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The first was successfully implanted in a human brain in 2006. Over the years, these interfaces have allowed subjects to control robotic arms, among other tasks. Experts say this new system developed by Musk—the threads, and the sheer number of electrodes that they allow for—marks a step forward, though roadblocks remain. “The tech is better than a lot of the stuff we have now, but I see a lot of hurdles to overcome,” says Chengyuan Wu, a neurosurgeon at Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia who works with implanted devices....

The court’s nine justices unanimously ruled on October 9 that farmers cannot save seeds for replanting if the seeds are harvested from Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready soybeans, which are genetically engineered to withstand direct application of the company’s Roundup herbicide. The Brazilian ruling aligns with similar decisions in the US and Canada. Courts in all three countries determined that, as a product of genetic engineering, Roundup Ready soybeans are protected by domestic patent law....

There are many types of emergency preparedness supplies, with solar generators and high-capacity batteries standing out as potentially life-saving when the electricity’s out. If you are looking for a way to prepare for the next blackout, having a solar generator could make a huge difference for your comfort and safety, but they come in all sizes and styles. We’ll take a closer look at a couple of solar-powered models: the Geneverse generator and solar panel bundle and the EcoFlow Delta power station....

Firefighters immediately pointed out errors in Trump’s assertions. The Woolsey Fire started not in a forest but on a hillside near Simi Valley before spreading to suburban communities, while the Camp Fire is burning in an area thinned by fire 10 years ago. Forest management didn’t cause these blazes and California is considered a leader in Forest management on private lands. “His comments are reckless and insulting to the fire fighters and people being affected,” said Harold Schaitberger, General President of the International Association of Fire Fighters, in a statement responding to Trump’s latest tweets....

Augmenting official flu reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with data harvested from the internet is another step in our online evolution. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center study, about 184 million Americans (more than half the nation’s residents) use the Web to find ­health-​­related information. These searches are like tips to a crime hotline, enabling researchers to identify suspected flu cases. In 2006, Gunther ­Eysen­bach, associate professor of public health at the University of Toronto, found that searches for the terms “flu” or “flu symptoms” spiked a week before a jump in doctor visits....

Key Specs: 30MP full frame Dual Pixel CMOS sensor3.69M dot OLED viewfinderFully articulated rear LCDDIGIC 8 processor, which enables shooting up to 8fpsISO range of 100-40,000 (expandable to 102,400)5,655 manually selectable AF pointsUHD 4K 30p video from a 1.83x crop of the sensorSingle UHS-II SD card slotUSB 3.1 in-camera charging New and Notable Features: The biggest change to the EOS R is its redesigned RF lens mount. The new mount features a 12-pin communication system, making the performance between the new RF mount lenses and the camera body faster and more precise than the typical EF lenses it uses on its DSLRs....

The Touch Bar will show different features depending on what it’s being used for. For example, when composing text in something like Word or Google Docs, the Touch Bar can offer word suggestions as you compose. When in Messages, you can use the rectangular panel for browsing emoji. Because the bar supports multi-touch, users will be able to press on one side and slide on the other for easy access to added options....

But lenses are not cheap, so figuring out which one to buy can be a challenge—the amount of choices out there can be overwhelming, and the specs sometimes include concepts that novices don’t fully understand. Still, it doesn’t need to be hard. It’s only a matter of assessing what you need, working out what you can afford, and making sure that the lens you choose actually fits your camera....

But that would be a misleading conclusion, says Janet McCabe, former Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama and a professor at Indiana University. Curbing greenhouse gases is a massive international effort that requires lowering fossil fuel consumption through many avenues, McCabe says. “There’s no one single thing that’s going to be the answer here.” So while cars with better fuel efficiency are hardly a silver bullet, 28 percent of total U....

