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After a brain stem stroke left him almost entirely paralyzed in the 1990s, French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a book about his experiences—letter by letter, blinking his left eye in response to a helper who repeatedly recited the alphabet. Today, people with similar conditions often have far more communication options. Some devices, for example, track eye movements or other small muscle twitches to let users select words from a screen.

And on the cutting edge of this field, neuroscientists have more recently developed brain implants that can turn neural signals directly into whole words. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) largely require users to physically attempt to speak, however, and that can be a slow and tiring process. But now a new development in neural prosthetics changes that, allowing users to communicate by simply thinking what they want to say.

The new system relies on much of the same technology as the more common “attempted speech” devices. Both use sensors implanted in a part of the brain called the motor cortex, which sends motion commands to the vocal tract. The brain activation detected by these sensors is then fed into a machine-learning model to interpret which brain signals correspond to which sounds for an individual user. It then uses those data to predict which word the user is attempting to say.

But the motor cortex doesn’t only light up when we attempt to speak; it’s also involved, to a lesser extent, in imagined speech. The researchers took advantage of this to develop their “inner speech” decoding device and published the results on Thursday in Cell. The team studied three people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and one with a brain stem stroke, all of whom had previously had the sensors implanted. Using this new “inner speech” system, the participants needed only to think a sentence they wanted to say, and it would appear on a screen in real time. While previous inner speech decoders were limited to only a handful of words, the new device allowed participants to draw from a dictionary of 125,000 words.“As researchers, our goal is to find a system that is comfortable [for the user] and ideally reaches a naturalistic ability,” says lead author Erin Kunz, a postdoctoral researcher who is developing neural prostheses at Stanford University.

Previous research found that “physically attempting to speak was tiring and that there were inherent speed limitations with it, too,” she says. Attempted speech devices, such as the one used in the study, require users to inhale as if they are actually saying the words. But because of impaired breathing, many users need multiple breaths to complete a single word with that method. Attempting to speak can also produce distracting noises and facial expressions that users find undesirable. With the new technology, the study’s participants could communicate at a comfortable conversational rate of about 120 to 150 words per minute, with no more effort than it took to think of what they wanted to say.

Like most BCIs that translate brain activation into speech, the new technology only works if people are able to convert the general idea of what they want to say into a plan for how to say it. Alexander Huth, who researches BCIs at the University of California, Berkeley, and wasn’t involved in the new study, explains that in typical speech, “you start with an idea of what you want to say. That idea gets translated into a plan for how to move your [vocal] articulators. That plan gets sent to the actual muscles, and then they carry it out.” But in many cases, people with impaired speech aren’t able to complete that first step. “This technology only works in cases where the ‘idea to plan’ part is functional but the ‘plan to movement’ part is broken,”—a collection of conditions called dysarthria, Huth says.

According to Kunz, the four research participants are eager about the new technology. “Largely, [there was] a lot of excitement about potentially being able to communicate fast again,” she says—adding that one participant was particularly thrilled by his newfound potential to interrupt a conversation—something he couldn’t do with the slower pace of an attempted speech device.

To ensure private thoughts remained private, the researchers implemented a code phrase: “chitty chitty bang bang.” When internally spoken by participants, this would prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing. 

Brain-reading implants inevitably raise concerns about mental privacy. For now, Huth isn’t concerned about the technology being misused or developed recklessly, speaking to the integrity of the research groups involved in neural prosthetics research. “I think they’re doing great work; they’re led by doctors; they’re very patient-focused. A lot of what they do is really trying to solve problems for the patients,” he says, “even when those problems aren’t necessarily things that we might think of,” such as being able to interrupt a conversation or “making a voice that sounds more like them.” 

For Kunz, this research is particularly close to home. “My father actually had ALS and lost the ability to speak,” she says, adding that this is why she got into her field of research. “I kind of became his own personal speech translator toward the end of his life, since I was kind of the only one that could understand him. That’s why I personally know the importance and the impact this sort of research can have.”

