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Neuralink chips can measure temperature, pressure and movement, data that could warn you about a heart attack or stroke, Musk said.Computers need power, and Neuralink's in-skull chip gets it by charging wirelessly through the skin, Musk said.The company's early research focused on interfacing with the rodent brain.
The former can insert more than 1,500 electrodes and the latter, 3,000. It is now coin-shaped, and meant to sit flush with the skull, rather than having a small module resting near the ear. The device can pair with a smartphone app over Bluetooth Low Energy, he said.Neuralink didn’t invent brain-machine interfaces — they’ve been around and implanted in people since 2006. Elon Musk brought out three pigs to show off his new Neuralink device. Musk has a knack for picking business problems that are difficult but attainable. Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET "He's aware some people are going to see trouble in Neuralink, too. "I'm confident in the long term it'll be possible to restore somebody's full body motion. But the most important thing the device might be able to do, Musk said, would be to let people achieve what he calls “AI symbiosis,” which allows the human brain to merge with an artificial intelligence. “I think it should be possible to get it similar to Lasik,” he said. Sign up for the
One former employee said Neuralink moved from rodent experiments into primates faster than expected in medical science.Neuralink responded to Stat's assertions in the article, suggesting some of them were "either partially or completely false. The installer is designed to dodge blood vessels to avoid bleeding, Musk said.As with Fitbit, Apple Watch and other wearable technology, Musk sees a health benefit for Neuralink besides direct brain-computer communications. That's a hard sell -- particularly in view of Neuralink competitors who prefer noninvasive headsets. Elon Musk’s new startup, Neuralink, wants to one day implant computer chips inside people's brain. Ultra-thin wires hanging from the device would go directly into the brain.
Pigs have large parts of their brains that are devoted to the snout, a sensitive sensing instrument.The design of the Neuralink device has changed since it was unveiled last year, rendering the device itself hard to see on Gertrude. Long term, Musk said they will be able to restore full motion in people with those types of injuries using a second implant on the spine. It's still far from reality, but Musk said the US Food and Drug Administration in July granted approval for "breakthrough device" testing.Musk also showed a second-generation implant that's more compact and that fits into a small cavity hollowed out of a hole in a skull.
One pig, Gertrude, had a device recording signals from an area of the brain linked to her snout.