2023魔都新茶论坛

In the Chinese science-fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem," Wallfacer Bill Hines and his wife develop the Mental Seal as part of his Wallfacer Project plan. The Mental Seal can directly imprint thoughts and beliefs on people's brains based on the theory of "brain quantum layer activity." 

The fictional plot is increasingly becoming a real-life possibility as the research and application of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) technology improves rapidly around the world, which not only leads to renewed hope for the treatment of many diseases, but also offers the first possibility of increased longevity of a healthy person's consciousness, and even immorality.

The rapid development of BCI technology and concerns over how it might change relationships and interactions between humans and machines has also prompted increased vigilance and caution among global authorities regarding opening the free market door to the technology as there has not yet been an approved invasive BCI product on the market globally. 

Aside from practical concerns over the various complex fields involved, potential damage to the human brain, the risk of personal information leakage, as well as ethical controversies, questions haunting the development of BCIs also expand further to metaphysical considerations like: What do BCIs mean for humanity? Would BCIs take control of human beings' brains? Would immortality become possible with BCIs and would we be still human if our bodies are merged with computers?

Rapid advancement

The BCI system refers to the creation of a new information exchange pathway between the brain and external devices. On one hand, it converts brain signals into machine-readable signals to achieve effective mechanical control. On the other hand, it converts external device signals into brain-readable signals to directly interface with the brain. From a technical perspective, the implementation of a BCI device can be invasive or non-invasive.

Wuhan-based Nuracom, in an interview with the Global Times, stated that the company's micro-needle has high reliability and stability in both mechanical and electrical characteristics, making it suitable for neural signal recording and neuron stimulation. 

On August 25, Nuracom's ultra-high-density implantable BCI system was recognized by a panel of 11 top experts in China in science and technology, including Chinese Academy of Sciences academician Zhao Jizong and Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Li Peigen. The expert group believes that the system is innovative, technologically advanced, has broad application prospects, is comparatively advanced in the on an international scale, and will promote the technological progress of China's brain-computer interfaces industry. 

Nearly a month later, Neuralink, a BCI technology company founded by Elon Musk, announced that it had obtained approval from the reviewing independent institutional review board and their first hospital site was ready to begin recruitment for the first-in-human clinical trial for the company's fully-implantable, wireless BCI device. 

Nuracom also said the company is conducting extensive preclinical research, including verification of product performance, safety and reliability tests, as well as extensive animal trials. 

"We are collaborating with medical institutions to conduct in-depth research on relevant diseases, improve our products through these studies, and ultimately develop a comprehensive diagnosis and treatment plan to benefit patients. We have also conducted extensive preclinical research and actively laid out clinical trials and registration of medical devices, which will lead to the introduction of clinical diagnostic and treatment products to the market," the company said in a statement to the Global Times.

Neuralink's product implants electrodes one by one through a robotic insertion method and assembles them by soldering to an external device. The product also needs to transmit neural signals out to an external circuit board for A/D conversion before sending out digital signals. 

By contrast, Nuracom's innovative on-site neural signal processing technology optimizes signal quality, improves signal decoding accuracy, and has stimulation precision. It can achieve a one-time implantation of 65,536-channel microneedles, solving the problems of the current single electrode implantation method, which is time-consuming and inefficient.

Nuracom said its BCI system not only has precise brainwave signal acquisition capabilities, but also enables reverse stimulation, providing researchers with more complex paradigms.

As leading companies enter the clinical stage, the BCI market is entering a critical period for market adoption. According to a report released by dongfangqb.com, a Chinese industry expert consulting service platform, the global BCI market was valued at $1.74 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $3.3 billion by 2027.

The Chinese market for BCI devices is expected to have a significant amplification effect when combined with specific use cases. It is estimated that by 2040, the market size of BCI devices in China will reach 56 billion yuan ($7.66 billion), with a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent.

Among them, the research-grade device market is estimated to be 1.5 billion yuan, and the consumer-grade device market is estimated to be 54.5 billion yuan. The report predicts that the market for BCI devices in China could be valued at hundreds of billions in the future.

