A new brain-computer interface (BCI) developed at UC Davis Health can translate brain signals into speech with an impressive accuracy of up to 97%—claimed to be the highest accuracy ever achieved by such a system.
The researchers implanted sensors in the brain of a man with severe speech impairment caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Remarkably, he was able to communicate his thoughts within minutes of using the system.
This new tech innovation deciphers brain signals when a person attempts to speak, converting them into text, which the computer then vocalizes. The decoded words were displayed on a screen and impressively spoken aloud in a voice resembling Harrell’s own, as it sounded before his ALS diagnosis. This voice was synthesized using software that had been trained on audio recordings of his voice from before the onset of the disease.
“Our BCI technology helped a man with paralysis to communicate with friends, families and caregivers,” said David Brandman, UC Davis neurosurgeon and co-senior author of the study. “Our paper demonstrates the most accurate speech neuroprosthesis (device) ever reported.”
A study about this work was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Neurotech company Synchron has made a breakthrough by connecting its brain implant to Apple’s Vision Pro headset. The company is building a brain-computer interface (BCI) that will allow patients with paralysis to operate technology like smartphones and computers with their minds.
The company has implanted its BCI in six patients in the U.S. and four in Australia, but still needs approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to commercialize its technology more broadly.
This integration allows patients with limited mobility to operate the Vision Pro headset solely through their thoughts, marking a significant advancement in brain-computer interface technology.
Users typically control the Vision Pro headset with eye movements, voice commands and hand gestures. Synchron has been working to make it accessible to patients who can’t speak or move their upper limbs.
The tibialis anterior muscle is the largest muscle located in the anterior (front) compartment of the leg. The blood supply to the tibialis anterior muscle comes primarily from the anterior tibial artery and its branches. In general, muscles of this compartment help to flex the foot in an upward direction at the ankle and also extend the toes.[1]
The tibialis anterior lies along the outside of the shinbone (tibia). The muscle attaches to the top of the shinbone and descends down the leg, following the outside of the bone. The muscle’s tendon crosses the top of the foot by the inside ankle and connects to two bones (medial cuneiform and first metatarsal) on the bottom of the foot.[2]
What are the pain and symptoms associated with the tibialis anterior muscle?
Pain in the big toe
Pain in the front of the ankle going up the front of the shin
Occasionally there will be swelling of the shin bone
Can contribute to shin splints
Can be a cause of weak ankles
Can contribute to drop foot which can cause tripping and falling [2]
Interesting facts about the tibialis anterior muscle:
Trigger points and a tight shortened tibialis anterior can make it difficult to pick up the foot and can contribute to ‘tripping over your own feet’.
Pain from trigger points in the tibialis anterior is sometimes diagnosed as gout or turf toe.
Is often the primary cause of “growing” pains in the feet and ankles of children. [2]
Weight loss is not a physical challenge – it’s a mental one.
‘The following behavioural strategies could help your weight loss plan:
Schedule your day to allow adequate time for buying, preparing and eating healthy food. Set an alarm if necessary so you don’t get stuck watching TV or working at the computer.
Stock up on healthy snacks that have a pleasing texture and taste. You may like the crunchiness of carrots, the tanginess of cheese cubes, or the smoothness of frozen yoghurt. Drinking a cup of hot tea with your midmorning or midafternoon snack may make it last longer and feel more satisfying.
Communicate with family and friends and ask for their support in improving your health. Ideally, working on weight together with a friend or family member means you can encourage and support each other and help keep each other on track.
Stay “in the moment” while eating. Avoid eating at the computer, while driving, or multitasking while you eat. Tune into the experience of eating, what tastes and textures you feel like, how satisfying the food is, and what it feels like to be hungry or full.
Remind yourself several times a day of your weight loss goal and how important it is to you. You could paste a picture of a thinner version of you or write your reasons for losing weight on a note card that you keep with you, or put a picture on your desk.
Don’t get caught in thinking traps that can derail you from your diet. If you feel that you deserve something extra for being good, reward yourself with an extra snack or a small dessert that only adds a limited amount of calories. If you have a bad day, don’t use it as an excuse to go off your diet for a week. Remind yourself that you need to get back on track as quickly as possible to minimize the damage.
