Research & Science

37 articles

Research

DARPA's Firefox programme wants a 100-channel non-invasive brain-computer interface

DARPA has opened its Firefox programme, run out of the Biological Technologies Office by program manager Dr Pedro Irazoqui, targeting a coherent-optical non-invasive brain-computer interface at 100 channels with 50-micron spatial and 100-microsecond temporal resolution. The stated goal is to replace surgically implanted electrodes. Proposers Day is 1 September 2026, registration closes 21 August. Firefox appears to follow directly from the coherent-optical track first funded under DARPA's N3 program at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in 2019.

Aug 20

Research

DARPA is funding non-invasive neuroplasticity technology

DARPA's Defense Sciences Office has posted Special Notice DARPA-SN-26-111 for its forthcoming SHINE (Selective Harnessing of Intrinsic Neuroplasticity Engineering) Disruption Opportunity, with a prerecorded Information Session webcast on 25 August 2026 and the DO release anticipated the same month. Program manager is Robin Bonomi. SHINE aims to non-invasively induce adaptive neuroplasticity in targeted dysfunctional neural circuits for injury recovery, spanning five modality domains. Awards will be Other Transactions for prototype projects. Registration closes 14 August 2026 and is unusually open to foreign nationals.

Aug 11

Research

KIST reports first BCI chip that reads electrical and optical brain signals on one probe

Researchers at KIST's Brain Science Institute have published a peer-reviewed BCI probe in Advanced Science that combines 416 electrodes and 832 photodiodes across 13 hair-thin silicon shanks, enabling simultaneous electrical and optical brain-signal readout on a single monolithic CMOS chip. KIST claims it as a world-first at this level of density and integration. Preclinical work in live mice; not yet in primate or human. Funded by Korea's K-Moonshot Project.

Aug 8

Research

An Imperial-Tsinghua BCI lets ten healthy people control a pair of extra robotic arms while balancing a ball with their own hands

Tianyu Jia and Dario Farina at Imperial College London, with collaborators at Tsinghua University and Southeast University Nanjing, published a Nature Communications paper on 2 July 2026 describing a tactile-encoded non-invasive BCI in which ten healthy participants controlled four supernumerary robotic degrees of freedom concurrently with a bimanual ball-balancing task, reaching 74.79 per cent single-task and 59.69 per cent dual-task online accuracy after three days of training.

Jul 2

Research

A Bath-and-Ulster EEG headset lifts covert-consciousness detection in brain-injury patients from 39 to 69 per cent

Naomi du Bois and Damien Coyle at the University of Bath and Ulster University published a Nature Communications Medicine paper on 17 April 2026, press-released by Bath on 30 June, showing a multi-session wearable EEG motor-imagery BCI lifted minimally-conscious-state detection from 39 to 69 per cent across 42 brain-injury patients.

Jul 1

Research

Meta's Brain2Qwerty v2 hits 61 per cent word accuracy decoding typed sentences from MEG

Meta AI released Brain2Qwerty v2 on 29 June 2026: a non-invasive system that decoded typed sentences from MEG brain signals at 61 per cent average word accuracy across nine healthy volunteers.

Jun 30

Research

A Chalmers-led review argues visual and somatosensory cortical prostheses have converged into one engineering problem

Giacomo Valle at Chalmers and co-authors from Pittsburgh, Amsterdam and Miguel Hernández University published a Nature Reviews Bioengineering paper on 1 June 2026 arguing that fifty years of parallel work on visual and somatosensory cortical microstimulation prostheses have converged into a single engineering discipline.

Jun 30

Research

Stanford maps the human precentral gyrus at single-neuron resolution across eight paralysed BCI participants

A Stanford-led BrainGate study across eight paralysed participants and 20 microelectrode arrays, published in Nature on 17 June 2026, finds whole-body representation at every sampled location of the precentral gyrus.

Jun 28

Research

A man with ALS has used his speech brain implant at home for nearly two years, mostly on his own

Casey Harrell, who has ALS, used a UC Davis intracortical speech BCI at home for more than 3,800 hours over 22 months without researchers present. Nature Medicine published the case on 15 June 2026.