The contribution and willingness of the research participants are crucial in studies like this, Kunz notes. “The participants that we have are truly incredible individuals who volunteered to be in the study, not necessarily to get a benefit to themselves but to help develop this technology for people with paralysis down the line. And I think that they deserve all the credit in the world for that.”

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One of the reasons Serena Williams decided to take some time away from tennis was to focus on motherhood and expanding her family. The tennis icon is staying true to her word and has just kickstarted a world tour with her eldest daughter, Olympia, 7, and youngest, Adira, 1. 

Williams, 43, announced the beginning of her mother-daughter travels with her Instagram followers and shared some snaps from their adventures. 

“A year ago, I told @olympiaohanian that we would start an epic girls trip that would include the 7 wonders of the world, and there are a lot of them!” the caption began. “Natural wonders. Man made wonders. Ancient wonders. So we are going to do them all. We started with #NiagaraFalls … where to next?”

The Seven Wonders of the World include the Great Wall of China, Petra, Christ the Redeemer, Machu Picchu, Chichén Itzá, Colosseum, and Taj Mahal. Niagara Falls is considered one of the Seven Wonders of North America.

In the footage shared, the mom and former athlete posed with her girls in front of the stunning Niagara Falls. Olympia, whom many of us remember being a baby in diapers, is almost at her mom’s shoulder. The trio even went aboard Niagara City Cruises, where they sighted a rainbow in front of the waterfalls.

In a follow-up post a couple of days later, Serena posted more images from their getaway with the caption, “What can I say, still chasing waterfalls… 🤷🏾‍♀️.” Williams made the brave choice to depart from one of her greatest loves, tennis, in 2022 after much contemplation.

“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair,” she wrote in an essay for Vogue at the time. “If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.” 

Although it was a tough decision, the tennis pro is happy in this chapter of her life where she focuses on entrepreneurship, wellness, and motherhood. Williams’ longtime husband, Alexis Ohanian, sang his wife’s praises, emphasizing how great of a mother she is during an appearance on the Today show in July. 

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Serena Williams/Instagram

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, iced out of the Alaska talks about his own country’s future, has come to the same conclusion, telling reporters on Tuesday: “Putin will win in this. Because he is seeking, excuse me, photos. He needs a photo from the meeting with President Trump.”

But it is more than a photo op. In addition to thawing Russia’s pariah status in the West, the summit has sowed discord within NATO — a perennial Russian goal — and postponed Mr. Trump’s threat of tough new sanctions. Little more than two weeks ago, he vowed that if Mr. Putin did not commit to a cease-fire by last Friday, he would punish Moscow and countries like China and India that help Russia’s war effort by buying its oil and gas.

The deadline passed with no pause in the war — the fighting has, in fact, intensified as Russia pushes forward with a summer offensive — and no new economic penalties on Russia.

“Instead of getting hit with sanctions, Putin got a summit,” said Ryhor Nizhnikau, a Russia expert and senior researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “This is a tremendous victory for Putin, no matter what the result of the summit.”

Before Alaska, only two Western leaders — the prime ministers of tiny Slovakia and Hungary — had met with Mr. Putin since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and was placed under an international arrest warrant for war crimes in March 2023.

Many in Europe have been flabbergasted by Mr. Trump’s decision to hold a summit on Ukraine that excluded Mr. Zelensky, and the continent’s leaders have pressed the president not to strike a deal behind Ukraine’s back.

Mr. Trump tried to allay those fears in a video call with European leaders, including Mr. Zelensky, on Wednesday. The Europeans said they had hammered out a strategy with President Trump for his meeting with Mr. Putin, including an insistence that any peace plan must start with a cease-fire and not be negotiated without Ukraine at the table.

A peace deal on Ukraine is not Mr. Putin’s real goal for the summit, said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “His objective is to secure Trump’s support in pushing through the Russian proposals.”

