Latest news with #StarfishNeuroscience
Free Malaysia Today
6 days ago
- Business
- Free Malaysia Today
Japan's Expo 2025 draws 5 million visitors in first 6 weeks
Visitors rest under the Grand Ring during the 2025 Osaka Expo in the city of Osaka on May 21, 2025. (Starfish Neuroscience pic) OSAKA : The World Expo in Japan's Osaka has welcomed five million visitors in its first six weeks, organisers say, despite lukewarm enthusiasm for the event ahead of its opening. A Mars meteorite and a beating artificial heart grown from stem cells are among the displays at Expo 2025, where more than 160 countries, regions and organisations are taking part. The event opened on April 13 and runs until mid-October, with most of the pavilions encircled by the world's largest wooden architectural structure, a latticed 'Grand Ring'. On Monday, the five millionth visitor entered the vast waterfront site, organisers said in a statement. 'The number of visitors to the Expo… increased from four million to five million in seven days,' they said, adding that more visitors were coming 'with each passing day'. So far 12.4 million tickets have been sold to the event. Organisers have set a total target of 23 million. Also known as a World's Fair, the Expo phenomenon, which brought the Eiffel Tower to Paris, began with London's 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition. It is now held every five years in different locations around the globe. Osaka last hosted the Expo in 1970 when Japan was booming and its technology the envy of the world. It attracted 64 million people, a record until Shanghai in 2010. Opinion polls before Expo 2025 opened showed low levels of public enthusiasm, with analysts saying inflation and high accommodation costs due to a record influx of foreign tourists to Japan could put people off buying tickets.
The Star
28-05-2025
- Health
- The Star
Soon miniature chips in the brain could treat degenerative diseases
The idea is to be able to stimulate several areas of the brain in a coordinated fashion. These first chips would measure just 2 to 4mm in length, and would be equipped with data recording and biphasic pulse stimulation capabilities. — AFP Relaxnews Starfish Neuroscience is a startup cofounded in 2019 by Gabe Newell, CEO of video game publisher Valve. The company recently announced its plans to develop innovative brain-computer interfaces, in the same vein as the brain implant specialist, Neuralink. While Neuralink's technology currently takes the form of a single implant, consisting of 1,024 electrodes, designed to interact with a specific area of the brain, Starfish Neuroscience envisages the use of several much smaller implants, each targeting a specific brain region. The idea is to be able to stimulate several areas of the brain in a coordinated fashion. These first chips would measure just 2 to 4mm in length, and would be equipped with data recording and biphasic pulse stimulation capabilities. On paper, these implants look tiny and would consume extremely little power, possibly even eliminating the need for recharging. A first prototype implant is due to be tested by the end of 2025. Starfish's current focus is on medical applications, including the treatment of neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease, depression and bipolar disorder. However, with Gabe Newell at the helm of the project, many people are already imagining video game applications, with implants specially dedicated to this purpose. This could pave the way for totally new immersive experiences. However, this vision of human-machine interaction remains the stuff of science fiction at this stage. In the field of brain-computer interfaces, Neuralink has paved the way, with the striking example of a quadriplegic man able to play chess on a computer thanks to the implant grafted into his brain. Its next stated objective is to enable a patient to control a robotic arm, simply by the power of thought. – AFP Relaxnews
The Verge
23-05-2025
- Science
- The Verge
Valve CEO Gabe Newell's Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year
Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, the company behind Half-Life and DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike and preeminent PC game distribution platform Steam, has long toyed with the idea that your brain should be more connected to your PC. It began over a decade ago with in-house psychologists studying people's biological responses to video games; Valve once considered earlobe monitors for its first VR headset. The company publicly explored the idea of brain-computer interfaces for gaming at GDC in 2019. But Newell decided to spin off the idea. That same year, he quietly incorporated a new brain-computer interface startup, Starfish Neuroscience — which has now revealed plans to produce its very first brain chip later this year. Starfish's first blog post, spotted by Valve watcher Brad Lynch, makes it clear we're not talking about a complete implant yet. This bit is the custom 'electrophysiology' chip designed to record brain activity (like how Neuralink can 'read your mind' so patients can interact with computers) and stimulate the brain (for disease therapy), but Starfish isn't claiming it's already built the systems to power it or the bits to stick it into a person's head. 'We anticipate our first chips arriving in late 2025 and we are interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip would open new and exciting avenues,' writes Starfish neuroengineer Nate Cermak (bolding theirs), suggesting that Starfish might wind up partnering with other companies for wireless power or even the final brain implant. But the goal, writes Starfish, is a smaller and less invasive implant than the competition, one that can 'enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions' instead of just one site, and one that doesn't require a battery. Using just 1.1 milliwatts during 'normal recording,' Starfish says it can work with wireless power transmission instead. Here's the chip's current spec sheet: Neuralink's N1, for comparison, has 1,024 electrodes across its 64 brain-implanted threads, a chip that consumed around 6 milliwatts as of 2019, a battery that periodically needs wireless charging, and the full implant (again, not just the chip) is around 23mm wide and 8mm thick. Starfish says it could be important to connect to multiple parts of the brain simultaneously to address issues like Parkinson's disease. 'there is increasing evidence that a number of neurological disorders involve circuit-level dysfunction, in which the interactions between brain regions may be misregulated,' Cermak writes. In addition to multiple simultaneous brain implants, the company's updated website says it's working on a 'precision hyperthermia device' to destroy tumors with targeted heat, and a brain-reading, robotically guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system for addressing neurological conditions like bipolar disorder and depression. In case you're wondering how any of this might make its way back to gaming, I'll leave you with Valve's talk from GDC 2019 about brain-computer interfaces.
