If only magic worked, Neuralink might succeed

The Neuralink device has been implanted in one (1) person, Noland Arbaugh, so far. It’s not going well.

An estimated 85-percent of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (BCI) implant threads connected to the first human patient’s motor cortex are now completely detached and his brain has shifted inside his skull up to three times what the company expected, volunteer Noland Arbaugh told The Wall Street Journal on Monday. Arbaugh also stated Neuralink has since remedied the initial performance issues using an over-the-air software update and is performing better than before, but the latest details continue to highlight concerns surrounding the company’s controversial, repeatedly delayed human implant study.

Neuralink’s coin-sized N1 BCI implant’s 64 wires thinner than a human hair are inserted a few millimeters into the motor cortex. Each thread contains 16 electrodes that translate a user’s neural activity into computer commands like typing and cursor movement. Around 870 of the 1024 electrodes in Arbaugh’s implant are no longer functional—an issue that allegedly took Neuralink a “few weeks” to remedy, reports The WSJ. When Arbaugh asked if his implant could be removed, fixed, or even replaced, Neuralink’s medical team relayed they would prefer to avoid another brain surgery and instead gather more information.

That device was inserted in January. In less than 6 months, it has decayed to 15% functionality, and the surgical team is reluctant to repair connectivity. That’s understandable; if the implant has basically torn out of place and built up scar tissue, there’s no point to sticking a second batch of wires into the same damaged spot, and relocating it to a new location is just going to tear up a different patch of Arbaugh’s brain.

The perils of being the first: you get to experience all the unforeseen problems, and also render yourself unsuitable for the Mark II device.

Oh well, too bad. Moving on, Neuralink is asking to stick wires in the brain of a second volunteer/guinea pig/sucker. There is no shortage of quadraplegics lined up for a miracle, and I can’t blame them.

The U.S. health regulator has allowed billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person after it proposed to fix a problem that occurred in its first patient, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Earlier this month, Neuralink said tiny wires implanted in the brain of its first patient had pulled out of position. Reuters reported last week, citing sources, the company knew from animal testing that the wires might retract.
The company intends to fix the problem by embedding some of the device’s wires deeper into the brain, the WSJ report said citing a person familiar with the company and a document it had viewed.

That last line is terrifying. Drill deeper! Get those wires in there, lock ’em in place, so if they do shift, they’ll rip up even more cortex! We better hope the second subject doesn’t know anything about the fate of the first.

This isn’t their only approach, though. They’re also thinking of patching the software. One of their goals is that Neuralink should be a discreet implant — I recall doing chronic implants in cats, where we’d get just one electrode in place, and lock it down with steel screws in the skull and great lumps of pink dental acrylic holding it down — which is obviously unsuitable for a human. So they have to make a small, low-profile device that operates on tiny voltages, and that also transmits and receives data to a larger, more capable computer. That’s a big constraint. Neuralink has put out a call for better algorithms, ones capable of a 200:1 lossless data compression with minimal computing power.

Turning brain signals into computer inputs means transmitting a lot of data very quickly. A problem for Neuralink is that the implant generates about 200 times more brain data per second than it can currently wirelessly transmit. Now, the company is seeking a new algorithm that can transmit this data in a smaller package — a process called compression — through a public challenge.

As a barebones web page announcing the Neuralink Compression Challenge posted on Thursday explains, “[greater than] 200x compression is needed.” The winning solution must also run in real time, and at low power.

Crucially, it specifies that the compression must be “lossless.” A “lossy” compression would be like a low-quality MP3 file, compared to pristine vinyl.

I know smart people are reading this blog. How about it? Get to work and write a revolutionary lossless compression algorithm that is capable of 200:1 reduction. I’m not a computer programmer anymore, so I’ll have to pass on the challenge, but I’m sure someone out there can do it…especially for such a great reward!

The reward for developing this miraculous leap forward in technology? A job interview, according to Neuralink employee Bliss Chapman. There is no mention of monetary compensation on the web page.

Although, to be fair, if you can write an efficient, fast 200:1 lossless compression algorithm, you can probably find better employment prospects than an Elon Musk company.

Also, there might be other reasons that Neuralink has invented what looks to be a hopeless task. They actually want the effort to fail.

Observers on social media immediately branded the task “impossible,” even speculating that Neuralink staff launched the challenge as a way of convincing the infamously incalcitrant Musk that it couldn’t be done.