Jun 16

Research

A Yale fMRI brain-computer interface cuts training time to under an hour by following the brain's natural geometry

Yale's Nature Neuroscience study reports that healthy participants learned to control a video game avatar in under an hour when the fMRI decoder followed each user's individual neural manifold. Off-manifold mappings produced no learning at all.

Jun 11

Research

Rockefeller researchers locate abstract thought in the ventral premotor cortex, opening a new decoding target above motor cortex for brain-computer interfaces

Researchers at Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Neural Systems published evidence in Nature that the ventral premotor cortex hosts the neural substrates of abstract symbolic thought, identifying a brain region that mediates between the higher-thinking prefrontal cortex and the action-executing motor cortex. The finding has direct implications for BCI decoding targets: implants placed at the ventral premotor cortex could potentially decode user intent at a higher level of abstraction than current motor-cortex BCIs.

May 26

Research

Chinese paraplegic patient regains partial sensation and movement one year after world-first combined Beinao-1 BCI and brain-spine interface surgery

A paraplegic patient who in May 2025 became the world's first to simultaneously receive the invasive Beinao No.1 brain-computer interface and a temporally programmed spinal cord stimulation system has improved from complete to incomplete spinal cord injury (ASIA Grade A to ASIA Grade C) after one year of staged rehabilitation, the Xuanwu Hospital Capital Medical University team disclosed on 22 May 2026.

May 24

Research

Real-time brain-controlled selective hearing isolates one voice in a crowd in first human study

Columbia's Zuckerman Institute and collaborators at UCSF, NYU and Northwell Health published the first real-time human-study evidence that an auditory attention decoding BCI can isolate a single speaker in a multi-talker environment.

May 12

Research

Macaque BCI Navigates Virtual Forest With a Single Fixed Decoder Across Task Switches

A KU Leuven team led by Peter Janssen trained three rhesus macaques to pilot avatars through virtual environments using implanted multi-array BCIs, with premotor cortex outperforming primary motor cortex and a single fixed decoder generalising across perspectives, avatars, and dynamic targets.

Apr 22

Research

Northwestern Prints Artificial Neurons That Fire Action Potentials Into Live Brain Tissue

A Mark Hersam-led team at Northwestern has demonstrated aerosol-jet-printed neuromorphic devices that generate biologically realistic voltage spikes and trigger responses in mouse cerebellum slices, a first for printed electronics and a potential route to lower-cost, flexible neural interfaces.

Apr 22

Research

INBRAIN Completes Enrolment in World's First-in-Human Graphene Brain-Computer Interface Study

The Barcelona neurotechnology enrolled ten patients and implanted eight during brain tumour resection at Salford Royal Hospital, completing the first human cohort for any graphene-based neural interface. Full results due later in 2026.

Apr 21

Research

Bidirectional brain-computer interface restores sensation during brain-controlled walking

A UC Irvine-led team has demonstrated the first brain-computer interface that simultaneously controls a walking exoskeleton through decoded brain signals and feeds artificial leg sensation back to the user's sensory cortex — closing the loop on locomotion for the first time.

Apr 16

Research

Purdue grows brain electrodes inside the brains of living mice

A Purdue team reports in Science that a liquid monomer injected into the motor cortex self-assembles into a conductive electrode mesh — catalysed by the iron in blood — and can then modulate neural activity with external near-infrared light.

Apr 14

Research

DARPA Launches O-CIRCUIT to Build Living Neural Computers for the Battlefield

A new 42-month programme will fund teams to build biological processing units from neural organoids, benchmarked against video games and drone navigation, at energy budgets rivalling a fruit fly's brain.

Apr 10

Research

Precision Neuroscience's Layer 7 Decodes Speech and Movement in First Peer-Reviewed Intraoperative Study

A Johns Hopkins team reports 77.5% speech classification and 78–84% motor decoding accuracy using Precision's 1,024-channel thin-film cortical array during awake brain surgery in four patients.

Apr 8

Research

Living Rat Neurons Learn to Generate Complex Signals in Real-Time Reservoir Computing First

Tohoku University researchers trained cultured rat cortical neurons to produce sine waves, square waves, and chaotic Lorenz attractors using closed-loop FORCE learning, demonstrating that biological neural networks can serve as computational resources.

