14 | New Scientist | 12 October 2019
A PIONEERING effort to collect
plastic rubbish from the seas
has caught floating debris for
the first time.
Boyan Slat, founder of The Ocean
Cleanup, said that after a failed
effort last year, his giant V-shaped
boom system has started
removing waste. “We now have a
self-contained system in the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch that is using
the natural forces of the ocean to
passively catch and concentrate
plastics,” he told a press conference.
Slat says the system caught all
sizes of plastic, from microplastics
to ghost nets for fishing, as well
as other rubbish. “Anyone missing
a wheel?” he joked on Twitter.
However, animals have also been
captured, including by-the-wind-
sailors and blue-buttons, relatives
of jellyfish that are eaten by birds,
fish and turtles. The Ocean Cleanup
says it isn’t happy about this but it
expects the impact to be minimal. ❚EnvironmentA MAN who is almost completely
paralysed from the neck down
was able to walk using an
exoskeleton suit he controls with
his mind. It can’t yet let him walk
independently – the suit hangs
from an overhead harness to stop
him falling – but the advance is a
step towards this goal.
Several groups are working on
ways to let people with spinal cord
injuries regain control over their
bodies by reading their thoughts.
So far, the most common method
has been to insert ultra-thin
electrodes into the brain.
But this entails wires entering
the skull, which could let in an
infection. The functioning of
the electrodes also graduallydeteriorates over the following
months as they get covered with
cells that form a kind of scar tissue.
To get round these problems,
Alim Louis Benabid at the
University of Grenoble Alpes in
France and his colleagues replaced
two 5-centimetre discs of skull,
one on either side of his head,
with brain sensors that have
electrodes on their underside.
The researchers started
by asking the man, known as
Thibault, to have several brain
scans so they could map which
areas became active when he
thought about walking or
moving his arms.
After inserting the sensors,
Thibault practised using them,first by trying to move an avatar
shaped like the exoskeleton on a
computer. After this, he was
strapped into the suit and he
learned to make it start walking
forwards, while supported from
overhead. “I felt like the first man
on the moon,” says Thibault.
He also learned to use the suit’s
arms for increasingly complex
tasks, such as rotating his wrists,
reaching out to targets and using
both hands simultaneously (The
Lancet Neurology, doi.org/dcbh).
The team’s next goal is to make theexoskeleton self-balancing. This
will require faster computation
speed, says Benabid.
However, not all of the project
has gone smoothly. Before
Thibault, another person was
given the implants, but they
stopped working within a few
seconds of being turned on, due
to a technical fault. This has now
been fixed and three more people
are set to test the system.
It is highly promising that
Thibault’s implants are still
working after 27 months, says Ravi
Vaidyanathan of Imperial College
London. “Obviously it has a long
way to go before it can be generally
used, but this is a pivotal step.” ❚Medical technologyMind-controlled suit helps man walk again
Adam VaughanGiant boom collects plastic
Device for cleaning up the oceans begins its work
THE^ OCE
ANCLEA
NUPNews
“ Thibault also learned to
use the suit’s arms for
tasks like operating both
hands simultaneously” Clare Wilson