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Melanie Reid was 52 years old when she hopped onto her horse, fell, and broke her neck. The resulting injury paralyzed her body below the chest area. Fourteen years later and after extensive physical therapy, she has gradually regained some function in her right handa lifeline, she said in a press conference. But her left hand remained useless.

As a journalist, the injury was devasting as she couldnt type. Even seemingly simple everyday routinestying her hair up into a ponytail, using an ATM card, or even unwrapping candywere a struggle.

With the help of a new device, shes able to do all that after just two months of use. Called ARC-EX therapy, the device zaps residual neural connections around the site of spinal cord injuries. Combined with physical rehabilitation, the treatment restored some functionality in her left handeven when the stimulation was turned off.

Reid was part of a 60-participant clinical trial that looked to use spinal cord stimulation to regain control of both hands. Similar treatments have shown promise in paraplegic patients, restoring the ability to walk in just a day. But those required surgery to place electrodes on the spinal cord.

ARC-EX therapy, by contrast, delivers two different types of electrical pulses through the skinno surgery required. Developed by Grgoire Courtine and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the device improved hand strength, pinch, and other movements in 72 percent of participants.

Because the device is non-invasive, its a simple addition to physical rehabilitation programsa sort of pilates for the fingers, explained the team. The trial only included two months of stimulation, and extending the timeline could potentially further improve results.

The stimulation only helps with finger and hand dexterity, not walking. But to Reid, thats what matters. Everyone thinks that [with] spinal injury all you want to do is to be able to walk again, she said. But what matters most is working hands[and] the gains can be life-changing.

All participants in the trial had a fracture in their spinal cord, roughly at the level of the neck.

With torn nerves, the brain can no longer command the body. Like a broken phone line, when you think move your hand, the signal gets lost at the break. Scientists have long tried to bridge this communication gap with electrodes to control muscle movement, essentially replacing broken biological wires with artificial ones.

Spinal cord stimulation is one solution. In 2018, a man walked across an entire football field years after he was paralyzed thanks to zaps to his spinal cord. With just a days stimulation, people with complete paralysis have been able to stroll around a busy downtown and go kayaking.

The key to recovery, explained the team, is to target living nerves. In a majority of cases, even patients deemed to have a complete spinal cord injury still have nerves left, and stimulating them can trigger regrowth and connections.

Picture the spinal cord as a tree, with branches reaching towards the skin. Now, imagine if the trunk was partially severed. By zapping the skin around the injury site, its possible to transmit electrical signals to the injured spinal cord trunk and allow living neurons near the injury site to rebuild neural connections.

In preclinical models, when applying stimulation, we immediately facilitated movement, said Courtine. But even more importantly, we saw new neuron growth, as if the body was repairing the broken neural system, he added. With sufficient healing, patients could potentially be able to use their hands even without stimulation.

Based on these ideas, the team built the ARC-EX device.

The clinical trial included 60 people with neck-level spinal cord injury. All participants underwent two months of physical therapy, followed by another two months of physical therapy combined with ARC-EX stimulation. The group was roughly 46 years old on average.

For physical rehab, each person practiced movements such as pinching, grasping, or moving the whole arm for an hour each day, up to five times a week. Although the therapy improved arm and hand function, progress plateaued for most patients.

The team then added ARC-EX stimulation, with the electrodes placed above and below the site of injury. During therapy, the team controlled the frequency and strength of the zaps, so it facilitated arm and hand movements without causing any unwanted muscle jerking.

The trial was open label, meaning both participants and researchers know theyre receiving stimulation. This can be risky business because of the placebo effectwhen participants recover because they think theyre getting the actual treatment, rather than, say, sham stimulation. However, with ARC-EX its impossible to blind the stimulation. Turning the device on immediately causes strange sensations in the participants, with the electrical pulses feeling like a sort of a buzz, said Reid. Turning the device off also immediately alerted participants. In one example, Reid said she was holding a jar with weights with the stimulation on, but with the stimulation offunbeknownst to hershe immediately dropped the jar.

In just eight weeks, 72 percent of participants met or exceeded goals for hand strength and dexteritythe ability to grab a mug or pinch a tweezeras assessed with a battery of tests. Only one person experienced unintended effectsuncontrollable muscle spasms. However, because stimulation was off when they occurred, the team says its likely not related to ARC-EX.

