🔔Bezos and Gates back Synchron in drive for brain implant breakthrough

LAST March, brain-computing interface expert Tom Oxley sat down to dinner with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos to talk about Oxley’s nascent company, Synchron That meal in Ojai, Calif, ended with something better than dessert: Bezos told Oxley that he wanted to invest in the business.

Synchron said on Thursday (Dec 15) it completed a US$75 million funding round, part of it from Bezos Expeditions.

The financing was led by ARCH Venture Partners, and includes a cheque from Gates Frontier, the venture investment arm of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and others. Existing investors also participated, including Khosla Ventures – whose founder, Vinod Khosla, introduced Oxley to Gates.

Brain-computer interfaces, known as BCIs, can interpret and stimulate parts of the brain and are seen as a possible treatment for brain injuries. New investors approached Synchron “through the lens of making an impact in neurology in an area of need,” Oxley said in an interview. They “saw BCI as a future therapeutic.” About 100 million people globally have upper limb impairment, he said, and could benefit from the technology.

🔔The search for next-generation armor materials has regularly led scientists into the realm of nature, where everything from snail shells to sea sponges have inspired some exciting possibilities. Researchers at the University of Kent have followed in these footsteps to developed a protein-based family of synthetic materials that can withstand supersonic impacts and which they see one day finding use in military and space applications.

Like another interesting advance in material science we looked at back in 2016, the team’s creation uses the unique properties of a protein as a starting point. Where that previous example took advantage of a protein’s counter-intuitive compression capabilities, the University of Kent team has drilled into the natural shock-absorbing abilities of a protein called talin, and used it to create a family of hydrogel materials called TSAMs (Talin Shock Absorbing Materials).