had been skeptical of some of them. (Read More)

(NPR) – It’s quite common for people to start on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound, especially as the diabetes and obesity treatments become more ubiquitous. They’re designed to treat chronic conditions, so the medicines are intended for lifelong use; yet a high percentage of people who start them also quit.

“We found that fewer than 1 in 4 patients remained on a GLP-1 medication after a year,” says Dr. Jaime Almandoz, an obesity medicine specialist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He looked at insurance claims data in a research letter published in JAMA and found that few patients actually adhere to the drugs for the long term. (Read More)

(NDTV via MSN) – A woman in the United States spent six months behind bars for crimes she insisted she never committed.

Kimberlee Williams, a resident of Oklahoma, was arrested after authorities in Maryland identified her as a suspect using facial recognition software. Investigators arrested her despite her repeated claims that she had never even set foot in the state, reported The Washington Post. (Read More)

(NPR) – Where once most drug users mostly consumed plant-based substances such as cocaine and heroin, drug gangs and cartels have shifted to producing and selling synthetic substances made from industrial chemicals.

Fentanyl and methamphetamines have been around for years. Now, illicit chemists are adulterating batches of street drugs with a fast-changing and often baffling mix of compounds, ranging from Novocaine to a stabilizer used in plastics manufacturing called BTPMS. (Read More)

(NPR) – Direct-to-consumer blood testing is a growing industry targeting health-conscious patients who want to order their own blood work for the price of a dinner out.

The space is becoming increasingly crowded: both by direct offerings from commercial laboratories such as Quest and Labcorp OnDemand, and by companies that partner with them to offer the testing. Recent blood-testing rollouts came from Oura, which has sold some 5.5 million of its smart rings and is aiming at that customer base, and from the wearable company Whoop. (Read More)

(Fox News) – Two patients became sicker after refusing standard transfusions, researchers found

An increasing number of patients are requesting “unvaccinated” blood for transfusions, which can delay care and pose risks to patients’ health, experts warn.

There is no evidence that unvaccinated blood presents any safety benefit, according to a new study published in the journal Transfusion.

There is currently no process for checking whether donated blood comes from vaccinated or unvaccinated donors, experts say. (Read More)

(IEEE Spectrum) – Early BCI users reveal what the technology gives—and takes

More people have gone to space than have received advanced brain-computer interfaces (BCI) like his. But a growing number of companies are now attempting to move the devices out of neuroscience labs and into mainstream medical care, where they could help millions of people with paralysis and other neurological conditions. Some companies even hope that BCIs will eventually become a consumer technology.

None of that will be possible without people like Imbrie. He’s a member of the BCI Pioneers Coalition, an advocacy group founded in 2018 by Ian Burkhart, the first quadriplegic to regain hand movement using a brain implant. (Read More)

(Nature) – The models are designed to predict someone’s risk of diabetes or stroke. A few might already have been used on patients.

Dubious data sets are being used to train artificial-intelligence models that are designed to predict people’s risk of stroke and diabetes, researchers report in a preprint on medRxiv. Some of the models seem to have been used in clinical settings although it’s not clear whether this has led to flawed diagnoses. At least two journals are investigating studies that used these data sets. (Read More)

(NYT) – Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky tried to persuade his colleagues in the operating room that the liver he removed from a 70-year-old patient was a spleen, according to Florida’s Health Department.

When an Alabama man visited a hospital near Miami in August 2024, he reported a pain in his left side, near the spleen. Three days later, he died on the operating table, missing a different organ, his liver, on his right side.

A grand jury in Walton County, Fla., on Monday indicted a surgeon, Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky, 44, on a charge of second-degree manslaughter in the death of the patient, William Bryan, the Office of the State Attorney for the First Judicial Circuit said. (Read More)

(Wired) – More than 70 organizations, including the ACLU, EPIC, and Fight for the Future, say the AI smart glasses feature would endanger abuse victims, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.

More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant advocacy organizations are demanding that Meta abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, warning that the feature—reportedly known inside the company as “Name Tag”—would hand stalkers, abusers, and federal agents the ability to silently identify strangers in public. (Read More)

(Wired) – Latifi, an investigative journalist, raises serious ethical questions about parents broadcasting their kids online, particularly when they may be too young to consent to do so. And some of the anecdotes she provides about parents pushing their kids in front of the camera—doing sponcon for a menstrual pad to capitalize on a young girl’s first period, for instance—are objectively horrifying.

