Web designer

Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, is not only in the business of space travel, electric cars and social media. He also owns Neuralink, developer of neurotechnology like brain-computer interface (BCI) devices.

A Neuralink brain implant has allowed a mute and paralyzed father from Arizona, United States to communicate just by thinking.

The man named Brad Smith, who suffers from the neuro-degenerative ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is the third recipient of the BCI chip which was implanted in his motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls body movement, Fox News reports.

The implanted device works by capturing neuron firings in the brain and sending the raw signal to a laptop, according to Fox News. Artificial intelligence processes the data to move the computer cursor on the keyboard and type his message in real time.

The BCI also allows Smith to talk with his own voice, which was cloned by AI from recordings before he lost it.

Despite the short life span of ALS sufferers, Smith has shown how the technology can help others with similar condition.

Meanwhile, German scientists have used another biotechnology to control a certain ability of an organism.

The researchers from the biomaterials department of the University of Bayreuth used the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to modify the genome of the common house spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, IFL Science reports.

The scientists injected red fluorescent protein gene into immature egg cells of female spiders to cause them to reproduce genetically modified offspring when they mate, according to IFL Science.

Some of the offsprings were able to spun red fluorescent silk, the researchers reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, Gizmodo reports.

Professor Dr. Thomas Scheibel, chair of Biomaterials at the University of Bayreuth and senior author of the study, told IFL Science that the successful experiment has the potential of creating spiders that can spin stronger silk.