Broad potentials

The development of BCI technology has a history of nearly a century since the invention of the electroencephalogram (EEG) in 1924. Before Neuralink's technology debuted in the arena of public discourse in August 2020, multiple international teams had already conducted research on the application of BCIs, most of it in clinical medicine.

In 1978, American biomedical scientist William Dobelle implanted an array of 68 electrodes into the visual cortex of a blind patient, allowing the patient to perceive grayscale modulated dot matrix images within a limited field of view by connecting a camera.

In the 21st century, with the overall scientific and technological advancement, BCI technology has seen rapid growth. In 1998, American scientists implanted a BCI device into the brain of a patient who suffered a brainstem stroke, enabling the patient to control a computer cursor. In 2014, Juliano Pinto, a 28-year-old quadriplegic man, controlled an exoskeleton through a brain-computer interface and kicked the first ball of the World Cup opening ceremony in Brazil, marking a milestone in the development of brain-computer interface technology.

On August 23 this year, a new study was published in Nature demonstrating that BCIs can help restore speech for people who have lost the ability due to paralysis. The clinical trial participant - who can no longer use the muscles of her lips, tongue, larynx, and jaws to enunciate units of sound clearly - was able to generate 62 words per minute on a computer screen simply by attempting to speak. This is more than three times as fast as the previous record for assisted communication using implanted BCI devices and an approach toward the roughly 160-word-per-minute rate of natural conversation among English speakers.

BCIs technology is also used in research for the treatment of various psychological and neurological disorders. In 1997, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first deep brain stimulation (DBS) device for the treatment of essential tremor. In 2002, the device was approved for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, the treatment of dystonia in 2003, and the treatment of epilepsy in 2018.

A switch between heaven and hell

The DBS technology is also the research foundation for the clinical research project on the use of BCI technology for treatment-resistant depression at the Ruijin Hospital, affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.

The principle of DBS involves implanting electrodes into specific neural circuits in the brain to regulate corresponding neural clusters through electrical stimulation for therapeutic purposes. However, in previous experiments in the use of DBS for the treatment of depression, once the surgery was completed and the electrodes were implanted in the patient's brain, the parameters of electrical stimulation could only be adjusted externally, and the signals of brain activity could not be transmitted outwards.

In other words, the communication between the brain and the machine was one-way, explained Sun Bomin, director of the Functional Neurosurgery Center at Ruijin Hospital and initiator of the clinical study of the use of BCI treatment for treatment-resistant depression, to the Global Times.

Research conducted at the Ruijin Hospital integrates BCI devices into DBS technology, which not only allows for external parameter adjustment but also enables continuous collection and export of deep brain activity data from patients, achieving true bidirectional information exchange. These data will help doctors to study the pathogenesis of depression and improve the effectiveness of precise stimulation for patients, Sun said.
According to Sun, he and his team have made unprecedented discoveries in this clinical trial: The energy of a slow-wave frequency band in the gamma wave range in the brain is positively correlated with the symptoms of depressed patients, known as "biomarkers." This means that the patient's "good state" and "bad state" can be quantified into different waveforms. In future research, based on the performance of these "biomarkers," researchers can provide corresponding stimulation to patients to maintain a "good state", thereby achieving the desired therapeutic effect.

Data shows that using BCI technology to regulate the brain can lead to an average improvement of over 60 percent in postoperative depression symptoms, according to a report the hospital released in April.

For Wu Xiaotian, one of the volunteers in Sun's team's project, the device researchers put in his right chest is like a switch that can transport him from a "hell of depression" to a "heaven of happiness."

The device is connected to two electrodes, extending from the device to behind the ears, and then from the back of the brain to the front of the brain, passing through the nerve nuclei at the front of the brain. When the device sends electric currents and stimulates the nerves, the symptoms of depression are eased or made to disappear.

Every morning when I turn on the device, I feel like I am freed from the prison of depression, Wu said.

Some people have expressed concern that BCIs might become something akin to "spiritual opium" for these patients as they rely on the device for emotional regulation and quotidian function.

Sun dispelled such worry, explaining that "we implant BCIs in these patients to control their brains in order to cure their diseases. These recipients are patients who need such treatment. We would not implant these devices in healthy people, so there is no reason to worry."

