Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:
A single shot transforms the mice’s brains into biomanufacturing machines. Blood proteins churn the injected chemicals into a soft, flexible electrode mesh that seamlessly wraps around delicate neurons. Pulses of light aimed at the mesh quiet hyperactive cells. All the while, the mice go about their merry ways, with no inkling they’ve been turned into cyborgs.
This science fiction-like invention is the brainchild of Purdue University scientists seeking to reimagine brain implants. These devices, often composed of rigid microelectrode chips, have already changed lives. They can collect electrical signals from the brain or spinal cord and translate these signals into speech or movement—returning lost abilities to people with paralysis or diseases of the brain. Implants can also jolt brain activity and pull people out of severe depression.
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Copilot seemed to follow my train of thought. I say “seemed” because I know the received opinion is that AI bots don’t have thoughts of their own and can’t really “follow” other people’s thoughts either: they just regurgitate information and predict the next word based on words they were trained on. Snicker at my naïveté if you will; I felt that Copilot was doing more than that.
Last October, Orpheus opened up a lottery, from which 10 people would be selected to beta test the Lazarus app. In the first twenty-four hours, they received more than 12,000 applications. Twelve thousand essays from grieving parents, spouses, and children, all hoping to be one of the lucky ones selected to get to talk again to the people that they lost. On November 1, 10 people were selected at random, each one assigned to a development team.
On February 28, the US and Israel launched a 
The first thing to note is that I whole-heartedly affirm Michaels’ now-classic claim that intentionality is constitutive of believing, acting, and therefore reading. Given the force of this claim, “Against Theory” should have been an object-lesson in swamp-draining, but in my view, its own quietism worked against its actual assimilation within literary studies. One way to put the problem is that Michaels is right to think that intentionality is descriptive of action and belief but wrong to think that it therefore has no normative role to play in the exercise of our agency.
“There you have it, the meeting went well,” 
A woman with an ultra-rare combination of three 
It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long. Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, concentrates on the lasting damage that the Cambridge spies inflicted by providing Stalin with crucial information about the Western allies’ strategy and priorities (as well as the development of the atom bomb) when it was becoming evident Germany was losing the war.
On the evening of Nov. 30, 1994, Merlin Holland sat in a dim side aisle of the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Paris church where, in 1900, Oscar Wilde had been given a quiet, almost clandestine funeral. Holland had spent the day tracing his grandfather’s final, penniless years in exile for a BBC documentary, and it had disturbed him. That evening, several dozen candles were already burning at the entrance to the chapel, far more than on his previous visits. Working out the day, he realized it was the anniversary of his grandfather’s death.