1. One Thing that Helps
A breakthrough brain implant is turning silent inner voices into spoken words.
Current tech gives people who can’t speak a voice by decoding brain signals as they try to talk. But what about people who can’t even attempt speech?
A team led by Stanford University researchers is tackling that challenge by decoding inner monologue. To pull this off, they first had to separate the neural activity for physical speech from the activity linked only to inner thoughts. By training AI models on this data, they were able to pinpoint the difference between attempted speech (where participants tried to make a sound) and inner speech (silent thought).
The system successfully decoded inner speech for participants who, for various reasons, cannot attempt speech at all. Accuracy is still low, but it’s a huge leap forward. The team even included a clever safeguard: a “mental password.” Participants had to think of a chosen word, like chittychittybangbang (yes, really!), before the device would broadcast their inner speech. Sounds like a good addition to me!
For people living with paralysis, this work represents more than just a technical milestone, it’s the possibility of regaining a voice.
2. One to be Wary of
Societal norms differ significantly between cultures and communities. We handshake while others bow, we Aussies say "How's it goin'?", when we really just mean "Hello". Different players coming in to a community can alter conventions and introduce new ones, and it seems the same happens in the AI world.
A team of researchers paired AI agents and had them play the “name game”. The agents pick a word or letter and guess the other agent’s choice. Guess it right, they get a point. Guess it wrong, no point at all. Each agent can remember the results of previous rounds. The results showed that over time the agents came up with the same preference, both in their pair, and across the pairs. They developed conventions.
The researchers then introduced agents designed specifically to sway the established conventions. It took just two percent of the "community" to change the conventions to match the infiltrators. This is concerning, as it means interacting AI agents are vulnerable to malicious attacks. It wouldn't take much for someone to introduce agents to propagate harmful opinions and divisive behaviour.
Studies like these are necessary so we understand how these new systems work and how we can best mitigate risk.
3. One to Amaze
You’ve heard the saying “you are what you eat” but what about giant stars? How do they get so big in the first place?
For a long time, scientists scratched their heads wondering how these cosmic heavyweight stars could even exist. Their own intense radiation and stellar winds should blow away most of the material trying to feed them. So how do they bulk up?
Enter ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) and a new discovery: streamers. No, not the Twitch kind, these are cosmic gas highways made of cold molecular gas and dust. Think of them like interstellar food delivery services, zipping material across vast distances straight to the star’s doorstep.
These streamers feed the stars faster than their winds can blow material away, letting them keep packing on mass. It’s a galaxy-sized breakthrough that could change how we understand star growth.