Red and Blue

My yard is full of these tiny baby orbweavers, and I struggled to get photos of them — here I’m using my Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens with a Raynox DCR-250, and I’m doing this handheld. I should break down and snatch them up into a petri dish and put them on the microscope in my lab, but I’m trying not to disturb them too much.

Four of them have moved into our blue recycling container, one to each corner, and others are building webs in various corners of our orange house, so at least I get different backgrounds.

A Carboniferous arachnid

This week has been a good one for chelicerate evolution. Here’s another fossil, Douglassarachne acanthopoda, which was creeping around in the forests of Illinois in the late Carboniferous.

Douglassarachne acanthopoda n. gen. n. sp., holotype and only known specimen FMNH PE 91366; for interpretative drawings and scale, see Figure 2. (1) Part, detail of distal femur and more-distal podomeres, showing nature of curved macrospines on lateral edge of distal podomeres, bases of macrospines on dorsal surface of femur; (2) counterpart, detail of posterior opisthosoma showing bilobed structure at base of anal tubercle.

What is it? I don’t know. The authors are unsure. It’s an arachnid, but it could be in the spider lineage or the harvestman lineage, or it could be its own weird thing. It’s spiderish, anyway.

Douglassarachne acanthopoda n. gen. n. sp., reconstruction of the possible appearance of the animal in life.

An Ordovician ancestor to spiders

On this Memorial Day, I’m going to have to have a discussion with my spiders about their distinguished, noble ancestry. It was kind of Nature to publish a study of their many-times-great grand uncles, an ancient euchelicerate named Setapedites abundantis, a common fossil found in Moroccan sediments that are about 478 million years old, which puts it right in the middle of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, a key moment in the evolution of modern taxa.

This is not a spider, though. It belongs in the euchelicerata, the large systematic group that includes spiders, scorpions, ticks, horseshoe crabs, sea scorpions, and other extinct groups. As you might guess from the name, a key feature is the presence of chelicerae, anterior appendages that in spiders carry the venomous fangs. It also has a common feature we see in both spiders and horseshoe crabs, the fusion of the anterior segments to form a prosoma, with posterior segments forming the abdomen or opisthosoma.

While it’s a cool looking little dude, it’s marine and pretty remote from modern chelicerates. From the dorsal side, it looks like an undistinguished little crustacean, of a type that was probably swarming in Ordovician seas.

A, B MGL.102899 and interpretative drawing, articulated specimen in dorsal view. C, D MGL.102828 and interpretative drawing, articulated specimen in dorsal view. E, F MGL. 102872 and interpretative drawing, articulated specimen in dorsal view. Abbreviations: btg, bipartite tergites; mr, median ridge; pl, pleura; pr, prosomal rim; saxn, sub-axial node; sr, sunken region; t1–11, tergites 1–11; t, telson; tk, telson keel. Scale bars, (A–F) 1 mm.

Where it gets interesting is when it’s flipped over, and you get a glimpse of the mass of limbs.

A, B YPM IP 517932c and interpretative drawing (counterpart), articulated specimen in ventral view. C, D YPM IP 517932c and interpretative drawing, chelicerae, and labrum anatomy detail. E, F Close-up of the prosoma of MGL.102934 and interpretative drawing, in dorso-lateral view. G, H Close-up of the prosoma of MGL.102634 and interpretative drawing, in ventral view. I, J Close-up of the prosoma of MGL.102800a under alcohol and polarized lighting, and interpretative drawing, in ventral view. Abbreviations: 1–6, podomeres 1–6 of the exopod; ptp, pretelsonic process; bs, basipodite; bst, brush-like setae; che, chelate podomere; db, doublure; lb, labrum; ss, single setae; st, pair of setae. Chelicerae are highlighted in gray, endopods in blue, exopods in green, opisthosomal appendages in red, and the pretelsonic process in purple. Scale bars, (A, B) 1 mm; (C, D) 100 µm; (E–K) 500 µm.

In front of the jaws proper (labrum, lb) it has a pair of small chelicerae (che). These have since evolved into the massive, sharptoothed chompers you can see my tarantula using to turn a mealworm into macerated mush.

Setapedites wasn’t such a fierce predator. Here’s what it looked like.

Illustration by Elissa Sorojsrisom.