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European leaders were stunned by Mr. Trump’s decision to hold a meeting with Mr. Putin on Ukraine that excluded Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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In the spring of 2022, the U.S. space community selected its top priority for the nation’s next decade of science and exploration: a mission to Uranus, the gassy, bluish planet only seen up close during a brief spacecraft flyby in 1986. More than 2.6 billion kilometers from Earth at its nearest approach, Uranus still beckons with what it could reveal about the solar system’s early history—and the overwhelming numbers of Uranus-sized worlds that astronomers have spied around other stars. Now, President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA could push those discoveries further away than ever—not by directly canceling the mission but by abandoning the fuel needed to pull it off.

The technology in question, known as radioisotope power systems (RPS), is an often overlooked element of NASA’s budget that involves turning nuclear fuel into usable electricity. More like a battery than a full-scale reactor, RPS devices attach directly to spacecraft to power them into the deepest, darkest reaches of the solar system, where sunlight is too sparse to use. It’s a critical technology that has enabled two dozen NASA missions, from the iconic Voyagers 1 and 2 now traversing interstellar space to the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers presently operating on Mars.

But RPS is expensive, costing NASA about $175 million in 2024 alone. That’s largely because of the costs of sourcing and refining plutonium 238, the chemically toxic, vanishingly scarce, and difficult to work with radioactive material at the heart of all U.S. RPS. The Fiscal Year 2026 President’s Budget Request (PBR) released this spring suggests shutting down the program by 2029. That’s just long enough to use RPS tech on NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly

mission, a nuclear-powered dual-quadcopter drone to explore Saturn’s frigid moon Titan. After that, without RPS, no further U.S. missions to the outer solar system would be possible for the foreseeable future.

“It was an oversight,” says Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, who has led science efforts on RPS-enabled NASA missions such as Cassini at Saturn and Galileo at Jupiter. “It’s really like the left hand wasn’t talking to the right hand when the PBR was put together.”

Throughout its 400-odd pages, the PBR repeatedly acknowledges the importance of planning for the nation’s next generation of planetary science missions and even proposes funding NASA’s planetary science division better than any other part of the space agency’s science operations, which it seeks to cut by half. But “to achieve cost savings,” it states, 2028 should be the last year of funding for RPS, and “given budget constraints and the reduced pipeline of new planetary science missions,” the proposed budget provides no funding after 2026 for work by the Department of Energy (DOE) that supports RPS.

Indeed, NASA’s missions to the outer solar system are infrequent because of their long durations and the laborious engineering required for a spacecraft to withstand cold, inhospitable conditions so far from home. But what these missions lack in frequency, they make up for in discovery: some of the most tantalizing and potentially habitable environments beyond Earth are thought to exist there, in vast oceans of icy moons once thought to be wastelands. One such environment lurks on Saturn’s Enceladus, which was ranked as the nation’s second-highest priority after Uranus in the U.S.’s 2022 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey.“The outer solar system is kind of the last frontier,” says Alex Hayes, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, who chaired the Decadal Survey panel that selected Enceladus. “You think you know how something works until you send a spacecraft there to explore it, and then you realize that you had no idea how it worked.”Unlike solar power systems—relatively “off-the-shelf” tech that can be used on a per-mission basis—RPS requires a continuous production pipeline that’s vulnerable to disruption. NASA’s program operates through the DOE, with the space agency purchasing DOE services to source, purify, and encapsulate the plutonium 238 fuel, as well as to assemble and test the resulting RPS devices. The most common kind of RPS, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, converts the thermal energy released from plutonium 238’s natural decay to as much as 110 watts of electrical power. Any excess heat helps keep the spacecraft and its instruments warm enough to function.

Establishing the RPS pipeline took around three decades, and the program’s roots lie in the bygone Cold War era of heavy U.S. investment in nuclear technology and infrastructure. Preparing the radioactive fuel alone takes the work of multiple DOE facilities scattered across the country: Oak Ridge National Laboratory produces the plutonium oxide, then Los Alamos National Laboratory forms it into usable pellets, which are finally stockpiled at Idaho National Laboratory. Funding cuts would throw this pipeline into disarray and cause an exodus of experienced workers, Hendrix says. Restoring that expertise and capability, she adds, would require billions of dollars and a few decades more.