Tell yourself “I can do this.” Research shows that self-efficacy, or confidence that you can succeed at reaching your goal, is a powerful predictor of future behavior. If you catch yourself thinking negatively, switch to thinking about other situations in which you successfully learned a new behaviorl. Visualize yourself resisting temptation or throwing the extra weight into the ocean to keep motivated.
These strategies, accompanied by a reasonable nutritional plan, and increased exercise should help you develop a new relationship to food and increase your self-control.’
This muscle is located on the side of the thigh. This muscle is the largest of the quadriceps group (often called quads) which also includes the rectus femoris, the vastus intermedius, and the vastus medialis. Collectively, the quadriceps muscle is the largest in the human body and its purpose is to extend the knee. The specific task of the vastus lateralis muscle is to extend the lower leg and allow the body to rise up from a squatting position.
Trigger points in three of the four quadricep muscles are the kingpins behind many cases of knee pain and dysfunction. The vastus lateralis trigger points refer pain to the outside of the thigh, knee, and upper lower leg. They may also cause the “stuck patella” or “locked knee cap” conditions in which the knee cap fails to track up and down naturally during movements of the knee. While the pain from the other quadriceps trigger points is focused only on the knee joint, the vastus lateralis trigger points may also project pain to the outside of the thigh, which may also be confused with IT Band syndrome.
What are the pain and symptoms associated with the vastus lateralis?
Knee pain
Pain on the side of the thigh extending down into the front and back of the knee
Pain under the buttock extending toward the hip joint
Pain occasionally descends into the back of the calf
Locked knee
Extended walking increases pain in the thigh and knee
Fun Facts about vastus lateralis
It is the largest of the quadriceps muscles
Everyone has trigger points in the vastus lateralis.
‘Growing pains’ in the knees and hips of children can often be traced to the vastus lateralis
You burn more calories in the 23 hours you don’t exercise, than the 1-hour you do.
21 Bizarre Ways To Burn Calories
These results are based on an average 68kg human.
An average sized human will burn about 2400 Calories per day without doing any exercise.
Singing in the shower can burn an extra 10-20 Calories per song, depending on the volume and pitch of your voice.
Laughing for 10 minutes can make you burn between 20 and 40 Calories.
You burn about 200 Calories during 30 minutes of active sex.
Banging your head against a wall uses 150 Calories an hour.
On average, brushing your teeth for three minutes will burn 10 Calories.
Pushing a shopping trolley up the aisles for half an hour will burn over 100 Calories, this number increases with the amount you put in your trolley and the heavier it gets.
One hour spent sitting in front of the TV burns around 65 Calories.
Don’t stick out your tongue if you want to hide your identity. Similar to fingerprints, everyone also has a unique tongue print!
The next time someone sticks out their tongue at you, take a closer look. See all those tiny bumps and ridges? “It’s the different distribution of size and shape, just as fingerprints,” said Bowyer, that makes your tongue unique to you and no one else. The bumps contain more than 10,000 taste buds, each one filled with microscopic hairs called microvilli. Microvilli function like tiny food critics, sensing if your meal is sweet or sour, salty or bitter, and sending reviews up to the brain.1
20 interesting human tongue facts2
Did you know that the tongue is the only muscle in human body that works without any support from the skeleton? Yes! It is known as a muscular hydrostat.
Our tongue is the home of our taste buds. When looked under a magnifying glass, hundreds and thousands of small bumps will become visible on the tongue. These bumps are known as papillae and are the actual home of our taste buds.
The tongue is not the only place where taste buds live. Taste buds can also be found on the inside of our cheeks, on our lips, on the roof of our mouth and even under the tongue.
There are approximately 10,000 taste buds in our mouth of which 8,000 live on our tongue and the remaining 2,000 are found in the places we mentioned in the previous point.
There are specific segments on the tongue for sensing different tastes. The notion that different parts of the tongue are responsible for sensing different types of tastes (in other words, there are taste belts) is actually a myth. Our tongue can taste sour, sweet, bitter, salty and umami. Umami is actually a very new variant of taste discovered by a Japanese scientist who found that the chemical that is responsible for this taste is monosodium glutamate.
