Reporters’ Notebook: The 10 Most Overlooked bioeconomy stories of the week

There’s been a breakthrough in translating brain waves directly into written text. You know the usual drill, we think, we speak, someone takes dictation. Usually the result is a) pretty accurate, b) slow and c) costs money. For years, there’s been the dream of cutting out the middleman and directly taking words from the same brainwaves that the speech centers in our brains use to generate spoken language. It’s proven to be far stickier to de-code the sometimes fuzzy brainwaves than originally hoped. Now, there’s been a breakthrough. This disclosure in Nature Neuroscience shows a team of researchers from the University of California at San Francisco who have achieved 97 percent accuracy based on a 30-50 sentence set of spoken thoughts. 250 or so electrodes were planted on the skull to measure the brainwaves and learn over time how to decode them.

More on the story, here.