“Parents are aware of the risks” of posting their kids on social media, Latifi tells me, citing the example of a mom who noticed her 7-year-old’s posts got the most engagement when she wasn’t fully clothed—but continued posting her child in dance costumes. “But in the end, it doesn’t change their behavior.” (Read More)

(The Hill) – The limited release of Anthropic’s new Mythos model is putting Washington officials on high alert after the AI firm’s warning about the model’s security risks sent shockwaves through and sparked debate in the tech industry. 

Within days of being informed of Anthropic’s new technology, the White House ratcheted up a multipronged response involving Trump administration leaders across agencies to evaluate just how powerful AI is becoming. (Read More)

(Washington Post via MSN) – Older adults — those 60 and older — are the fastest-growing group of cannabis users in the country. According to a 2022 study, adults over 60 who started using did so for medical reasons, including to treat pain and arthritis, sleep disturbances, anxiety and depression.

While more than three-quarters of those people found the cannabis either somewhat or very helpful, the question remains: What are the side effects? You may be particularly curious about brain effects, given concerns about cognitive decline. So what exactly does the research say? (Read More)

(NYT) – Plenty of people hate Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligent, supercharged spectacles. I was ready to hate them, too.

Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them.

Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy. (Read More)

(WDKY Lexington via Yahoo!) – It’s now Kentucky law that if any medical provider observes any indication of life from the donor during organ harvesting, the procedure must stop.

House Bill 510 was signed into law on April 7, standardizing “pause in procedure” in the organ procurement process. The law was proposed after a Kentucky man’s organs were nearly harvested in 2021, while he was still alive. (Read More)

(WaPo) – The artificial intelligence company asked religious leaders for guidance on building a moral chatbot.

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company valued at $380 billion, can take its pick of Silicon Valley talent thanks to the success of its chatbot, Claude. But last month, the start-up sought help from a group rarely consulted in tech circles: Christian religious leaders.

The company hosted about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and the business world at its headquarters in late March for a two-day summit that included discussion sessions and a private dinner with senior Anthropic researchers, according to four participants who spoke with The Washington Post. (Read More)

(WSJ) – We all took an oath to do no harm. That includes killing our patients.

Throughout medical school and residency, I always believed that people mattered. But it wasn’t until my conversion to Christianity that I understood why. Scripture teaches that people are made in God’s divine image. Medical schools don’t teach this moral reality, and therefore most medical schools no longer pledge to do no harm.

Instead, medical schools meticulously train physicians to look at patients only scientifically: knowledge through biochemistry, physics, anatomy, charts, machines, diagrams, lenses, statistical models, photographs, medical journals and pharmacology. In doing so, most doctors never learn to see the divine dignity of patients. (Read More)

(BBC) – A ballerina with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) says she was able to dance again after her brainwaves were used to power an avatar live on-stage in Amsterdam.

Breanna Olson, a mother of three, found out two and a half years ago she had ALS, the most common form of motor neurone disease (MND) and which, with no known cure, weakens muscles and over time affects speech, swallowing and breathing.

However, using sensors to measure the electrical activity transmitted from her brain, her motor signals could be converted into an digital avatar. (Read More)

(NYT) – China, the U.S., Russia and others have ramped up their contest over artificial-intelligence-backed weapons and military systems. The buildup has been compared to the dawn of the nuclear weapons age.

China’s military display and the U.S. countermove were part of an escalating global arms race over A.I.-backed autonomous weapons and defense systems. Designed to operate by themselves using A.I., the technology reduces the need for human intervention in decisions like when to hit a moving target or defend against an attack. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – Companies are playing word games with promising cancer treatments.

In its formal communications, like regulatory filings, Moderna hasn’t called the shot a cancer vaccine since 2023. That’s when it partnered up with Merck and rebranded the tech as individualized neoantigen therapy, or INT. Moderna’s CEO said at the time that the renaming was to “better describe the goal of the program.” (BioNTech, the European vaccine maker that’s also working in cancer, has shifted its language too, moving from “neoantigen vaccine” in 2021 to “mRNA cancer immunotherapies” in its latest report.)

The logic of casting it as a therapy is that patients already have cancer—so it’s a treatment as opposed to a preventive measure. But it’s no secret what the other goal is: to distance important innovation from vaccine fearmongering, which has been inflamed by high-ranking US officials. (Read More)