Our tongue is the only muscle in our body that is capable of sensing taste and sending taste signals to the brain. Each individual taste bud has around 15 receptacles that are responsible for carrying taste signals to our brain.
The tongue is THE STRONGEST muscle in the entire body. However, it is at the same time, one of THE MOST sensitive muscles as well.
In terms of flexibility, the tongue beats every other muscle in our body! Because of this flexibility, the tongue is capable of easily manipulating food inside the mouth and is also capable of acting as a natural cleanser for our teeth after a meal.
Our tongue has a unique property. It is incapable of detecting taste if it is dry. This means that if you place a piece of lemon on a dry tongue, you will not be able to tell that it is sour. The tongue gets its ability to sense taste only in the presence of saliva that keeps it moist.
Tongueprints (actually tongue imprints) of humans are unique (very much the same as the fingerprints). Tongues of different humans are of different shapes and will have different number of taste buds, thus making the tongue imprints unique.
The tongue has a really, really rough texture. Did you ever notice that while kissing someone?
Women have shorter tongues compared to males.
We mentioned in point 9 that a dry tongue is incapable of detecting taste. That’s because taste buds are capable of sensing taste only when molecules of the food (or whatever you put in your mouth) dissolve in water (our saliva consists of water). This essentially means that you cannot sense the taste of anything whose molecules do not dissolve in water even if you have a moist tongue. Ever tried tasting glass?
Here is an interesting tongue fact – if you don’t keep your tongue clean, you will get bad breath. Why is it so? That’s because our mouth is the home of more than 600 different types of bacteria and a single saliva drop contains 1 million of those bacteria. Our entire tongue remains moist due to saliva. So, can you ever imagine the number of bacteria present on our tongue?
Every taste bud on our tongue has somewhere between 50 and 100 taste sensing cells. No individual cell is capable of tasting more than one taste.
About 2/3rd of the tongue is visible and the remaining 1/3rd is not visible. The part that is not visible is close to the throat.
In Tibet, you can merrily stick your tongue out at others. It will not be considered rude or childish. In Tibet, it is actually a greeting.
The tongue is more important than we think. It not only helps to taste food but also helps to talk, to spit, to swallow and even to kiss.
The rectus femoris is situated in the middle of the front of the thigh; it is fusiform in shape, and its superficial fibers are arranged in a bipenniform manner, the deep fibers running straight (rectus) down to the deep aponeurosis. Its functions are to flex the thigh at the hip joint and to extend the leg at the knee joint.[1]
Fun Facts about the Quadriceps and rectus femoris
Did you know that the Rectus Femoris is the strongest and leanest muscle in the human body?
Did you know that the Rectus Femoris is the only quad that isn’t actually attached to the femur (thigh bone) but actually is attached below the knee and to the pelvis. So it can both straighten the leg and bend the hip!?
The Latin full formal name for quadriceps is musculus quadriceps femoris, and the meaning literally translates to “four-headed muscle of the femur”.
President Bill Clinton had surgery in 1997 to repair the quadriceps tendon in his right knee, which he tore stumbling on steps.
Arnold Shwarzenaeger has just about as many muscle fibers in his quads as you do. They’re just thicker.[2]
The quadriceps are used for knee extension, cycling, climbing stairs. Squats or leg extensions on a machine will develop this muscle.[3]
There is a fifth muscle of the quadriceps complex that is often forgotten and rarely taught called articularis genus. In addition, recent cadaver studies have confirmed the presence of a sixth muscle, the tensor vastus intermedius.[4]
You can’t use exercise to target fat loss in specific areas.
‘Targeted fat loss, also known as “spot reduction,” is a popular idea partly because it appeals to our intuition. After all, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the fat you burn while exercising comes from the area around the muscles you are using. Yet a 1971 study conducted by the University of California, Irvine on tennis players found that this is not actually the case.’[1]
10 Myths And Facts About Burning Fat[2]
You Must Eliminate Entire Food groups to See Results
Endless Jumping Exercises are Great for Fat Loss
Eating Twice a Day is the Best Way to Lose Fat
You can Eat Whatever you want, as long as you create a Caloric Deficit
Just Eat Less and you’ll Lose Weight
All Calories are Equalso Eat Less and you’ll Lose Weight
You should feel Exhausted at the end of every Workout
You need to Work Out Every Day if you’re Serious about Losing Weight
Intense Cardiovascular Training will Burn Muscle and Thin out my Legs
You may not want to swim in your spit, but if you saved it all up, you could. In a lifetime, the average person produces about 25,000 quarts of saliva – enough to fill two swimming pools!
