🧠 Thomas Oxley Wants to Transform Our Brain's Relationship With Computers Forever

Jan. 31, 2023

Welcome back to the future of you. Each day this week, we are bringing you stories from cutting edge research in personal health and medicine.

Would you ever want a computer in your brain? Today, we sit down with Tom Oxley, the CEO and founder of Synchron, a 7-year-old start-up that has created one of the smallest and least invasive brain-computer interfaces in development. The device, which is implanted into a blood vessel near the brain's motor cortex, enables users — the device is currently aimed for those who are paralyzed — to text and send emails via their thoughts alone.

The secret behind Synchron's success is that the device can be placed without brain surgery, unlike many of its competitors which require far more invasive methods. In fact the entire process is a simple 2-hour outpatient procedure. While it's aimed at helping paralyzed people better communicate, Oxley hints at what Synchron has in store for the future and how his company's device could change how we use computers in the near and far future.

What’s New
The Future of You
Thomas Oxley Wants to Transform Our Brain's Relationship With Computers Forever

Tom Oxley remembers the moment his entire career trajectory turned.

It was in 2006, and an article in Nature had just been published describing the first time a brain-computer interface was successfully implanted and used in a human being.

“A patient who’d had a stroke moved a robotic limb and fed herself,” he recalls to Inverse as we sit in his office inside New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard, overlooking the East River. “And it just opened up my mind with possibilities.”

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Gear
Exclusive: Nothing Phone (2) confirmed for U.S. release in late 2023

Were you bummed that Nothing’s Phone (1) didn’t get an official U.S. release when the transparent Android phone launched last summer?

Are you disappointed with the $299 “beta membership” for U.S. customers that gets you a Phone (1) with the caveat that it only supports the N41 5G band on T-Mobile and there’s no 5G connectivity on AT&T or Verizon?

That all changes this year.

Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei has confirmed to Inverse that the company will make a significant push into the U.S. with its next flagship Android phone, the Phone (2), launching later this year. “We decided to make the U.S. our No. 1 priority in terms of markets,” Pei says.

“We couldn't do it earlier because we were only in our second year and our hands were tied building the team as we were building the products. Now as we're on a more solid footing, we can take a step forward.”

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THE INVERSE INTERVIEW
In Infinity Pool, Brandon Cronenberg Puts Alexander Skarsgärd Through Hell

For all the mind-altering psychosexual horrors they harbor, the nightmarish new worlds of Brandon Cronenberg outwardly resemble our own.

It’s in digging beneath the surface — of his characters’ civilized exteriors as much as their quietly sinister surroundings — that strange and twisted realities start to erupt.

Cronenberg and Infinity Pool star Alexander Skarsgärd discuss human civility, animal impulse, and their NC-17 sci-fi horror-satire, which blurs the lines between them.

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News
‘Tomb Raider’ is Becoming a TV Series — ‘The Last of Us’ Shows How It’s Done

Amid the success of The Last of Us at HBO, Amazon is hunting for a game adaptation of its own: Tomb Raider.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the online giant has picked up the film and TV rights to the Tomb Raider games. THR reports Amazon is planning a shared universe, all centered around heroine Lara Croft. Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge is set to write a series based on the game, though she’s not attached to act in it or work on the associated feature film. The project is part of a broader deal between Waller-Bridge and Amazon.

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Space
Astronomers Use a New Method to Identify Eight Candidate Alien Signals

Imagine the moment in Contact when Jodie Foster hears an alien radio signal coming from the Vega star system. Now imagine that Jodie Foster is an AI.

That might be one version of the future for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a decades-long effort to find cultures on other planets by looking for what SETI researchers call technosignatures: everything from alien radio messages to giant star-enclosing megastructures. University of Toronto machine learning researcher Peter Ma and his colleagues recently trained a machine learning algorithm to comb through radio astronomy data, searching for potential alien signals — and it spotted eight interesting signals that previous searches missed.

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