Scientists are now using artificial intelligence to help people who cannot speak.
Researchers at Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute are creating bots to translate brain signals into speech, per a study published Tuesday in Scientific Reports.
The researchers hope the AI technology can help people with speech disabilities, like someone recovering from a stroke, or someone with epilepsy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a motor neuron disease that most notably affected the late Stephen Hawking.
Researchers are using a vocoder, a synthesizer that decodes speech after learning and listening to the speech patterns of humans, writes Gizmodo. Popular voice command systems like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa also use this technology, says Nima Mesgarani, the paper's senior author. While the technology can't translate all of a person's imagined thoughts, it can translate patterns in brain signals to reconstruct words, rather than having a person select pre-programmed words from a system, as Hawking did.
"Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one's voice due to injury or disease is so devastating," said Mesgarani. "we have a potential way to restore that power. We've shown that, with the right technology, these people's thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener."
In the study, patients listened to a person reading numbers 0-9 while researchers scanned their brains and the AI decoded it into speech. The AI software correctly picked up at least 75 percent of the patient's language, researchers found. Tatyana Bellamy-Walker
The Justice Department's move to defend President Trump in writer E. Jean Carroll's defamation lawsuit has been denied by a federal judge.
Judge Lewis Kaplan on Tuesday rejected the DOJ's attempt to step into the lawsuit filed by Carroll, who has accused Trump of rape, and said he can be personally sued by the writer, CNN and The New York Times report.
Trump has denied Carroll's allegation that he raped her in the 1990s. She filed a defamation lawsuit against him in 2019, but the DOJ last month tried to take over the case in an unusual move. The Justice Department hoped to move the case to federal court and substitute in the United States as the defendant instead of Trump, according the Times. But Kaplan denied this request, saying that Trump's statements denying Carroll's allegation weren't made in his official capacity as president.
"His comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States," Kaplan said. The judge also said that Trump "is not an 'employee of the government,' as Congress defined that term," and that even if he were, his "allegedly defamatory statements" would "not have been within the scope of his employment." Brendan Morrow
Most analysts aren't surprised that immigration has taken a back seat in the 2020 election. For starters, the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout have dominated the discussion for months, while nationwide racial injustice headlines and the Supreme Court have also emerged as major stories in the lead up to Nov. 3. Still, a review from The Wall Street Journal shows how sharply President Trump's messaging on immigration has declined in the last four years.
Immigration was a driving factor for Trump in 2016 — with a particular emphasis on building a Southern border wall — when it was the fourth most mentioned issue in his television campaign ads, but in 2020 it's barely cracked the top 10. (Similarly, terrorism went from being the third-most mentioned issue to falling out of the top 10 entirely.)
A lot of that has to do with the shifting circumstances and priorities in the U.S., but some Republicans think the campaign realized Trump was overzealous in his efforts to curb immigration in 2018, eventually costing the party votes in the mid-term elections that year.
"I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we haven’t heard a whole lot about immigration since Election Day 2018," Alex Conant, a former senior adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), told the Journal. "He tried to make the midterms all about immigration and it failed horribly."
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who lost his re-election bid, also said he thinks Trump's "divisive rhetoric" and "scapegoating" contributed to defeat.
That doesn't mean the Trump campaign is completely ignoring the issue. Per the Journal, the progressive advocacy group Immigration Hub has found that more than 20 percent of Trump's Facebook ads over the past month have focused on immigration, so the strategy has evidently shifted more toward "micro targeting." Read more at The Wall Street Journal. Tim O'Donnell
The Lincoln Project isn't going anywhere.
The PAC of President Trump-opposing Republicans and other moderates has built a social media behemoth based largely on trolling the president with pointed ads. And once it potentially achieves its goal of getting Joe Biden and other Democrats elected, it's looking to capitalize on that and build a whole media empire, Axios reports.
The Lincoln Project's Twitter account boasts a following that even exceeds the Republican party's, and has raked in millions of dollars from its supporters who'd like to see Trump out of the White House. To Ra Kumar, the project's representative at United Talent Agency, it's clear that "they know how to get audiences," he tells Axios.
So in the coming weeks, the Lincoln Project is expected to move beyond podcasts and TV ads and into Hollywood. For starters, the group is working with a documentarian to produce a non-fiction film after the election, Axios reports. Some TV networks are interested in running the project's livestreamed shows, a source says. TV studios are also reportedly reaching out to work with the Lincoln Project "to help develop a House of Cards-like fiction series," Axios reports — a comparison that probably doesn't help the project with allegations of stealing ideas and memes. Kathryn Krawczyk
Flu shots are already considered an important factor in combating the coronavirus pandemic, since widespread inoculations will hopefully help prevent medical facilities from becoming overwhelmed by dual diseases. But new research suggests flu shots may also play some role in preventing COVID-19 infections in the first place, The Scientific American reports.
A study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that workers at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands who received a flu shot during the 2019-20 season were 39 percent less likely than their colleagues to test positive for the coronavirus as of June 1, 2020. Non-vaccinated employees contracted the virus at a 2.23 percent rate, compared to only 1.33 percent of those who were vaccinated.
The preliminary research would certainly require further clinical trials — though the author of the study noted it would be unethical to compel a control group of subjects to be denied a flu shot — and there could be several reasons why the vaccinated group staved off infection more easily, including the possibility that they are generally more health conscious and took more COVID-19 precautions.
Still, there have been other studies that hint at a possible link between flu shots (and other vaccines, for that matter) and lower COVID-19 risk. Additionally, the Radboud research team conducted a laboratory experiment in which they took blood cells from healthy individuals, purified them, and exposed some of them to a flu vaccine. After allowing the cells to grow for a few days, the researchers exposed them to the coronavirus. A day later they found that the vaccinated cells produced more of several kinds of immune molecules that fight off pathogens than those that were initially left alone. Read more at The Scientific American. Tim O'Donnell