Apr 6

Research

Personalised TMS Reaches the Hippocampus Without Surgery, Iowa Study Shows

University of Iowa researchers have demonstrated for the first time that non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation can modulate hippocampal activity when the stimulation site is tailored to each patient's brain connectivity.

Apr 4

Research

Spinal Cord Stimulation Restores Both Movement and Sensation in Complete Paralysis for the First Time

A Brown University-led trial published in Nature Biomedical Engineering demonstrates simultaneous motor and sensory restoration in three people with complete spinal cord injuries using patterned electrical stimulation and machine learning.

Mar 23

Research

Brain Implants Malfunction at Night, Dutch Study Reveals Critical Gap in Round-the-Clock BCI Use

A UMC Utrecht study found that a brain-computer interface trained on daytime neural signals produced 245 false commands per hour when the patient slept, exposing a fundamental problem for 24/7 assistive devices.

Mar 22

Research

Cambridge's Brain-Inspired Chip Material Could Cut AI Energy Use by 70%

A new hafnium oxide memristor from the University of Cambridge mimics biological synapses with a million-fold reduction in switching current, pointing toward more efficient neuromorphic hardware.

Mar 21

Research

BrainGate BCI Restores Typing at 22 Words Per Minute for Paralysed Patients

A brain-computer interface developed by Mass General Brigham and Brown University enabled two paralysed individuals to type at speeds rivalling able-bodied texting, with a word error rate of just 1.6 per cent.

Mar 16

Research

Brain Oscillations Don't Work How We Thought They Did

New research upends a foundational assumption in neuroscience and BCI design: that individual frequency bands reliably map to neural activity. The discovery could reshape how we decode brain signals.

Mar 11

Research

Invisible Flickers Could Make Brain Monitoring Disappear Into Everyday Interfaces

Researchers developed a near-invisible BCI technique using texture-based visual stimuli to monitor mental workload in pilots without the distraction of traditional flickering screens.

Mar 11

Research

Self-Healing Hydrogel Makes Neuromorphic Prosthetics Resilient to Body's Chaos

A new iontronic reservoir built from self-healing hydrogel creates neuromorphic prostheses that can withstand the unpredictable physiological environment inside the human body.

Mar 10

Research

New Database Maps Global Neuroimaging Data for Vision Decoding

A researcher has compiled an index of datasets used to reconstruct what people see from brain activity, potentially accelerating development of visual BCIs and neuroprosthetics.

Mar 8

Research

Evoked Potentials Could Personalize Stroke Rehab Through BCI Integration

A comprehensive review maps how brain signals measured during stroke recovery are converging with BCI systems and closed-loop neuromodulation to move rehabilitation beyond generic protocols toward individualized treatment.

Mar 7

Research

Dual-Pathway Model Reconstructs Speech from Brain Signals in 20 Minutes

New framework resolves the historic trade-off between acoustic richness and linguistic clarity in neural speech decoding, achieving 4.0/5.0 intelligibility with minimal training data.

Mar 6

Research

Chinese Team Decodes Semantic Meaning From Brain Waves in Aphasia Patients

Researchers developed TFSANet, a deep learning model that decodes language comprehension from EEG signals, achieving 60.73% accuracy in aphasia patients using Chinese linguistic stimuli.

Mar 5

Research

Seven-Tesla Brain Scans Reveal Optimal Target for Gesture-Decoding Implants

New fMRI research identifies precise cortical locations for implantable BCI electrodes, finding that surface recordings from gyral regions may suffice for gesture decoding without penetrating sulcal depths.

Mar 5

Research

Software Testing Technique Exposes Safety Flaws in ML Neurostimulation

Researchers adapted automated fuzzing from software security to stress-test machine learning models that control neural implants, revealing widespread violations of biophysical safety limits in retinal and cortical devices.

Mar 5

Research

Brain Stimulation Improves BCI Control Through Two Distinct Neural Pathways

New research reveals how targeting different brain regions with theta burst stimulation enhances motor imagery performance through separate mechanisms, offering potential solutions for stroke patients struggling with BCI control.

Mar 2

Research

Personalized Brain Decoders Track Chronic Pain Without Patient Input

Researchers demonstrate that individualized fMRI models can decode spontaneous pain in chronic pain patients, marking a shift toward objective, brain-based pain measurement that could reshape treatment and neurotech interventions.

Mar 1

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