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A new tool developed by bioengineers at Caltech has been shown to be the best yet at translating brain signals generated from internal speech. While it has only been tested in two patients so far, with further development the technology could allow people who are unable to speak to communicate using only their thoughts.Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are already doing incredible things. Versions of these systems, which link the brain’s electrical signals to an output device that seeks to either replace or restore a function in the body, have been used to help paralyzed patients walk and, in the case of Neuralink's first experimental subject, control a computer “telepathically”.One of the major use cases of this technology is in assisting communication. For people who cannot speak – due to a neurological disease or brain injury, for example – BMIs can allow them to regain their voice.Such devices, like the one famously used by the late Stephen Hawking, have some limitations. One is that it’s difficult to capture the natural rhythm of speech – though scientists are working on that, with a little help from Pink Floyd. Another is that a lot of speech BMIs require the user to attempt to say words out loud, which is not possible for everyone. The ideal solution would be to find a way of decoding internal speech, so someone would only have to imagine saying a word. Some advances in this area have been made, but it’s proven very challenging and results have been mixed.Now, the team at Caltech has developed a system that has the potential to decode internal speech with a higher degree of accuracy than ever before.Microelectrode arrays were implanted into the brains of two male patients with tetraplegia (paralysis of all four limbs), a 33-year-old and a 39-year-old. The team targeted the primary somatosensory cortex and the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), a region of the brain that hasn’t been explored in previous speech BMI studies.The interface was trained on six real words (battlefield, cowboy, python, spoon, swimming, telephone) and two made-up words (“nifzig”, “bindip”), to see whether the words needed to have meanings for the system to work effectively. The participants were either shown each word on a screen or had the word spoken to them, before they were then asked to imagine saying the same word for 1.5 seconds. They were subsequently asked to say the word out loud.       Although these two participants were physically able to speak, “This technology would be particularly useful for people that have no means of movement anymore,” first author Sarah Wandelt told Nature News. “For instance, we can think about a condition like locked-in syndrome.”The BMI allowed the researchers to decode, in real-time, the activity in the SMG as the participants were thinking of each word. For one participant, the accuracy reached 79 percent, “only slightly less accurate than the decoding of vocalized speech,” Wandelt and co-author David Bjånes explain in a briefing on their work; for the other participant, it was 23 percent.The technology will need to be further refined and tested on a larger group of people using more words, but the study does demonstrate that the SMG is a promising brain region to target.“Even if this result could not be replicated in the second participant, this study is important because it is to my knowledge the first achievement of a real-time speech brain-computer interface based on single unit recordings in the SMG,” commented Blaise Yvert of The Grenoble Institute of Neuroscience, who was not involved in the study.Next, the team wants to find out if the BMI can distinguish between letters of the alphabet, and Wandelt and Bjånes also suggest that decoding individual sound units of speech, called phonemes, could be a promising approach.“This proof-of-concept study of high-performance decoding of internal speech will certainly be of great interest to researchers working to push the boundaries of BMIs and other therapeutic devices for people who can no longer speak,” added Giacomo Ariani, the paper’s Associate Editor.The study is published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. 

An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a truly odd-ball planet. The planet has an extremely low density, so low that it has been compared to cotton candy. It is 50 percent larger than Jupiter but seven times less massive, orbiting its star every 6.25 days. It is called WASP-193b.The proximity to its star is what makes the planet puff up so much. However, the expansion of the atmosphere on similar planets to this (like the ones in the Kepler-51 system) leaves planetary scientists scraping their heads. These super-puffy planets are truly an outlier when it comes to planets in the galaxy."WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller," lead author Dr Khalid Barkaoui, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Liège's EXOTIC Laboratory, said in a statement. “Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date. This extremely-low-density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure.”Different observations were necessary to estimate the size of the planets and their mass. Put together, they suggest that WASP-193b has a density of 0.059 grams per cubic centimeter. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, so WASP-193b would float on water. In the Solar System, only Saturn has a density smaller than water with 0.687 grams per cubic centimeter.Jupiter is a lot denser: 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter. And Earth is over four times that: 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter. Gas giants and rocky planets are not just nicknames. And for worlds like WASP-193b, even "gas giant" seems insufficient to describe the puffiness.“The planet is so light that it’s difficult to think of an analogous, solid-state material,” explained co-author Julien de Wit, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The reason why it’s close to cotton candy is because both are pretty much air. The planet is basically super fluffy.”How such a planet came to be is an utter mystery. A mystery that hopefully has a solution in sight thanks to new observatories such as JWST. Studying its puffed-up atmosphere might reveal something about its past that would allow astronomers to better understand its origin.“We don’t know where to put this planet in all the formation theories we have right now, because it’s an outlier of all of them. We cannot explain how this planet was formed. Looking more closely at its atmosphere will allow us to constrain an evolutionary path of this planet,” added Francisco Pozuelos, astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia.“WASP-193b is a cosmic mystery. Solving it will require some more observational and theoretical work, notably to measure its atmospheric properties with the JWST space telescope and to confront them to different theoretical mechanisms that possibly result in such an extreme inflation,” concluded Barkaoui. A paper describing the results is published in Nature Astronomy.

