Neural networks translated a paralyzed man’s brainwaves into conversational phrases. Researchers trained a system to interpret electrical impulses from the brain of a man who had lost the ability to speak 15 years ago, and displayed them as words on a video screen.

An insect-sorting robot could help scientists grapple with the global biodiversity crisis. An automated insect classifier sucks in tiny arthropods, classifies them, and maps their most important identifying features.

Computer vision is probing the history of ancient pottery | What’s new: Researchers at Northern Arizona University developed a machine learning model that identifies different styles of Native American painting on ceramic fragments and sorts the shards by historical period.

A combination of computer vision and drones could help restore dwindling killer whale populations. Researchers at Oregon State University and conservation groups SR3 and Vulcan developed a system that assesses the health of orcas.

Surgical robots perform millions of delicate operations annually under human control. Now they’re getting ready to operate on their own.

Some doctors don’t trust a second opinion when it comes from an AI system. A team at MIT and Regensburg University investigated how physicians responded to diagnostic advice they received from a machine learning model versus a human expert.

Many medical drugs work by modulating the body’s production of specific proteins. Recent research aimed to predict this activity, enabling researchers to identify drugs that might counteract the effects of Covid-19.

Neural nets could speed up development of new materials.What’s new: A deep learning system from Sandia National Laboratories dramatically accelerated simulations that help scientists understand how changes to the design or fabrication of a material change its properties.

An AI-powered collar may help protect wild elephants from poachers, hunters, and other hostile humans. Ten ElephantEdge wireless tracking collars will be fitted onto African elephants next year, TechCrunch reported.

Covid Moonshot, an open-source project to vet potential medicines using machine learning, is closing in on compounds that might help curb Covid-19. Four new antiviral drugs identified by the project are ready to advance to animal trials.

Many people worry that face recognition is intrusive, but wild animals seem to find it bearable. Melanie Clapham at University of Victoria with teammates of the BearID Project developed a model that performs face recognition for brown bears.

Machine learning is helping to design energy cells that charge faster and last longer. Battery developers are using ML algorithms to devise new chemicals, components, and charging techniques faster than traditional techniques allow.

New guidelines for reporting on experiments with medical AI aim to ensure that such research is transparent, rigorous, and reliable. Spirit-AI and Consort-AI are complementary protocols designed to improve the quality of clinical trials for AI-based interventions.

Geologists call them slow slips: deep, low-frequency earthquakes that can last a month but have little effect on the surface. A model trained to predict such events could help with forecasting potentially catastrophic quakes.

Convolutional neural networks are good at recognizing disease symptoms in medical scans of patients who were injected with iodine-based dye, that makes their organs more visible. But some patients can’t take the dye. Now synthetic scans from a GAN are helping CNNs learn to analyze undyed images.