Beyond controversies

Although Sun is seemingly clear on the aim of his research, concerns over how BCI technology might change relationships and interactions between humans and machines has prompted increased vigilance among global authorities.

It may still be too early for human beings to be able to answer questions above as it very likely would take years, even decades, before a mature implantable BCI product is available on the market, and an understanding of and discussions around the issue are also improving accordingly.

But human beings still have to seize the current opportunity to get current decisions right, experts have warned. Only as people deal with these concerns step by step, will we be able to approach a controllable future.

The impact caused by [technology] depends on its application scenarios. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the priority application areas of brain-machine interface technology that can have a beneficial impact on humans and focus on in-depth research and application, said scientists from Nuracom when asked about how to address ethical controversies surrounding brain-machine interface technology.

We believe that within the framework of law and ethics, brain-machine interfaces technology, in its application process, can reduce negative impacts and ultimately benefit humanity and society, the scientists stressed.

Some experts have urged that it is necessary to establish a sound ethical framework and moral guidelines for the behavior of brain-machine interfaces developers and users in practice, ensuring the legality and morality of the technology.

Some countries have been making such moves. In 2021, Chile became the first country to have enumerated specific brain-related rights in its constitution, establishing the rights to personal identity, free will, and mental privacy.

The 2021 yearly global cybersecurity report released by the Chinese public security authority also highlighted legal regulation of some rapidly advancing technologies such as quantum computing and BCIs.

Q: What’s your comment on the result of the election in the Taiwan region?

A: The spokesperson of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council has commented on the result of the election in China’s Taiwan region.

The Taiwan question is China’s internal affair. Whatever changes take place in Taiwan, the basic fact that there is only one China in the world and Taiwan is part of China will not change; the Chinese government’s position of upholding the one-China principle and opposing “Taiwan independence” separatism, “two Chinas” and “one China, one Taiwan” will not change; and the international community’s prevailing consensus on upholding the one-China principle and long-standing and overwhelming adherence to this principle will not change. The one-China principle is the solid anchor for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. We believe that the international community will continue to adhere to the one-China principle, and understand and support the Chinese people’s just cause of opposing “Taiwan independence” separatist activities and striving to achieve national reunification.

Multiple Chinese cities including Dongguan in South China's Guangdong Province have recently announced a number of policies to stabilize employment and manufacturing around the Chinese Lunar New Year holidays (which falls from February 10-17) in order to ensure a strong economic start and sustained recovery in 2024.

Dongguan will offer subsidies worth 300 yuan ($42) to every worker outside Guangdong that will return to their positions at key enterprises in the city from February 12-17, while 200 yuan in subsidies will be provided for those willing to return to their posts from February 18-20, according to a circular on local government website.

In addition, enterprises in the city will get subsidies of up to 300,000 yuan for new hiring from February 10 to March 9. The city is offering a series of targeted policies to ensure manufacturing production in enterprises above the designated scale, services firms enhancing effectiveness, and enterprises attending exhibitions, among others.

Quanzhou in East China's Fujian Province and Yongkang in East China's Zhejiang Province have recently announced similar measures to encourage enterprises to expand employment and increase output for a good start in 2024.

Among the measures, enterprises in Quanzhou will receive subsidies of 1,000 yuan per worker, capped at 200,000 yuan in total, if they have taken active measures to stabilize workforce and maintain continuous production in February.

The moves came as local governments are ramping up efforts to implement pro-growth policy measures to kickstart the country's economic recovery in 2024 following the tone-setting Central Economic Work Conference in December 2023.

On the first working day of 2024, Han Wenxiu, executive deputy director of the office of the Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs, wrote in an article published in the People's Daily that China's economic recovery and long-term improvement remain unchanged, calling for the implementation of policies that would help stabilize expectations, promote growth and boost employment.

"Currently, the Chinese economy is experiencing comprehensive, full-loaded recovery across many sectors. The economy is expected to be better than foreign financial institutions' forecast in 2024, and may reach 5 percent growth," Cao Heping, a professor from Peking University, told the Global Times.

He said the governments should step up credit support in 2024 in order to ensure reasonable and ample liquidity to meet the needs of real economy.