The therapy didnt just improve hand function. The paralyzed participants also felt less pain, had fewer struggles with breathing, and slept better.

The stimulation wont work for the roughly 10 percent of people with spinal cord injuries that completely severed all neural connections. But for those who still have residual nerve endings, it makes restoring finger movements easier.

Sherown Campbell, another participant in the trial, said ARC-EX is a life-changer. A self-proclaimed tech geek, he constantly works on his computer. Focusing on hand function was the biggest thing I was hoping to improve, he said.

With ARC-EX therapy, his typing speed increased from 25 words per minute to 33 words per minute, about a 30 percent increase, which is really significant for me, he said. But more importantly, his quality of life improved. He can cook and write againtwo seemingly simple everyday activities that give him joy but were robbed by his accident.

With the success of this trial, the device may hit the market soon. Because its non-invasive, it can easily be integrated into existing physical therapy sessions. The team is already looking for approval in the United States, with discussions with the European Union soon to follow. For now, the price is unknown, although Courtine said the aim is to make it widely accessible.

To Reid, being able to use her left hand is an enormous change to her life. Its extraordinary, she said. It makes you hold your head up and look at the world differently.

Image Credit: ONWARD Medical N.V.

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This Device Zaps the Spinal Cord to Give Paralyzed People Use of Their Hands Again - Singularity Hub

This column was originally going to be a recap of some of the technology I saw on display at NAB Show 2024 earlier this month. But as Ive been spending much of my free time since returning helping to care for my mother as she recovers from surgery, Ive also been thinking a bit more about the over-arching concept driving much of the technological innovation in the radio space right now.

For those that have never been to NAB, it is multiple events in one. There is the show floor, theres the engineering conferences, the sales conferences, the executive meetings, plus other events piggybacking on it such as Broadcast Education Association. Really it has something for every facet of the broadcast community, except for audio content creators, but even there was an attempt at improving those events this year.

What did generate much of my attention was a number of new or recently emerging players into the radio broadcast tech sphere especially on the end-user side. New cloud based playout systems, embedding of AI tech, and the moving of the playout tech from the studio to the transmitter site were seen across the floor of the show.

We are headed towards one do-all application/appliance for broadcasting. Super Hi-Fis partnership with Orban to place programming, processing, PPM encoding, stream encoding, and metadata in one box is just the start. Soon all of those features could be included in a transmitter along with access to cloud based music scheduling and voicetracking allowing one device to power nearly all of a radio stations necessary functions.

Other companies are doing the same. From Radio.cloud to internal systems like iHeartMedias Sound+, the shift to an all-in one combination of application and appliance is only going to continue. It will lead to an improved product as workflows are simplified to allow access to all relevant content in one place. AI generated auto-segueing of songs is already happening. Over time these platforms and others will include your board/faders, allow for any audio clip or song needed to be dropped in on the fly, auto-produce podcasts and on-demand audio clips and publish them to the station website, and allow for customization on the fly in ways that would still take hours of production time today.

These are the AI capabilities that radio can and should get behind as it will enable talent to better utilize their time and resources. While still being used as a novelty more than anything at this point, it is the continued growth of AI voices in on-air shifts that still is worrisome, but the fact it has not caught on in a major use is still a good sign for human voices.

But it will also enable simplicity.

One of the other major topics of discussion at and around NAB was in regards to how stations are going to solve the looming engineering crisis. Many operators, including those in larger markets such as Las Vegas, are down to relying on over-worked contract engineers at or nearing retirement age. A CEO asked us point-blank, What do I have to do to train and retain a single engineer? Having less technology to have to maintain will be a great start, especially since training will become easier. There will always be a demand for RF engineers, but radio needs to find IT capable people for studios and a combined infrastructure will make that much easier in helping to teach and learn broadcast IT.

The ability for future innovation built around a broadcast architecture that encompasses everything will only accelerate. Were already at the point where talent can broadcast from anywhere in the world just by clicking an icon in an app. Soon it may also provide web and social media content on the fly, podcasts published within seconds of content airing live, and dynamic customized broadcasts specifically for each listener truly making radio a one to one service in addition to the one to many offering it has always provided. A singular hardware/software solution creating a truly singular proposition.