11 Squeaky-Clean Facts About Spit
1. IT’S MOSTLY WATER.
Saliva consists of about 99 percent water. The other 1 percent is made up of electrolytes and organic substances, including digestive enzymes and small quantities of uric acid, cholesterol, and mucins (the proteins that form mucus).
2. THERE’S A MEDICAL STANDARD FOR HOW MUCH YOU SHOULD DROOL.
Healthy individuals accumulate between 2 to 6 cups of spit a day. That’s without stimulation from activities like eating or chewing gum, which open the spit floodgates.
3. SALIVA PRODUCTION HAS A CIRCADIAN RHYTHM.
Your body typically produces the most saliva in the late afternoon, and the least at night. Salivation is controlled by the autonomic nervous system (much like your heartbeat), meaning it’s an unconscious process.
4. THERE ARE FIVE DIFFERENT KINDS OF SPIT.
Salivation has five distinct phases, most triggered by the passage of food through the body. Not all of them are a good thing. The first type of salivation is cephalic, the kind that occurs when you see or smell something delicious. The buccal phase is the body’s reflexive response to the actual presence of food in the mouth (which aids in swallowing). The oesophageal involves the stimulation of the salivary glands as food moves through the oesophogus. The gastric phase happens when something irritates your stomach—like when you’re just about to puke. The intestinal phase is triggered by a food that doesn’t agree with you passing through the upper intestine.
5. IT CAN BATTLE BACTERIA.
There’s a reason the phrase “lick your wounds” came about. Spit is full of infection-battling white blood cells. And, according to a 2015 study in the journal Blood, neutrophils—a type of white blood cell—are more effective at killing bacteria if they come from saliva than from anywhere else in the body. So adding saliva to a wound gives the body a powerful backup as it fights off infection.
6. IT KEEPS YOU FROM GETTING CAVITIES.
The calcium, fluoride, and phosphate in saliva strengthen your teeth. Spit also fights cavity-causing bacteria, washes away bits of food, and neutralizes plaque acids, reducing tooth decay and cavities. That’s why chewing gum gets dentists’ stamp of approval—chewing increases the flow of saliva, thus protecting your oral health.
7. YOU NEED IT IF YOU WANT TO TASTE ANYTHING.
Saliva acts like a solvent for tastes, ferrying dissolved deliciousness to the sites of taste receptors. It also keeps those receptors healthy by keeping them from drying out and protecting them from bacterial infection. Many people who have dry mouth (xerostomia) find their sense of taste affected by their oral cavity’s parched conditions. Because many medications have dry mouth as a side effect, scientists have developed artificial saliva sprays that mimic the lubrication of real spit.
8. SWAPPING SPIT EXCHANGES MILLIONS OF BACTERIA.
A 10-second kiss involves the transfer of some 80 million bacteria, one study found.
9. PEOPLE AREN’T BORN DROOLING.
Babies don’t start drooling until they’re two to four months old. Unfortunately, they also don’t really know what to do with their spit. They don’t have full control of the muscles of their mouth until they’re around two years old, so they can’t really swallow it effectively. Which is why we invented bibs.
10. STRESS CAN LEAVE YOU SPIT-LESS.
The body’s fight-or-flight response is designed to give you the energy and strength needed to overcome a near-death experience, like, say, running into a bear, or, more common in the modern age, giving a big presentation at work. Your blood pressure goes up, the heart beats faster, and the lungs take in more oxygen. This is not the time to sit around and digest a meal, so the digestion system slows down production, including that of saliva.
11. A LACK OF SPIT WAS ONCE USED AS AN ADMISSION OF GUILT.
In some ancient societies, saliva was used as a basic lie detector. In ancient India, accused liars had to chew grains of rice. If they were telling the truth, they would have enough saliva to spit them back out again. If someone was lying, their mouth would go dry and the rice would stick in their throat.