The Northern Hemisphere’s summer was a scorcher, pushed off the charts by a combination of global heating and El Niño. Given the much higher baseline today, and how exceptional it was, some people speculated last summer may have been the hottest for 100,000 years, if not longer. That’s not a claim that can currently be tested, but new evidence shows summer 2023 was the hottest at least since the time of Jesus, and the 1.5°C (2.7°F) target agreed on in Paris nine years ago may be well behind us.The further back we look in time, the hazier our estimates of global temperatures become. We have less than 50 years of satellite data covering the entire globe. There’s a bit over a century of records from widespread weather stations, and if we extrapolate from limited parts of the planet, we can go back to about 1850.That doesn’t mean, however, that we have no capacity to compare modern temperatures with those of the past. Climate proxies such as the growth rings in trees, isotopes from air bubbles in ice, and limestone cave structures all tell us something useful. Professor Ulf Büntgen of the University of Cambridge is part of a team that used the summer proxies to put last year in context.    “When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” Büntgen said in a statement. “2023 was an exceptionally hot year, and this trend will continue unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.”Büntgen and colleagues relied on tree rings to reach this conclusion. Growing conditions are reflected in the width of tree rings laid down in a specific year. In temperate and sub-polar zones where water is usually not a limiting factor, this generally reflects the warmth of the spring and summer. Individual trees’ growth may be affected by specific local factors, but with a large enough sample, it’s possible to gain an estimate of temperatures that tracks closely with measurements since they have been available.Instrumental summer land temperatures (red) shown together with the tree ring reconstruction mean (yellow) and 95% uncertainty range derived from the variance among tree ring members (grey).Image credit: Esper et al 2024Data is sparse for the Southern Hemisphere, and in the tropics factors besides temperature can be the dominant drivers of tree growth. To increase the accuracy of their estimates, Büntgen and co-authors restricted their analysis to areas between 30° North and the pole.The work didn’t just prove 2023 was exceptional, it allowed the researchers to compare it with average conditions over 2,000 years, as well as with the coldest summer during that time. That was the year 536, when a “volcanic winter” worse even than the “year without a summer” hit. The growing season in Büntgen’s study area averaged 3.93°C (7.07°F) colder in 536 than last year.Frequency distributions of the observed and reconstructed temperatures anomalies (0°C = 1850-1900 CE mean) with exceptionally cold and warm summers highlighted.Image credit: Esper et al 2024Prior to the point where human activity moved the climate into new territory, the hottest northern summer of the period was in 246, but even this was more than a degree (1.19°C or 2.14°F to be precise) cooler than 2023. The authors provide uncertainty ranges for the extreme years, but even the highest error bar doesn’t reach last year.The research was informative for more than just extreme years. Comparing the tree ring data with the instrumental records available for a few locations from 1850 to 1900, the authors concluded we have over-estimated summer temperatures in the late 19th century by a few tenths of a degree. Recalibration makes 2023’s northern summer 2.07°C (3.73°F) above the 1850-1900 average.This allowed a re-estimate of temperatures further back, placing last summer 2.2°C (3.96°F) above the pre-1850 average. “Such offsets fundamentally question the calculation of temperature ranges considered in the 2015 Paris Agreement using observational data,” the authors write.“It’s true that the climate is always changing, but the warming in 2023, caused by greenhouse gases, is additionally amplified by El Niño conditions, so we end up with longer and more severe heat waves and extended periods of drought,” said Professor Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “When you look at the big picture, it shows just how urgent it is that we reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately.”The study is published in Nature. 

ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! has the week off, but that did not stop the eponymous host from traveling across the country to New York and NBC’s Monday edition of Late Night with Seth Meyers. Together, Meyers and Kimmel would fantasize about trolling Donald Trump at his trial and dream about him being convicted. The duo was discussing their histories with Trump when Meyers observed, “You actually got mentioned in the proceedings because there was some texts and it was because you had Stormy Daniels on your show.” While Kimmel took pride in that, he claimed it didn’t live up to Meyers’s experience, “I appreciate that. It doesn't compare to making so much fun of him at the White House Correspondents' Dinner that he actually ran for president.”     After Meyers wanted to forget the whole thing, “No, no, let's talk about yours,” Kimmel continued, “Which was your fault. But it was exciting even though you put in—you know, you put in the work, and it really pays off. I was excited to be mentioned. I don't know why I was excited to be mentioned, but I was definitely excited to be mentioned.” Meyers then wondered, “But you would want to go down to the courthouse? If you lived in New York full-time, do you think you'd go down?” Kimmel replied, “No, I want to go down with you” before recalling, “I think—because, listen, we know he hates us… Do you remember the first time you found out he really, really hated us? I was on a weeklong camping trip, where there were no motors, or phones, or anything allowed. And when I got off the river, my phone clicked on, and I just got message after message after message about Trump bashing us. And I thought, ‘Oh, I'm back in civilization.’ But what I would love to do is for you and I to go down there, and maybe as a -- because, you know, he's in some legal trouble.” He then suggested, “As a gesture of goodwill, because we are human beings… I think we should bring him a whole bunch of little bottles of ketchup. Because you're not allowed to eat in the courtroom. You're not allowed to drink in the courtroom. Ketchup falls in that kind of gray area.” Kimmel then turned the dynamic around and asked Meyers, “How close do you think we could get to him? And I mean emotionally.” Meyers then imagined a scenario where, “I mean, based on the amount of people there, we could just go and wait in line and get in. And it would be -- he'd be so rattled if we were there. It would be like that SNL sketch where all of a sudden, Kenan realized Beavis and Butthead are there. He'd have the same reaction.” He then wondered, “Have you thought about what would happen if he actually was convicted?” Kimmel admitted that “I have thought about this. I dream about it. I really hope it happens.” Maybe Kimmel could give the flowers he held in his lap during the interview to Alvin Bragg, that would certainly cement the late night comedian’s relationship with the Democratic Party. Here is a transcript for the May 13-taped show: NBC Late Night with Seth Meyers 5/14/2024 12:59 AM ET SETH MEYERS: I wanted to congratulate you. You actually got mentioned in the proceedings.  JIMMY KIMMEL: Thank you. MEYERS: Because there was some texts— KIMMEL: Well. MEYERS: — and it was because you had Stormy Daniels on your show. KIMMEL: I -- thank you. I appreciate that. It doesn't compare to making so much fun of him at the White House Correspondents' Dinner that he actually ran for president.  MEYERS: No, no, let's talk about yours. KIMMEL: Which was your fault. But it was exciting even though you put in -- you know, you put in the work, and it really pays off. I was excited to be mentioned. I don't know why I was excited to be mentioned. MEYERS: Yeah. KIMMEL: But I was definitely excited to be mentioned. MEYERS: But you would want to go down to the courthouse? If you lived in New York full-time, do you think you'd go down? KIMMEL: No, I want to go down with you. MEYERS: Okay. KIMMEL: I think -- because, listen, we know he hates us. MEYERS: 100 percent. KIMMEL: 100 percent. Do you remember the first time you found out he really, really hated us? I was on a weeklong camping trip, where there were no motors, or phones, or anything allowed. And when I got off the river, my phone clicked on, and I just got message after message after message about Trump bashing us. MEYERS: Yes. KIMMEL: And I thought, “Oh, I'm back in civilization.” But what I would love to do is for you and I to go down there, and maybe as a -- because, you know, he's in some legal trouble. MEYERS: Yeah. KIMMEL: And as a gesture of goodwill, because we are human beings. MEYERS: Sure, empathetic human beings, no less. KIMMEL: Nice people. I think we should bring him a whole bunch of little bottles of ketchup. MEYERS: Uh-huh. KIMMEL: Because you're not allowed to eat in the courtroom. You're not allowed to drink in the courtroom. Ketchup falls in that kind of gray area. MEYERS: Condiments are allowed, yeah. KIMMEL: That I think he