We live in the age of Big Data, or so the pundits would have you believe. And yet, amazingly, very few projects have tried to apply a big data approach to one of our most fundamental concerns: our health. That is, until now. The Human Diagnosis Project is a global effort to map any health problem to its possible causes. The goal is to get a dataset that will present a patient, a caregiver, or a patient advocate with the smallest possible number of diagnoses to help someone get treatment faster....

“The way that we measure health is very significant, because we can tell which groups in the population are doing well, and which are falling behind,” says Henrie Monteith Treadwell, director of the Morehouse School of Medicine’s Community Voices and Men’s Health Initiative in Atlanta, Georgia. “When we look at the information, it’s clear that the health of Black people in this country is not good. We have much more incidence of disease, and it’s not improving....

In the case of Zika virus, the major route of spread is mosquitoes. The Aedes species carry the virus and then can infect anyone with a simple bite. This means prevention requires control actions beyond the usual methods. Long clothing and insect repellents are good for the individual while fogging is a common practice to protect the population. Yet they may not be sufficient to stop the spread of this virus, which is now considered to be a public health emergency....

Non-genetic changes to gene expression are called epi-marks, for epigenetics, the field of research dealing with the molecular on/off switches. Epi-marks are normally erased between generations, but there’s recent evidence that they’re sometimes passed from parent to child. Researchers at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) looked at how epi-marks that influence testosterone sensitivity in the womb might contribute to homosexuality. Late in pregnancy, natural variations in testosterone levels can alter a fetus’ sexual development....

This post has been updated. The US now has more than 1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by a novel coronavirus first detected in Wuhan, China, in December and now spreading on every continent save for Antarctica. The States became the epicenter of the new pandemic in late March, with the case count surging past China’s and the hardest-hit European nations’ as New York increased its testing capacity....

In early 2018, Bill Crawford learned that Mississippi lawmakers intended to shrink Medicaid reimbursements by 5 percent. Crawford, a longtime community leader from Meridian, worried about the wisdom of cutting funds for medical care in the throes of an influenza epidemic. He sat down and typed out a column for the Mississippi Business Journal, describing a situation across the state that looked grim. “Mothers with sick babies on Medicaid have trouble getting timely access to providers....

Now, a large study out of Argentina is reinforcing the call to ensure children are vaccinated against COVID-19 to prevent death. The study published today in The British Medical Journal (BMJ), finds that the vaccines remain effective in preventing death in adolescents and children, regardless of which variants are predominant (Delta, Omicron, etc.). While vaccine effectiveness for infection can decrease over time, particularly when the Omicron variant emerged one year ago, research from a team representing three institutions in Argentina finds that vaccinations continue to prevent deaths and remain and important public health measure....

Dunning has put his “Mechanical Techno” project to work in live musical performances. See it in action below. Boing Boing

Flying aircraft carriers are more common in fiction than in real life. The most iconic is likely S.H.I.E.L.D’s Helicarrier, a giant airborne base introduced in the mid-1960s and seen on film recently in both The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The craft relies on power sources beyond current human ability to provide thrust roughly equivalent to that of 70 space shuttle booster rockets firing at once. Lifting an aircraft carrier, its human crew, and a squadron of human-piloted fighters takes a lot of energy....

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced it wants to go back to the drawing board for a new Vertical Take-Off and Landing project, called the VTOL X-Plane. The new program is DARPA’s plan to kick-start private industury into creating a completely new type of aircraft. Project head Ashish Bagai says he wants nothing less than to spark a paradigm shift. DARPA, which plans to put $150 million toward development of the X-Plane, is leaving the particulars of the aircraft’s design wide open....

New Scientist notes that there have been rumors that these pandas behaved strangely in the moments leading up to the quake. Reportedly, all 86 adult pandas got up from a mellow, bamboo-munching session and started parading around the facility. There are also unconfirmed reports that wild pandas moved to higher ground in the time leading up to the shaking. This is the same sort of speculation that popped up after the 2004 tsunami – there were reports of elephants and other animals racing to higher elevations....