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Converging Towards The Radio Singularity - RadioInsight - RadioInsight

Emmy-winning composer and musician Bear McCreary has recruited Slash and Joe Satriani for his new single Escape from the Machines, which premiered today exclusively on Guitar World.

The two electric guitar heavyweights have joined McCreary for the latest preview of his epic, mysterious, and furious conceptual rock album, The Singularity, which arrives digitally on May 3.

McCreary describes The Singularity as an expression of my complete creative self, and calls it the result of three decades of exploring narrative, symphonic cinematic scoring, and hard rock that melds everything I love about music, storytelling and art.

Escape from the Machines is a song he first wrote when he was teenager. Now, its finally been released with the help of two of McCrearys biggest heroes.

"I wrote this song when I was 15, McCreary tells Guitar World, and never would have dared dream that one day I would hear it performed by two of the guitar gods who inspired it."

The single is as epic and operatic as youd expect from a rock concept record featuring Slash and Satriani, largely in part thanks to Satchs spectrum-sweeping solo that his fellow guest guitarist describes as super-intense.

Even that is something of an understatement: that mind-melting lead line at 1:40 performed while Slash holds down the riff is absolutely wild. The final 30 seconds is equally awe-inspiring, loaded with wild bombastic bends that wouldnt sound out of place in the climax of a Christopher Nolan epic.

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Of his own contributions, Satriani tells Guitar World, I loved playing on this killer track! It inspired me to be hyper-dramatic to match the power and intensity of the song.

This is my fourth appearance alongside the always-iconic Slash, he goes on. Oddly enough, we never get to hear each others contributions until the tracks are released!

Interestingly, McCreary revealed the original 30-year-old cassette demo makes a cameo on the record, before Slash reinvigorates it with a new interpretation.

"This is another great composition from a record loaded with great compositions from Bear, Slash notes. This riff was right up my alley. But some of the syncopated melodies I got to play throughout the track are pure genius McCreary.

As well as Slash and Satch, The Singularity features a huge range of additional guest stars, including Serj Tankian, Corey Taylor, Jens Kidman, Buck Dharma, Kim Thayil, Scott Ian and more.

It will be the latest release from McCreary, whose resume includes scoring work on Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

McCreary will share the stage with Slash and Buck Dharma and a handful of other guest musicians on May 12 at The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles for a live performance of The Singularity Live. Tickets for the show are available now.

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I never would have dreamed that I would hear this song performed by two of the guitar gods who inspired it: Joe ... - Guitar World

Metas Open Source Llama 3 Is Already Nipping at OpenAIs Heels Will Knight | Wired OpenAI changed the world with ChatGPT, setting off a wave of AI investment and drawing more than 2 million developers to its cloud APIs. But if open source models prove competitive, developers and entrepreneurs may decide to stop paying to access the latest model from OpenAI or Google and use Llama 3 or one of the other increasingly powerful open source models that are popping up.

Real Hope for Cancer Cure as Personal mRNA Vaccine for Melanoma Trialed Andrew Gregory | The Guardian Experts are testing new jabs that are custom-built for each patient and tell their body to hunt down cancer cells to prevent the disease ever coming back. A phase 2 trial found the vaccines dramatically reduced the risk of the cancer returning in melanoma patients. Now a final, phase 3, trial has been launched and is being led by University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH). Dr Heather Shaw, the national coordinating investigator for the trial, said the jabs had the potential to cure people with melanoma and are being tested in other cancers, including lung, bladder and kidney.

An AI Startup Made a Hyperrealistic Deepfake of Me Thats So Good Its Scary Melissa Heikkil | MIT Technology Review Until now, all AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality. Because theyre so close to the real thing butnot quiteit, these videos can make people feel annoyed or uneasy or ickya phenomenon commonly known as the uncanny valley. Synthesia claims its new technology will finally lead us out of the valley.

Nuclear Fusion Experiment Overcomes Two Key Operating Hurdles Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist A nuclear fusion reaction has overcome two key barriers to operating in a sweet spot needed for optimal power production: boosting the plasma density and keeping that denser plasma contained. The milestone is yet another stepping stone towards fusion power, although a commercial reactor is still probably years away.

