Neural Lace  

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has a firm goal to implant tiny electrodes in human brains, and now has launched a start-up to tackle the problem. Neuralink, it will work on what Musk calls the 'neural lace' technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Tesla, OpenAI and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is behind a new startup called Neuralink. While the details so far are scarce, the Internet is abuzz with excitement over Musk's latest venture into Singularity technology.

It has been reported that Neuralink is a biotech company registered in California, and it’s working to develop neural lace technology into something that could actually hit the market for consumers. The reports are that the technology has already been tested in mice.

Neuralink has already hired a number of top experts in the fields of flexible electrodes and brain physiology, though at this early stage the company is still taking its funding entirely from Musk himself.

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Neural lace is a concept first coined in Iain M. Banks Culture Series, where humans living on another planet install genetically engineered glands in their brains that can secrete stimulants, psychedelics and sedatives any time they like.

An approach to a neural lace system was published two years ago. The “syringe-injectable electronics” concept was invented by researchers in Charles Lieber’s lab at Harvard University and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing. It would involve injecting a biocompatible polymer scaffold mesh with attached microelectronic devices into the brain via syringe.

Lieber’s team of researchers has shown this in live mice and verified continuous monitoring and recordings of brain signals. “We have shown that mesh electronics with widths more than 30 times the needle ID can be injected and maintain a high yield of active electronic devices … little chronic immunoreactivity,” the researchers reported in their paper in Nature Nanotechnology. 

“In the future, our new approach and results could be extended in several directions, including the incorporation of multifunctional electronic devices and/or wireless interfaces to further increase the complexity of the injected electronics,” they wrote.

"We're trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits."

According to Lieber, "We're trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits."

Musk’s eventual aims for this technology are clear: The control of AI and robots with mental commands, for increases in both the speed and usefulness of interactions with artificial intelligence.

Musk first described neural lace as a brain-computer system that would link human brains with a computer interface. It would allow humans to achieve "symbiosis with machines" so they could communicate directly with computers without going through a physical interface.

Musk has said a neural lace will help prevent people from becoming "house cats" to artificial intelligence. If successful, neural lace may not only help cast the technology in a positive light, but present ethics boards with a real early reason to push past the risks of initial human testing. 

Once we’ve had human beings walking around for years with neural lace implants, regardless of why they got those implants in the first place, it will be much easier to pitch expansion of the procedure for other purposes.  This could be the beginning of the first true human internet, or Global Brain, where brain-to-brain interfaces are possible via injectable electronics that pass your mental traffic through the cloud.

Musk has promised more details soon through the site Wait But Why on Twitter:

Long Neuralink piece coming out on @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2017

SOURCE  Wall Street Journal (paywall), Top Image Lieber Research Group, Harvard University

By  33rd Square	Embed

 Cyborg Tissue Engineering  

Researchers at Harvard University have created the first examples of cyborg tissue: Neurons, heart cells, muscle, and blood vessels that are interwoven by nanowires and transistors.

Bioengineers at Harvard University have created the first examples of cyborg tissue: neurons, heart cells, muscle, and blood vessels that are interwoven by nanowires and transistors.

As described in a paper published in Nature Materials, a multi-institutional research team led by Charles M. Lieber, the Mark Hyman, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at Harvard and Daniel Kohane, a Harvard Medical School professor in the Department of Anesthesia at Children's Hospital Boston developed a system for creating nanoscale "scaffolds" which could be seeded with cells which later grew into tissue.

"The current methods we have for monitoring or interacting with living systems are limited," said Lieber. "We can use electrodes to measure activity in cells or tissue, but that damages them. With this technology, for the first time, we can work at the same scale as the unit of biological system without interrupting it. Ultimately, this is about merging tissue with electronics in a way that it becomes difficult to determine where the tissue ends and the electronics begin."

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The research addresses a concern that has long been associated with work on bio-engineered tissue -- how to create systems capable of sensing chemical or electrical changes in the tissue after it has been grown and implanted. The system might also represent a solution to researchers' struggles in developing methods to directly stimulate engineered tissues and measure cellular reactions.

"In the body, the autonomic nervous system keeps track of pH, chemistry, oxygen and other factors, and triggers responses as needed," Kohane explained. "We need to be able to mimic the kind of intrinsic feedback loops the body has evolved in order to maintain fine control at the cellular and tissue level."

Using the autonomic nervous system as inspiration, the researchers built mesh-like networks of nanoscale silicon wires -- about 30 -- 80 nm in diameter -- shaped like flat planes or in a reticular conformation.

The process of building the networks, Lieber said, is similar to that used to etch microchips.

Beginning with a two-dimensional substrate, researchers laid out a mesh of organic polymer around nanoscale wires, which serve as the critical nanoscale sensing elements. Nanoscale electrodes, which connect the nanowire elements, were then built within the mesh to enable nanowire transistors to measure the activity in cells without damaging them. Once complete, the substrate was dissolved, leaving researchers with a net-like sponge or a mesh that can be folded or rolled into a host of three dimensional shapes.

Once complete, the networks were porous enough to allow the team to seed them with cells and encourage those cells to grow in 3D cultures.

"Previous efforts to create bioengineered sensing networks have focused on two-dimensional layouts, where culture cells grow on top of electronic components, or on conformal layouts where probes are placed on tissue surfaces," said Tian. "It is desirable to have an accurate picture of cellular behavior within the 3D structure of a tissue, and it is also important to have nanoscale probes to avoid disruption of either cellular or tissue architecture."

Using heart and nerve cells, the team successfully engineered tissues containing embedded nanoscale networks without affecting the cells' viability or activity. Using the embedded devices, they were able to detect electrical signals generated by cells deep within the tissue, and to measure changes in those signals in response to cardio- or neuro-stimulating drugs.

Researchers were also able to construct bioengineered blood vessels, and used the embedded technology to measure pH changes -- as would be seen in response to inflammation, ischemia and other biochemical or cellular environments -- both inside and outside the vessels.

Though a number of potential applications exist for the technology, the most near-term use, Lieber said, may come from the pharmaceutical industry, where researchers could use the technology to more precisely study how newly-developed drugs act in three dimensional tissues, rather than thin layers of cultured cells. The system might also one day be used to monitor changes inside the body and react accordingly, whether through electrical stimulation or the release of a drug.


SOURCE  Harvard Gazette

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