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Taylor Swift’s podcast appearance on New Heights was full of moments that her fans adored. But what revelation was the greatest during the two-hour broadcast? Stylist contributor, Rose Gallagher, shares her thoughts.

Yesterday marked something of a revolutionary Taylor Swift moment. Of all the surprises she’s ever sprung upon us, from hidden messages to surprise double albums, she gave us the biggest scoop of all: a glimpse at the person behind the pop star.

Swift joined her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and his brother Jason as a guest on their podcast New Heights, marking her first ever podcast appearance. 

Watching live on YouTube last night, Jason’s questions made for a fascinating listen. There is a lot of ground covered on things we’ve not verbally heard her take on yet. They discussed the saga of her losing the rights to and buying back her music. We got a deep dive into the logistics that helped to explain the magnitude of how monumental this was. Swift also spoke at length about her favourite parts of the Eras tour (the Willow fan project was among them, which made me so happy! I, too, took yellow balloons with me to light up with my iPhone torch like an orb for that witchy song). It was truly eye-opening to hear about what went into making her ground-breaking tour.

But, the thing that surprised me the most wasn’t hearing all of this, and it also wasn’t one singular quote or story. What surprised me was the sheer length of the episode – and how it was arguably the first time we’ve ever seen what Swift is like behind her billion-dollar image. We had two hours of no-holds-barred access to Swift and Kelce as a couple, with video footage, endless audio, inside jokes. For someone we know to be fiercely private, Swift gave us a real glimpse into her day-to-day life. You can be the most media-trained and professional person in the game – but sit next to someone you trust for two whole hours, and what you get is a beautiful insight into someone’s life. We couldn’t help but feel the playfulness, the happiness, and the cosy bond between them, and I think we got to see the real Swift.

Don’t get me wrong, there were scoops along the way that made it feel like a traditional interview. There was the shock news that Swift was announcing her new album, The Life Of A Showgirl, right there on the episode. She gave us the entire song list, including a title track that features Sabrina Carpenter, and told us all about its inception between Eras tour dates. 

But the real insight came in the smaller details. Kelce reads the commentary on their relationship online and finds it funny. She doesn’t; she sees her energy as an “expensive” commodity and won’t waste it doing that. The two of them mince about the house making sourdough and she scours online blogs to perfect her craft. 

Travis and Jason are known to be close, and you definitely felt a sense of how connected this whole unit are. Jason asked Swift, “were you aware that I had been told I had to be on best behaviour?” when they first met. We got a further glimpse into their dynamic when Swift was laughing about Jason not knowing what to do with his beer when offered the chance to meet the royal family on the Eras tour. He wanted to keep it, but didn’t want to be inappropriate, and the conundrum sent him into a tailspin. 

It’s easy to see glimpses of Swift’s life – a selfie with Prince William, Princess Charlotte, and Prince George – and think this is a normal day for her. But in reality, alongside preparing a performance for 90,000 people at Wembley, she’s got a brother-in-law having a meltdown about how he’s meant to act when he meets the royals – which is likely what any of the rest of us would likely be doing in that situation. 

If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, I’d really recommend it. For those who aren’t familiar with her, it’s rare to get this depth of a chat with her, the likes of which we haven’t seen since her Miss Americana documentary – and arguably here, alongside people she feels safe and trustful of – we get an even greater glimpse of who she truly is.

For the fans, it’s lovely to get a glimpse into Swift the person rather than Swift the popstar. I really admire her bravery in showing us this side of her. Though we haven’t had this level of access to her before, we’ve certainly been aware of the highs and lows of her relationships. I remember when the Eras tour setlist changed to accommodate a new album, The Tortured Poets Department, and wondering if The 1 may have been removed because it felt too raw in light of her previous break-up. To have an awareness of how much her fans read into every little detail (like I’m doing right now!) and still put herself on the line to be observed like this? That’s the sign of a true optimist and a true romantic.

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Credit: Getty

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