Daniel Dennett: Why Civilization Is More Fragile Than We Realized Tom Chatfield | BBC [Dennetts]warning was not of a takeover by some superintelligence, but of a threat he believed that nonetheless could be existential for civilization, rooted in the vulnerabilities of human nature. If we turn this wonderful technology we have for knowledge into a weapon for disinformation, he told me, we are in deep trouble. Why? Because we wont know what we know, and we wont know who to trust, and we wont know whether were informed or misinformed. We may become either paranoid and hyper-skeptical, or just apathetic and unmoved. Both of those are very dangerous avenues. And theyre upon us.'

California Just Went 9.25 Hours Using Only Renewable Energy Adele Peters | Fast Company Last Saturday, as 39 million Californians went about their daily livestaking showers, doing laundry, or charging their electric carsthe whole state ran on 100% clean electricity for more than nine hours. The same thing happened on Sunday, as the state was powered without fossil fuels for more than eight hours. It was the ninth straight day that solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and battery storage fully powered the electric grid for at least some portion of the time. Over the last six and a half weeks, thats happened nearly every day. In some cases, its just for 15 minutes. But often its for hours at a time.

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AI Hype Is Deflating. Can AI Companies Find a Way to Turn a Profit? Gerrit De Vynck | The Washington Post Some once-promising start-ups have cratered, and the suite of flashy products launched by the biggest players in the AI raceOpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Metahave yet to upend the way people work and communicate with one another. While money keeps pouring into AI, very few companies are turning a profit on the tech, which remains hugely expensive to build and run. The road to widespread adoption and business success is still looking long, twisty and full of roadblocks, say tech executives, technologists and financial analysts.

Apple Releases Eight Small AI Language Models Aimed at On-Device Use Benj Edwards | Ars Technica In the world of AI, what might be called small language models have been growing in popularity recently because they can be run on a local device instead of requiring data center-grade computers in the cloud. On Wednesday, Appleintroduced a set of tiny source-available AI language models called OpenELM that are small enough to run directly on a smartphone. Theyre mostly proof-of-concept research models for now, but they could form the basis of future on-device AI offerings from Apple.

If Starship Is Real, Were Going to Need Big Cargo Movers on the Moon and Mars Eric Berger | Ars Technica Unloading tons of cargo on the Moon may seem like a preposterous notion. During Apollo, mass restrictions were so draconian that the Lunar Module could carry two astronauts, their spacesuits, some food, and just 300 pounds (136 kg) of scientific payload down to the lunar surface. By contrast, Starship is designed to carry 100 tons, or more, to the lunar surface in a single mission. This is an insane amount of cargo relative to anything in spaceflight history, but thats the future that [Jaret] Matthews is aiming toward.

Image Credit:CARTIST / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 27) - Singularity Hub

Blood transfusions save lives. In the US alone, people receive around 10 million units each year. But blood banks are always short in supplyespecially when it comes to the universal donor type O.

Surprisingly, the gut microbiome may hold a solution for boosting universal blood supplies by chemically converting other blood types into the universal O.

Infusing the wrong blood typesay, type A to type Btriggers deadly immune reactions. Type O blood, however, is compatible with nearly everyone. Its in especially high demand following hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other crises because doctors have to rapidly treat as many people as possible.

Sometimes, blood banks have an imbalance of different blood typesfor example, too much type A, not enough universal O. This week, a team from Denmark and Sweden discovered a cocktail of enzymes that readily converts type A and type B blood into the universal donor. Found in gut bacteria, the enzymes chew up an immune-stimulating sugar molecule dotted on the surfaces of type A and B blood cells, removing their tendency to spark an immune response.

Compared to previous attempts, the blend of enzymes converted A and B blood types to type O blood with remarkably high efficiencies, the authors wrote.

Blood types can be characterized in multiple ways, but roughly speaking, the types come in four main forms: A, B, AB, and O.

These types are distinguished by what kinds of sugar moleculescalled antigenscover the surfaces of red blood cells. Antigens can trigger immune rejection if mismatched. Type A blood has A antigens; type B has B antigens; type AB has both. Type O has neither.