As November kicks in, Hollywood is gearing up for an intensive release period with four major films set to hit Chinese theaters, which film critics said could bring strong support for the home stretch of the annual box office both in China and North America. 

Shi Wenxue, a film critic based in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday that November and early December is usually the "Hollywood month" in the Chinese film market as a lot of Hollywood films tend to be released during the period, aiming to set the stage for the New Year film period.

"After the global pandemic crisis, it is good to see the return of Hollywood movies. Their release would undoubtedly help to improve the annual box office of the world's two largest film markets - China and the US," he said, adding that The Marvels might get the most attention among Chinese moviegoers due to its well-known characters. 

The superhero movie is set to premiere in the Chinese mainland on Friday, the same day as in North America.

Brie Larson, an Oscar-winning actress, reprises her role as Captain Marvel, showcasing her formidable powers in a universe-spanning adventure. The film introduces new characters for a thrilling cosmic escapade. Early reviews for the film are mixed, with a 58 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 50-point composite score on Metacritic.

Then on November 17, Lionsgate's The Hunger Games: Songbird and The Snake will have its global premiere. Adapted from the immensely popular book series, the film is directed by Francis Lawrence, who also directed The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Disney's new film, Wish, will debut on November 22 in North America and November 24 in the Chinese mainland. Dubbed by Chinese actress Liu Yifei and actor Yu Shi, the animated feature follows the story of Asha, a determined and resilient girl. 

December 8 will see the release of Wonka, the prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Focusing on Willy Wonka's youth, the film narrates his adventures leading up to becoming the head of the chocolate factory. Hollywood heartthrob Timothee Chalamet takes on the lead role, adding a fresh allure to Wonka's character. Behind the scenes, the film boasts a stellar team, with producer David Heyman, known for the Harry Potter series, and Paul King, director of the Paddington series, at the helm.

So far this year, the Chinese box office has grossed 49.68 billion yuan ($6.82 billion), and has surpassed the level from 2020 to 2022, when the global pandemic hit cinemas hard. 

"It would be ideal if the annual box office in China could achieve 50 billion yuan," Shi said. 

For flowers, too much light at night could lead to a pollination hangover by day.

Far from any urban street, researchers erected street lights in remote Swiss meadows to mimic the effects of artificial light pollution. In fields lit during the night, flowers had 62 percent fewer nocturnal visitors than flowers in dark meadows, researchers report August 2 in Nature.

For one of the most common flowers, daytime pollination didn’t make up for nightly losses, says ecologist Eva Knop of the University of Bern in Switzerland. In a detailed accounting of the pollination life of cabbage thistles (Cirsium oleraceum), Knop and colleagues found that night-lit plants produced 13 percent fewer seeds overall than counterparts in naturally dark places.
Night lights could affect the entire network of plants and pollinators, the team suggests. In the test fields, nighttime pollination wasn’t just the business of a few kinds of specialized moth-loving plants. Flowers that fed a wide range of nighttime visitors also attracted a broad buzzing circus of different kinds of daytime pollinators. If the daytime insects don’t make up for nocturnal losses, a flower’s population might dwindle. And a lot of insects, both day and night, might then feel the loss of nectar and foliage, Knop says.

More than 80 percent of flower species get some help from animals in making seeds, and none evolved with light after sundown. “I hope people start to realize that it’s really something that changes the whole ecosystem,” Knop says.
The new study is the first to show how artificial light affects plants’ ability to make seeds, she says. The test is also unusual because it considers all kinds of insect pollinators instead of focusing on, say, only night-flying moths.
This big-picture view was so not easy to achieve. Finding possible dead-dark sites in highly developed Europe to set up LED lamps was impossible, so researchers worked in 14 dark-as-possible, remote meadows in land rising toward the Alps. But that created a problem. “If you don’t have light, you don’t have power,” Knop points out. To avoid generator growls and smells confounding their results, researchers painstakingly scouted sites where possible near water-powered energy sources and overall used “really long cables.”
For the sites with natural night, researchers measured pollination by patrolling set paths and catching any insect wriggling on a flower — in complete darkness, of course. The team used night-vision goggles but still didn’t have a perfect view, she says. It’s “not that easy to catch insects without three-dimensional vision.”

