Hacker News Reader

Comment by alantrrs | Hacker News Reader

This + OpenWater(https://www.openwater.cc/) will be a way better approach than Neuralink.

Since genetic engineering is necessary to first put light sensitive ion channels in the brain, I don't see how this is "way better" if you're targeting applications in humans like neuralink.

I'd much rather get an injection than get brain surgery.

I would think a brain virus has a higher risk than a one-time surgery.

I wouldn't even try to guess either way - there's zero statistics for genetic manipulation of the human brain and some stats for brain surgery.

Comparing few data points to none just doesn't allow for any intuition about the safety of either compared to the other.

OpenWater doesn't have enough resolution. I find their PR kinda sketchy because it makes a lot of emphasis on laser and optical things, which they use, but rarely mentions that the fact that they rely on an ultrasound beacon makes their best-case temporal and spatial resolution not as exciting.

The tech is really cool, as in a portable MRI-like device is really cool even if it's resolution is way worse than a big MRI machine. But it's nowhere near "brain scanning for brain upload" territory because of fundamental physical laws that they actually choose to work withing the constraints of.

I would really like to see something like OpenWater but used to help with de-scattering LiDAR on rainy/foggy days. I'm not sure if it's possible but from my limited understanding I think it's worth the try.

From the talks/podcasts I've heard, the goal is for the resolution to be good enough to measure and target individual neurons. Not sure where you get the ultrasound beacon part, but the images they have on their are using only red/near-infrared light. That being said, all of these is based on their own advertising. Curious to know, what are the fundamental physical constraints you are referring?

So if I don't misunderstand they heal the scattered wavefront by knowing that they are applying ultrasound to relax/contract a specific blood vessel. So while the image is created with information coming from reflected photons in the red/NIR spectrum they also know how to locate that physically by using a beacon.

This is all from old tech-talks and material that I saw. They were even very vocal about how they were able to do this because they were using this new piezoelectric microphone/speaker chips in the ultrasound frequencies.

Wow, very interesting project, I hope they succeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com