Stanford and UCSF teams separately decoded attempted speech from cortical implants in people who could no longer speak intelligibly, reaching 62 and 78 words per minute as text, with UCSF also driving a synthesized voice and a digital avatar.
Clusters grown from adult human tracheal cells formed motile, cilia-driven constructs, and in a dish, groups of them encouraged neurons to grow across a scratched area.
Wireless brain implants decoding movement intention, linked to spinal cord stimulation, let a participant with chronic tetraplegia stand, walk and climb stairs, with some recovery persisting even when the system was off.
A wearable silicone bioreactor delivering a five-drug cocktail to amputation sites for one day triggered 18 months of leg regrowth in adult African clawed frogs, which normally cannot regenerate limbs.
Some xenobot shapes sweep loose frog stem cells into piles that mature into new motile constructs, a form of replication the authors call kinematic self-replication.
An evolutionary algorithm designed body shapes that were then assembled by hand from frog skin and heart-muscle cells, producing millimetre-scale living machines with behaviours no frog has.