The U.S. Department of Transportation is investigating Elon Musk's brain-implant company — Neuralink — over allegations of illegally moving hazardous pathogens.

“You could have a Neuralink device implanted right now and you wouldn’t even know. I mean, hypothetically ... In fact, in one of these demos, I will.”

🗣 @Elon_Musk

"First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs," Musk said in April 2021.

Neuralink also believes its device will eventually be able to restore neural activity inside the body, allowing those with spinal cord injuries to move limbs.

Animal care at @Neuralink

At @Neuralink, we have imaging capabilities that let us see exactly what’s going on in fully sealed devices. For implant debugging, we often capture high-resolution 2D and 3D images with microCT. It’s what’s on the inside that counts ♥️

We are building surgery simulations for faster iteration and better test coverage. Join us to help expand this capability🦾

Bath time! 🛁 Our accelerated lifetime tester ages our implants at 4x speed. Developing new ways of expediting long-duration testing at scale allows us to iterate faster, identify low probability failures, and reduce animal use

microCT view inside a Neuralink

I would get the @Neuralink brain chip, would you?

Freshly baked 🍪

Monkey business 🐒🌈

We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!

This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people.

Recruitment is not yet open for our clinical trial. We’ll announce more information on this soon!

Our thin, flexible threads are a few red blood cells wide, minimizing the brain’s response to them. We use scanning electron microscopy to verify process control, understand defects, and sometimes take glamour shots 🔬

We want to surpass able-bodied human performance with our technology. Using only his mind, here's precision cursor control from Pager (star of Monkey MindPong) achieving 65% and 88% of the median Neuralinker using a mouse. Join us to breakthrough to 110% and beyond! 🧠

We practice surgeries on proxies with all the hardware and instruments needed in our mock OR in the engineering space. This helps us rapidly test and benchmark surgical improvements. A great surgery is a boring one, and practice makes perfect 🎯

We caught a glimpse of the Northern Lights at the office 🌌! The two light sources are “sputter guns” depositing Titanium and Iridium on our electrodes through plasma bombardment.

We test the thermal performance of our implants to ensure safety and improve efficiency. Here, we are taking infrared images to detect hotspots on the bottom surface of an implant while charging with the charger coil in different positions. Stay cool 😎