Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink has opened the application process for people who want to be implanted with its brain-computer interface device, despite criticism over its safety
Musk has previously claimed that his BCI ‘will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind’ (Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink has revealed it is looking for people to trial its brain-computer chip, despite fierce criticism of its ‘deadly’ animal tests.
The company got the green light from an independent review board to start their brain-computer interface testing on people suffering from paralysis from from cervical spinal cord injuries or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Musk has previously claimed that his BCI “will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs.”
He and his company will now initiate recruitment for the first human trial of its brain implant, but neither stated the number of participants to be enrolled in the trial, which is expected to span approximately six years. During the study, a robot will implant the chip in a brain region responsible for the intention to move. Musk’s aim is for the person’s thoughts to control a computer cursor or keyboard.
Kylie Jenner made headlines for wearing a very realistic lion’s head dress at the Schiaparelli Haute Couture Spring Summer 2023 presentation in Paris. Getty Images
It’s a fashion face-off between the most famous sisters in the world.
Kylie Jenner will go up against Kim and Khloé Kardashian and launch a new fashion range, sources confirm to Page Six.
The 26-year-old billionaire has signed on with Jens and Emma Grede, the husband-and-wife fashion team behind Kim’s hugely successful Skims and Khloé’s Good American denim range.
“All the girls each have their own vision,” one source told us. “They inspire and whip each other up. They’re all so different and independent, but they give each other a ton of advice.”
At the end of 2019, Jenner sold 51% of her cosmetics and skin care brand, Kylie Cosmetics, to Coty for $600 million, a price tag that valued the company at $1.2 billion.
Meanwhile, Kim’s Skims, the shapewear and lingerie brand, was valued at a staggering $4 billion last month — and she’s also in talks with Coty to buy back the minority stake she sold in her beauty firm, SKKN.
Kim Kardashian and her youngest sister Kylie Jenner wowed at the Vanity Fair Oscars party in February 2020. ZUMAPRESS.com
Jenner was barely in her teens when she and her older sister, model Kendall Jenner, released their own line, Kendall + Kylie back in 2012, in collaboration with the retailer PacSun.
We’re told that the license deal ended earlier this year.
“Kylie has always been in fashion, and she’s stepping up her game,” said a fashion insider: “She’s always had a very clear vision.”
Paris Hilton (from left), Kris Jenner, Emma Grede, stylist Rachel Zoe, and Jen Atkin at Zoe’s Fall 2018 fashion presentation in West Hollywood.
Indeed, Jenner — who recently modeled for famed French couturier Jean Paul Gaultier’s summer campaign — is taking on Kim as the style icon in the family.
She is also the new face of Dolce & Gabbana eyewear and handbags, and, Page Six is told, she has another fashion campaign coming this fall.
She stunned at Paris Fashion Week last September, channeling her inner Julia Fox and wearing a pair of white briefs and a tank to the Loewe Show.
Next, she turned up in a super-plunging Schiaparelli gown to the couture house’s presentation.
She then showed off in a sexy sheer lace catsuit at the Business of Fashion gala.
In January, the star — whose fortune has allowed her to splash out on a private jet, lavish homes including a $36million California mansion, Birkin bags, and sports cars — hit the headlines when she donned an eerily lifelike lion headdress at the Schiaparelli show, again in Paris.
Fifty years since the first mobile phone call, the technology we carry around in our pocket is helping to create the world’s biggest earthquake detection system.
On 25 October 2022, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake jolted California’s Bay Area. Fortunately, it was more of a than a violent shake, but reports from residents across the region flooded into the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from those who had felt it. There was no damage reported, but the earthquake was significant in another way – many people in the area received alerts on their phones before the shaking started.
More crucially still, many of these phones helped detect the earthquake in the first place, too.
Google has been working with USGS and academics at a number of universities in California to develop an early warning system that alerts users a few seconds before tremors arrive. It is a brief window of warning, but a few seconds can give enough time to shelter under a table or desk. It can also be enough time to slow trains, stop planes from taking off or landing and keep cars from entering bridges or tunnels. As such, this system is likely to save lives when stronger quakes hit.
It uses data from two sources. Initially, the system relied upon a network of the 700 seismometers – devices that detect earth tremors – installed across the state by seismologists at USGS, the California Institute of Technology and University of California Berkeley and the state government. (Seismometers in two other US states – Oregon and Washington – also feed into the system, known as ShakeAlert.) But Google has also been creating what is the world’s largest earthquake detection network through phones owned by members of the public.
Most smartphones running Google’s Android operating system have on-board accelerometers – the circuitry which detects when a phone is being moved. These are most commonly used to tell the phone to re-orientate its display from portrait to landscape mode when it is tilted, for example, and also helps provide information about step-count for Google’s onboard fitness tracker.
But the sensors are surprisingly sensitive, and can also act like a mini seismometer.
Google has introduced a function that allows users to allow their phone to automatically send data to the Android Earthquake Alerts System, if their device picks up vibrations that are characteristic of the Primary (P) waves of an earthquake. By combining data from thousands or even millions of other phones, the system can work out whether an earthquake is happening and where. It can then send out alerts to phones in the area where the seismic waves are likely to hit, giving an early warning.
And because radio signals travel faster than seismic waves, the alerts can arrive before the shaking starts in areas away from the epicentre.
Marc Stogaitis, a software engineer at Android, put it like this: “We’re essentially racing the speed of light (which is roughly the speed at which signals from a phone travel) against the speed of an earthquake. And lucky for us, the speed of light is much faster!”
As most of the data is crowdsourced, the technology opens up the possibility of monitoring for earthquakes in areas where there aren’t extensive networks of expensive seismometers. It means raises the possibility of providing earthquake alerts in even remote and poorer regions of the world.
In October 2022, engineers at Google saw phones across the San Francisco Bay Area light up with earthquake detection data as the seismic waves travelled outwards from the epicentre.