Besides paying special attention to the commonly visited cabbage thistle, researchers pieced together the whole network of which pollinator species visited which plant species day or night. Analysis of this Matterhorn of data suggested that changes in the night crew could affect daytime meadows.

The idea that night light could have broad knock-on effects on daytime pollinators is still speculation at this point, says ecologist Darren Evans of Newcastle University in England, who also studies light pollution and pollination. But the risk of such spillover warrants more attention.

A boy who lived in what’s now South Africa nearly 2,000 years ago has lent a helping genome to science. Using the long-gone youngster’s genetic instruction book, scientists have estimated that humans emerged as a distinct population earlier than typically thought, between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago.

The trick was retrieving a complete version of the ancient boy’s DNA from his skeleton to compare with DNA from people today and from Stone Age Neandertals and Denisovans. Previously documented migrations of West African farmers to East Africa around 2,000 years ago, and then to southern Africa around 1,500 years ago, reshaped Africans’ genetics — and obscured ancient ancestry patterns — more than has been known, the researchers report online September 28 in Science.
The ancient boy’s DNA was not affected by those migrations. As a result, it provides the best benchmark so far for gauging when Homo sapiens originated in Africa, evolutionary geneticist Carina Schlebusch of Uppsala University in Sweden and her colleagues conclude.

In line with the new genetically derived age estimate for human origins, another team has proposed that approximately 300,000-year-old fossils found in northwestern Africa belonged to H. sapiens (SN: 7/8/17, p. 6). Some researchers suspect a skull from South Africa’s Florisbad site, dated to around 260,000 years ago, qualifies as H. sapiens. But investigators often place our species’ origins close to 200,000 years ago (SN: 2/26/05, p. 141). There is broad consensus that several fossils from that time represent H. sapiens.

Debate over the timing of human origins will continue despite the new evidence from the child, whose remains came from previous shoreline excavations near the town of Ballito Bay, says Uppsala University evolutionary geneticist and study coauthor Mattias Jakobsson. “We don’t know if early Homo sapiens fossils or the Florisbad individual were genetically related to the Ballito Bay boy,” he says.

Thus, the precise timing of humankind’s emergence, and exact patterns of divergence among later human populations, remain unclear. Researchers have yet to retrieve DNA from fossils dating between 200,000 and 300,000 years old that either securely or possibly belong to H. sapiens.
However early human evolution played out, later mixing and mingling of populations had a big genetic impact. DNA evidence from more recent fossils, including those studied by Schlebusch’s group, increasingly suggests that Stone Age human groups migrated from one part of Africa to another and mated with each other along the way (SN: 10/20/12, p. 9), says Harvard Medical School evolutionary geneticist Pontus Skoglund. In the Sept. 21 Cell, he and his colleagues report that DNA from 16 Africans, whose remains date to between 8,100 and 400 years ago, reveals a shared ancestry among hunter-gatherers from East Africa to South Africa that existed before West African farmers first arrived 2,000 years ago.

That ancient set of common genes still comprises a big, varying chunk of the DNA of present-day Khoisan people in southern Africa, Skoglund’s group found. Earlier studies found that the Khoisan — consisting of related San hunter-gatherer and Khoikhoi herding groups — display more genetic diversity than any other human population.

Schlebusch’s team estimates that a genetic split between the Khoisan and other Africans occurred roughly 260,000 years ago, shortly after humankind’s origins and around the time of the Florisbad individual. Khoisan people then diverged into two genetically distinct populations around 200,000 years ago, the researchers calculate.

Ancient DNA in Schlebusch’s study came from seven individuals unearthed at six South African sites. Three hunter-gatherers, including the Ballito Bay boy, lived about 2,000 years ago. Four farmers lived between 500 and 300 years ago.

Comparisons to DNA from modern populations in Africa and elsewhere indicated that between 9 percent and 30 percent of Khoisan DNA today comes from an East African population that had already interbred with Eurasian people. Those East Africans were likely the much-traveled farmers who started out in West Africa and reached southern Africa around 1,500 years ago, the researchers propose.