Cute, right? I don’t know why it’s drawn as a swimmer, though — with that anatomy, it looks more like a benthic organism.

The final bit of interesting information is that they mapped out the correspondences in the segmentation of this animal with other, similar fossils and the extant Xiphosurians.

Simplified extended majority rule tree of a Bayesian analysis chronogram of euchelicerate relationships, based on a matrix of 39 taxa and 114 discrete characters, showing the position of Setapedites abundantis within Offacolidae. Lineages extending after the Silurian are indicated with arrowheads. Schematic models of the body organization in Habelia, Setapedites abundantis, Dibasterium, Offacolus, and Xiphosurida illustrate the origin and early evolution of euchelicerate uniramous prosomal appendages and tagmosis. Roman numbers designate somites. Prosoma somites are highlighted in blue, pre-abdomen somites in yellow, abdomen somites in brown, and the possible anal pouch or post-ventral structure (pvs) in purple. Black dorsal lines indicate tergites and cephalotorax. Schematic model of Xiphosurida Offacolus, and Dibasterium from 45, Habelia

Also of note: Setapedites had biramous appendages, a feature that is mostly kind of lost in modern arthropods — the outer branch got adapted into gills and lungs and even wings.

I can’t help but notice that domestication and artificial selection turns wolves in little yapping Pomeranians, but natural selection turns shrimp into tarantulas.

WoRk??!?

Mary made me do hard manual labor today. She has some serviceberries she wanted planted in the back yard, so I had to help cut chickenwire and bend it to make a protective circle around them — we have lots of rabbits around here — and then we had to dig holes in the thick, glue-like, clayey soil in our backyard (which, I know, isn’t the best for these bushes). Look what it did to my shoes!

Unfortunately, these are my only shoes. We’re poor, and I was supposed to get a new pair for my birthday a few months ago, and we never had the energy to drive all the way to Cabela’s. I guess I’d better make the trip soon.

Also, I’ve got a blister on my right hand. I am not made for hard manual labor.

We did find something interesting, a Masked Hunter.

Now though, I have to lie down and recuperate.

How can a cartoon be so true?

Does this remind anyone else of a certain University of Chicago professor who was both outraged that anyone would refuse to pay racists and gender criticals to speak on campus, while also freaking out that students had strong opinions he disagreed with? It’s uncanny.

Although…the worst ones tend not to call themselves “conservative.” They’re “liberal” or “centrist” or “open-minded” while magically and unthinkingly aligning themselves with conservatives all the way down the line.

It shouldn’t take so long to recognize a fool

I’ve seen Terrence Howard in Crash and Red Tails and the first Iron Man (he wasn’t in any of the sequels, I wonder why?), and he was fine as an actor. It’s when he goes off script that you discover that he is totally nuts. Professor Dave explores some of his lunacy.

It’s 48 minutes long, but most of it is redundant — at his first attempt to explain that 1 x 1 = 2, or his redrawn periodic table, or his wacky 3-dimensional models of elements, it’s clear that he has lost the plot. And then the video gets into Howard’s 3 hour long interview with Joe Rogan, and it becomes clear that Rogan is just as ignorant and deluded and deranged and useless.

I’ve seen no more than a few minutes of Rogan in short excerpts, and knew from my first exposure that he was a fraud. Nowadays, when I see an account on social media that is trying to sell how smart he is, I insta-block that channel. I’d do the same with any mention of Howard, except that everyone sees how foolish he is, and he isn’t getting paid millions of dollars to babble for hours on Spotify every day.

Spiders blooming everywhere!

Mary spotted all these tiny yellow spiders all around the backyard. Apparently, a sac full of Araneinae hatched out in the last few days.

These are the equivalent of those kids’ show Minions. They’re all over, I can’t tell them apart, and they talk funny.

While I was out roaming in the yard, I spotted a few other familiar faces. This is Salticus scenicus, the zebra jumper. They were all over the walls.

Then there was this guy, Parasteatoda, who had caught a sowbug. It’s like having lobster for lunch.

So that’s what they’re afraid of

People have this absurd fear that fraternizing with different kinds of people will radically transform them in every way.

If you think that, allow me to reassure you: I’ve been friends with and talking to gay and trans people for decades now, and I’m still heterosexual. I’ve just become a liberal, socialist-leaning, humanist-atheist who always votes for the political party with the more tolerant, progressive policies. Nothing to be afraid of there.