Month: March 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jakub Porzycki)

The Food and Drug Administration denied a human-trials application from Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, in early 2022, citing dozens of concerns about the company's device that employees are still working to address, according to a report by Reuters. The report is based on interviews with seven current and former Neuralink employees.

The revelation of the FDA rejection tracks with the thin public progress reports from the company, which place Neuralink behind rivals as well as Musk's ambitious timelines. Musk, who co-founded Neuralink in 2016, said in 2019 that the company aimed to start human trials by the end of 2020 and held lofty goals of curing spinal cord injuries and dementia. In a November 2022 presentation, which showed little technological progress, Musk said the company was still about six months away from human trials.

According to a company document from last fall, Neuralink expected to get FDA authorization for trials by March 7—next week. But employees who spoke with Reuters said they are not confident they'll get it, with one calling it a "gamble."

Enlarge (credit: USPTO)

A rather dystopian if somewhat expected use for connected cars started doing the rounds this week with the discovery of a patent, published last month, titled "Systems and methods to repossess a vehicle."

Filed by Ford, the patent describes a system whereby a bank or leasing company could remotely disable specific features—the air conditioning or the radio—or perhaps the car itself in cases where the person leasing the vehicle hasn't kept up with payments.

Perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US has become an extremely car-centric society since the 1950s, the patent describes how "the lockout condition may be lifted momentarily in case of an emergency situation so as to allow the vehicle to travel to a medical facility when the emergency is a medical emergency."

Enlarge (credit: George Rose via Getty)

Electric vehicle batteries keep getting larger, and the typical driving range between charges keeps growing.

The shift is partly a response to “range anxiety”—the fear of being stranded because EV batteries don’t have enough power to get to the next charging station—an idea so familiar in discussions of electric vehicles that it was spoofed in a Ram Super Bowl ad last month.

But this concern is unwarranted for a large share of EV customers, according to research from the University of Delaware, published February 21 in the journal Energies.