MINNEAPOLIS — Birds don’t need to be drenched in crude oil to be harmed by spills and leaks.

Ingesting even small amounts of oil can interfere with the animals’ normal behavior, researchers reported November 15 at the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry North America. Birds can take in these smaller doses by preening slightly greasy feathers or eating contaminated food, for example.

Big oil spills, such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, leave a trail of dead and visibly oily birds (SN: 4/18/15, p. 22). But incidents like last week’s 5,000-barrel spill from the Keystone pipeline — and smaller spills that don’t make national headlines — can also impact wildlife, even if they don’t spur dramatic photos.
To test how oil snacks might affect birds, researchers fed zebra finches small amounts of crude oil or peanut oil for two weeks, then analyzed the birds’ blood and behavior. Birds fed the crude oil were less active and spent less time preening their feathers than birds fed peanut oil, said study coauthor Christopher Goodchild, an ecotoxicologist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

Oil-soaked birds will often preen excessively to try to remove the oil, sometimes at the expense of other important activities such as feeding. But in this case, the birds didn’t have any crude oil on their feathers, so the decrease in preening is probably a sign they’re not feeling well, the researchers say.

Exactly how the oil affects the birds’ activity levels isn’t clear. Researchers suspected that oil might deprive birds of oxygen by affecting hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood. Blood tests didn’t turn up any evidence of damaged hemoglobin proteins but did find some evidence that oil-sipping birds might be anemic, Goodchild said. At the higher of two crude oil doses, birds’ blood contained less hemoglobin per red blood cell, a sign of anemia.
The findings, while preliminary, add to a growing pile of evidence that estimates of the number of animals impacted by oil spills might be too low. For instance, even a light sheen of oil on sandpipers’ wings makes it harder to fly, costing birds more energy, a different group of researchers reported earlier this year. That could affect everything from birds’ daily movements to long-distance migration.

Movies and other media are full of mixed messages about the risks and rewards of building machines with minds of their own. For every manipulative automaton like Ex Machina’s Ava (SN: 5/16/15, p. 26), there’s a helpful Star Wars droid. And while some tech titans such as Elon Musk warn of the threats artificial intelligence presents, others, including Mark Zuckerberg, dismiss the doomsayers.

AI researcher Toby Walsh’s Machines That Think is for anyone who has heard the hype and is seeking a critical assessment of what the technology can do — and what it might do in the future. Walsh’s conversational style is welcoming to nonexperts while his endnotes point readers to opportunities for deeper dives into specific aspects of AI.
Walsh begins with a history of AI, from Aristotle’s foundation of formal logic to modern facial-recognition systems. Excerpts from computer-composed poetry and tales of computers trouncing humans at strategy games (SN: 11/11/17, p. 13) are a testament to how far AI has come. But Walsh also highlights weaknesses, such as machine-learning algorithms’ reliance on so much data to master a single task.

This 30,000-foot view of AI research packs a lot of history, as well as philosophical and technical explanation. Walsh personalizes the account with stories of his own programming experiences, anecdotes about AI in daily life — like his daughter’s use of Siri — and his absolute, unapologetic love of puns.

Later in the book, Walsh speculates about technical hurdles that may curb further AI development and legal limits that society may want to impose. He also explores the societal impact that increasingly intelligent computers may have.
For instance, Walsh evaluates how likely various jobs are to be outsourced to AI. Some occupations, like journalist, will almost certainly be automated, he argues. Others, like oral surgeon, are probably safe. For future job security, Walsh recommends pursuing careers that require programming acumen, emotional intelligence or creativity.

AI also has the potential to revolutionize warfare. “Like Moore’s law, we are likely to see exponential growth in the capabilities of autonomous weapons,” Walsh writes. “I have named this ‘Schwarzenegger’s law’ to remind us of where it will end.” Walsh isn’t resigned to a Terminator-like future, though. If governments ban killer robots and arms developers use automation to enhance defensive equipment, he believes military AI could actually save many lives.

In fact, Walsh argues, all aspects of AI’s future impacts are in our hands. “Artificial intelligence can lead us down many different paths, some good and some bad,” he writes. “Society must choose which path to take.”