could get away with a little bit of that. How close do you think we could get to him? And I mean emotionally. MEYERS: Well I -- the funny thing is we could -- I mean, based on the amount of people there, we could just go and wait in line and get in. And it would be -- he'd be so rattled if we were there. KIMMEL: Oh, yeah, he would. MEYERS: It would be like that SNL sketch where all of a sudden, Kenan realized Beavis and Butthead are there. He'd have the same reaction. KIMMEL: Except even Beavis and Butthead-ier than that, yeah. MEYERS: Now, what do you think would -- have you thought about what would happen if he actually was convicted? KIMMEL: If he is convicted -- yeah, I have thought about this. MEYERS: Okay. KIMMEL: I dream about it. MEYERS: Okay. KIMMEL: I really hope it happens.

USA Today once again raised the specter of election interference to justify the Department of Homeland Security’s latest foray into election meddling in its latest sycophantic interview. On May 8, USA Today’s Josh Meyer released a new “exclusive” interview with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The theme of the interview was how DHS was dealing with an “unprecedented array of election threats.”  He opined, “The right to vote and the integrity of the right to vote – and therefore of the election itself – is a fundamental element of our democracy.” Mayorkas was careful to stress, of course, that the effort was wholly “nonpartisan,” a label that was also applied to the anti-constitutional Disinformation Governance Board (DGB). “This is a nonpartisan effort,” he claimed. “And, in fact, all our efforts across this department are nonpartisan.” Despite Mayorkas’s assertions of nonpartisanship, the USA Today piece paints the initiative as primarily a response to anti-democratic forces on the right.  “Democrats also fear violence from those who would reject election results showing Joe Biden being reelected,” the leftist newspaper reported. Mayorkas stressed that DHS would use its power to combat the “threat of disinformation,” just like the short-lived DGB, infamously known as the Ministry of Truth. According to USA Today, the coordination between the DHS and local election officials has been run out of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “We’re providing best-practice security guidance to these stakeholders, and that’s where we unpack threats, but also and most importantly provide them with recommendations for what they can actually do to mitigate those threats,” said Cait Conley, senior advisor to CISA director Jen Easterly and leader of the initiative. In order to fight these “threats,” characterized by USA Today as a result of “unsubstantiated claims of election fraud,” CISA launched Protect24, a new website that proliferates materials for local and state election officials. The website has several pages related to “disinformation actors.” One page, titled “Tactics of Disinformation,” identifies common “tactics” used by supposed malactors. “Disinformation actors capitalize on conspiracy theories by generating disinformation narratives that align with the conspiracy theory worldview,” the brochure reads.  The brochure also targets “alternative platforms,” that is, platforms that don’t censor their user base, as tools of subversive elements. “Disinformation actors may seek to take advantage of platforms with fewer user protections, less stringent content moderation policies, and fewer controls to detect and remove inauthentic content and accounts than other social media platforms,” the brochure says. Another page, titled “Election Security Rumor vs. Reality,” tries to debunk concerns around expanded voting procedures like mail-in-balloting and unsupervised ballot drop boxes. Before the 2020 election, CISA also used its power to quash skepticism regarding voting practices such as universal mail-in-ballots. CISA worked through the Election Integrity Partnership, run out of Stanford Internet Observatory, to nudge social media companies to censor accounts that questioned election procedures.  According to Mike Benz, founder of Freedom for Freedom Online, the EIP flagged 27 million tweets to be deleted by social media companies and used DHS infrastructure to do so.  In leaked emails, Alex Stamos, the leader of SIO, described the effort as a way for the federal government to coordinate censorship. “The EIP’s true purpose was to act as a censorship conduit for the federal government,” wrote Stamos in a Nov. 2020 email. In another email to the social media app Nextdoor, Stamos described EIP as “a one-stop shop for local election officials, DHS, and voter protection organizations to report potential disinformation for us to investigate and to refer to the appropriate platforms if necessary.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable

In a front-page story for Tuesday’s print edition and published Monday online, The Washington Times’s intrepid reporter Stephen Dinan shared the findings of a new Center for Immigration Studies report that said only 46 percent of recent immigrant arrivals — both illegal and legal — are holding down jobs and contributing to the American economy. “The Center for Immigration Studies, using Census Bureau numbers, calculates that 46% of immigrants who arrived over the past two years are employed. That challenges a key selling point from immigration advocates that the stream of newcomers is critical to the U.S. economy,” he explained, pointing out this means even though “[s]ome immigrants say they are looking for work...most...are out of the labor force.” He cited this key quote from CIS officials Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler: “Immigration clearly adds workers to the country, but it just as clearly adds non-workers who need to be supported by the labor of others.” Dinan later went through the push and pull of whether mass, persistent immigration benefits an economy: One persistent issue has been whether immigrants are a net benefit or a drain. The Congressional Budget Office says that taken as a whole, the economy grows faster with more people. The reason is simple: More potential workers means a more productive total economy. The CBO says the average worker is slightly worse off. Again, the reason is simple: The pie may be bigger, but it is divided by even more people. The CBO says the population has a large range of outcomes. Those at the higher economic rungs come out better off with higher immigration levels, while those on the lower rungs, who are more likely to compete with less-educated newcomers, end up worse off. (....) The CIS said the unemployment rate among immigrants from Latin America, overlapping heavily with illegal immigrants, without a college education is 10%. That rate has held steady for several decades. The Biden administration is trying to get official work permits for newly arrived illegal immigrants who are caught and released into the interior. Immigrant rights advocates say that will allow the migrants to support themselves and stop using government assistance. To read Dinan’s story, click here.

A school principal in Texas said she cut all ties with her husband after he was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography. The principal revealed the details in two emails sent to school employees and parents.James Stone, 53, who taught at Tompkins High School in Katy, Texas, was arrested on Monday after the authorities discovered thousands of photos of minors in his possession, according to the New York Post.The authorities said Stone admitted to producing a number of the images, some of which were taken on school property.'It is also important for me to confirm with you that I, nor any other family member, is implicated in James’ criminal activity.'Consequently, Stone's wife, Melinda, the principal at Taylor High School, wrote an email to school staffers and parents following her husband's arrest. The two emails were made available to the public by Covering Katy News.In the first email, addressed to school staff, Melinda confirmed awareness that her husband had been arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.“I am sure that many of you are aware of the incident involving my husband, James Stone. James was arrested this morning for possession of pornographic materials,” she wrote.“His arrest and involvement in this criminal activity was unbeknownst to me or those closest to him.”“My family and I are deeply disappointed in his actions and thus we do not have any plans to be involved in James’ criminal proceedings as he navigates the next steps,” the email continued.“It is also important for me to confirm with you that I, nor any other family member, is implicated in James’ criminal activity.” — (@) Melinda noted that "because the incident is still being investigated, law enforcement agencies are unable to provide additional information at this time, but know that the District and I take this incident very seriously and are fully cooperating with law enforcement."The authorities claimed that the images in Stone's possession were leaked on the "dark web." However, it is not clear how the police were clued in to the existence of the images.Melinda also sent a separate email to parents, writing: "I believe it is important for our parents to be aware of the information that is being shared with staff concerning this matter."“I understand that you may have questions or concerns and I am available to speak with parents who wish to do so.”“As mentioned to staff below, law enforcement are continuing to investigate. I apologize for any disruption this disgraceful incident may have caused,” the email continued.The school has informed parents that Stone will not return to his teaching post.He is being held at the Fort Bend County Jail, and the investigation is still ongoing. Stone will make his first court appearance on Tuesday.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!