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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020. DISCOVER 75i
Will 2020 be the year humans start walking around with computers in their
heads? Elon Musk thinks so.
Neuralink, Musk’s secretive biohacking company, launched in 2016 with
the promise of implementing cutting-edge technology directly into people’s brains.
At a press conference in July, the Neuralink team announced plans for a chip,
dubbed the N1, that would physically attach to a user’s brain through a “neural
lace” — a network of tiny threads. Each thread would send and receive electrical
pulses in the brain.
The company claims the tech could be helpful in the medical field, possibly
giving paraplegic patients the ability to walk and people with vision loss the ability
to see. But the team also wants to go beyond medical uses and potentially implant
the N1 into the brain to allow for telepathic communication. To top it off, Musk
wants it all to work wirelessly, controlled through a phone app.
It might sound like science fiction, but the company contends it has already
tested the chip in animals, including a monkey — with “very positive” results,
according to Musk. And assuming the FDA allows it, Neuralink officials say they
want to start human trials this year. We’ll see if 2020 brings this brain-hacking
fantasy to life.Elon Musk
Wants to Read
Your Mind
BY JENNIFER WALTER40
to extract and broadly identify these
ancient proteins. More recently, however,
they have been able to read the protein
sequences on a much finer scale, finding
subtle differences on an amino acid level.
It’s similar to the way geneticists work
with DNA, only instead of genomes,
they’re reconstructing ancient proteomes.
Previous paleoproteomic work focused
on the protein collagen, extracted from
ancient bones rather than tooth enamel.
Collagen, however, doesn’t change much
between species, and it’s only a single pro-
tein. The tooth enamel proteome provides
information on multiple proteins, and, as
Cappellini puts it, “better chances to find a
text we can read.”
And although the approach is destruc-
tive — tiny chips of enamel are pulverized
and fed into a mass spectrometer — teeth
are among the most common finds in the
fossil record.
Paleoproteomics does have limitations.
For example, proteomes are much smaller
than genomes, so they provide fewer data
points, and the extraction and sequencing
of ancient proteins is difficult work. Still,
the rhino tooth study shows that it’s pos-
sible to study organisms on a molecular
level well beyond ancient DNA’s expira-
tion date — theoretically including early
members of our own family tree.
“I’m always fascinated to see some-
thing invisible become visible,” says John
Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
While he stressed that he admires the
careful, thoughtful work of Cappellini
and his colleagues, Hawks cautions
that their success may have unintended
consequences.
“The reality is that there is a bone rush,”
Hawks says. “Copycats will come around
to [museum collection curators] and say,
‘I’ll give you a paper in Nature ... just give
me some teeth to grind up.’ ”
For now, Cappellini is focused on
refining the method to obtain more
detailed proteomes, from potentially even
older fossils.
“We don’t know how far back we can
go,” says Cappellini. “I’m looking forward
to finding out.”Elon Musk brainchild Neuralink announced
plans in July for an implantable chip that
would send and receive signals in the brain
(right). The chip, called the N1, would be
implanted by machine (above) into people’s
heads with extreme precision.