If you’re in the market for a new television, some of our favorite QLED screens from TCL are almost half off for the start of football season. They’re already budget-friendly, so these discounts make them even more appealing as an upgrade, and they feature mini LED technology for impressive brightness.

While a variety of models are on sale, I want to focus on the two that have found their way into a few of our favorite television roundups. First up is the TCL QM6K (8/10, WIRED Recommends), a screen that impressed us with its excellent balance, screen uniformity, and color reproduction across the entire panel. It has great off-angle viewing too, if you’ve got a big or oddly shaped TV room, and has great quality-of-life features, like a dedicated eARC HDMI port for your soundbar.

If you have a particularly bright home, or a bigger budget, you might also consider the TCL QM8K (9/10, WIRED Recommends). This upgraded TV is one of the most premium mini LED screens we’ve had the pleasure of testing, with top-tier colors for the category. It’s also exceptionally bright, which is perfect if you’re stuck somewhere you can’t pull the shades and turn out the lights every time you want to watch a movie.

Both screens have Google TV for their interface, which is one of our preferred platforms for built-in streaming. It’s super fast and responsive, and has a massive catalog of apps and streaming options, even if you aren’t an Android user. Both the QM6K and QM8K also have impressively thin bezels, which doesn’t help performance, but will make these feel a bit more modern hanging on your wall or sitting on your entertainment stand.

The 65-inch QM6K is marked down from $1,000 to just $650, a healthy 35 percent discount for an impressive mid-tier television. Meanwhile, the 65-inch QM8K is discounted from $2,500 to $1,500. The discounts should run across official TCL retailers, so I was able to find both the QM6K and QM8K at Best Buy as well, if you’d prefer to try and find one locally, and there are markdowns on both larger and smaller examples as well, with some variation between them.

In brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and other neural implant systems, electrodes serve as the critical interface and are core sensors linking electronic devices with biological nervous systems. Most currently implanted electrodes are static: Once positioned, they remain fixed, sampling neural activity from only a limited region. Over time, they often elicit immune responses, suffer signal degradation, or fail entirely, which has hindered the broader application and transformative potential of BCIs.

In a study published in Nature, a team led by Prof. Liu Zhiyuan, Prof. Xu Tiantian and Assoc. Prof. Han Fei from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with Prof. Yan Wei from Donghua University, have reported a soft, movable, long-term implantable fiber electrode called “NeuroWorm,” marking a radical shift for bioelectronic interfaces from static operation to dynamic operation and from passive recording to active, intelligent exploration.

The design of NeuroWorm is inspired by the earthworm’s flexible locomotion and segmented sensory system. By employing sophisticated electrode patterning and a rolling technique, the researchers transformed a two-dimensional array on an ultrathin flexible polymer into a tiny fiber approximately 200 micrometers in diameter.

The tiny NeuroWorm integrates up to 60 independent signal channels along its length, resembling a highly sophisticated sensory highway. Crucially, the tip of the fiber is equipped with a small magnetic module, enabling wireless steering of the implanted device via external magnetic fields. With this setup, NeuroWorm effectively records high-quality spatiotemporal signals in situ while being steered within the brain or along muscle tissue as needed.

To validate NeuroWorm’s ability to navigate within muscle fascia, the researchers implanted it through a minimally-invasive, half-centimeter incision in a rat and then used external magnets to guide its daily movement across muscle surfaces. X-ray images showed the biomimetic motion, which resembles a microscale bionic worm gliding smoothly between tissue layers.

During the seven-day post-implantation period, the device demonstrated the capability to relocate across various positions while concurrently capturing clear and stable electromyographic (EMG) signals from all channels. This functionality effectively realizes dynamic and precise monitoring with the principle of “measurement on demand at targeted locations.”

The researchers implanted a single NeuroWorm in a rat’s leg muscle for over 43 weeks, during which it continuously and stably recorded EMG signals. The fibrotic encapsulation thickness was less than 23 micrometers, much thinner than the 451 micrometers typically observed with conventional rigid electrodes. In addition, the researchers navigated the NeuroWorm through a rabbit’s brain, guiding it from the cortex into subcortical regions while capturing high-quality neural signals throughout its trajectory. These examples underscore the device’s biocompatibility and long-term stability.

This study provides a solution to enable noninvasive repositioning of implants via magnetic guidance, potentially eliminating surgeries due to drift or misplacement. NeuroWorm offers a smarter, softer, and less invasive platform for long-term, multisite neural monitoring with potential applications in BCls, smart prosthetics, epilepsy mapping, and the management of chronic neurological disorders.