Earlier this year, a brain chip from Elon Musk's Neuralink was implanted in a human patient for the first time, with some hiccups. Now, Quartz reports that a second patient has received a Neuralink chip, with the company noting it hopes to carry out eight more such implants by the end of the year. The issue with the first patient, quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh, centered on the implant's hairlike threads, which record neural activity. Arbaugh's threads had dislodged from his motor cortex, limiting the amount of data that could be transferred and slowing down computer actions based on his thoughts.
In May, the FDA said it had reviewed Neuralink's proposed fix for that and approved a second implant. The fix: to place the threads a little deeper into the patient's motor cortex, 8mm instead of 3mm to 5mm, as in Arbaugh's case. USA Today, citing Bloomberg, notes that the second implant had originally been set for June, but the original patient had to pull out due to an unspecified medical condition. Details haven't yet emerged on the replacement candidate.
During a Friday podcast, Musk said "so far, so good" on the second implant, noting that the procedure "seems to have gone extremely well," per Popular Science. "There's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes." The outlet notes that "a lot" of electrodes is relative, with Musk guessing that only about 400 of the chip's 1,000-plus electrodes—they "acquire brain signals that are then routed to the electronics in the implant," which in turn transmits the data to a computer, per USA Today—are providing signals at the moment. That's just 39% of the total, Popular Science points out. Musk seems unfazed. "Let's give people superpowers," he said during the podcast. (More Neuralink stories.)
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