This is why type O blood can be used for most people. It doesnt normally trigger an immune response and is highly coveted during emergencies when its difficult to determine a persons blood type. One obvious way to boost type O stock is to recruit more donors, but thats not always possible. As a workaround, scientists have tried to artificially produce type O blood using stem cell technology. While successful in the lab, its expensive and hard to scale up for real-world demands.

An alternative is removing the A and B antigens from donated blood. First proposed in the 1980s, this approach uses enzymes to break down the immune-stimulating sugar molecules. Like licking an ice cream cone, as the antigens gradually melt away, the blood cells are stripped of their A or B identity, eventually transforming into the universal O blood type.

The technology sounds high-tech, but breaking down sugars is something our bodies naturally do every day, thanks to microbes in the gut that happily digest our food. This got scientists wondering: Can we hunt down enzymes in the digestive track to convert blood types?

Over a half decade ago, a team from the University of British Columbia made headlines by using bacterial enzymes found in the gut microbiome to transform type A blood to type O. Some gut bugs eat away at mucusa slimy substance made of sugary molecules covering the gut. These mucus linings are molecularly similar to the antigens on red blood cells.

So, digestive enzymes from gut microbes could potentially chomp away A and B antigens.

In one test, the team took samples of human poop (yup), which carry enzymes from the gut microbiome and looked for DNA that could break down red blood cell sugar chains.

They eventually discovered two enzymes from a single bacterial strain. Tested in human blood, the duo readily stripped away type A antigens, converting it into universal type O.

The study was a proof of concept for transforming one blood type into another, with potentially real-world implications. Type A bloodcommon in Europe and the USmakes up roughly one-third of the supply of donations. A technology that converts it to universal O could boost blood transplant resources in this part of the world.

This is a first, and if these data can be replicated, it is certainly a major advance, Dr. Harvey Klein at the National Institutes of Healths Clinical Center, who was not involved in the work, told Science at the time.

Theres one problem though. Converted blood doesnt always work.

When tested in clinical trials, converted blood has raised safety concerns. Even when removing A or B antigens completely from donated blood, small hints from earlier studies found an immune mismatch between the transformed donor blood and the recipient. In other words, the engineered O blood sometimes still triggered an immune response.

Why?

Theres more to blood types than classic ABO. Type A is composed of two different subtypesone with higher A antigen levels than the other. Type B, common in people of Asian and African descent, also comes in extended forms. These recently discovered sugar chains are longer and harder to break down than in the classic versions. Called extended antigens, they could be why some converted blood still stimulates the immune system after transfusion.

The new study tackled these extended forms by again peeking into gut bacteria DNA. One bacterial strain, A. muciniphila, stood out. These bugs contain enzymes that work like a previously discovered version that chops up type A and B antigens, but surprisingly, they also strip away extended versions of both antigens.

These enzymes werent previously known to science, with just 30 percent similarity when compared to a previous benchmark enzyme that cuts up B and extended B antigens.

Using cells from different donors, the scientists engineered an enzyme soup that rapidly wiped out blood antigens. The strategy is unprecedented, wrote the team.

Although the screen found multiple enzymes capable of blood type conversion, each individually had limited effects. But when mixed and matched, the recipe transformed donated B type cells into type O, with limited immune responses when mixed with other blood types.

A similar strategy yielded three different enzymes to cut out the problematic A antigen and, in turn, transform the blood to type O. Some people secrete the antigen into other bodily fluidsfor example, saliva, sweat, or tears. Others, dubbed non-secreters, have less of these antigens floating around their bodies. Using blood donated from both secreters and non-secreters, the team treated red blood cells to remove the A antigen and its extended versions.

When mixed with other blood types, the enzyme cocktail lowered their immune response, although with lower efficacy than cells transformed from type B to O.

By mapping the structures of these enzymes, the team found some parts increased their ability to chop up sugar chains. Focusing on these hot-spot structures, scientists are set to hunt down other naturally-derived enzymesor use AI to engineer ones with better efficacy and precision.

The system still needs to be tested in humans. And the team didnt address other blood antigens, such as the Rh system, which is what makes blood types positive or negative. Still, bacterial enzymes appear to be an unexpected but promising way to engineer universal blood.

Image Credit: Zeiss Microscopy / Flickr

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Scientists Find a Surprising Way to Transform A and B Blood Types Into Universal Blood - Singularity Hub