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Soft ‘NeuroWorm’ electrode allows wireless repositioning and stable neural monitoring

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Soft ‘NeuroWorm’ electrode allows wireless repositioning and stable neural monitoring


Design, fabrication strategy and demonstrations of NeuroWorm. Credit: Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-0934-w

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 as needed.







Credit: Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-0934-w

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.

More information:
Ruijie Xie et al, A movable long-term implantable soft microfibre for dynamic bioelectronics, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-0934-w. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09344-w

Citation:
Soft ‘NeuroWorm’ electrode allows wireless repositioning and stable neural monitoring (2025, September 17)
retrieved 17 September 2025
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Several High-End TCL TVs are Almost 50% Off Today

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Several High-End TCL TVs are Almost 50% Off Today


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.

  • Photograph: Parker Hall

  • Photograph: Parker Hall

  • Photograph: Parker Hall

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.



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Inside Trumpworld’s Reality Distortion Field

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Inside Trumpworld’s Reality Distortion Field



In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing, Donald Trump’s advisors were sure who was to blame. That law enforcement says they were wrong didn’t, and doesn’t, much seem to matter.



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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Is Bananas for Google Gemini’s AI Image Generator

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Is Bananas for Google Gemini’s AI Image Generator


Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is in London, standing in front of a room full of journalists, outing himself as a huge fan of Gemini’s Nano Banana. “How could anyone not love Nano Banana? I mean Nano Banana, how good is that? Tell me it’s not true!” He addresses the room. No one responds. “Tell me it’s not true! It’s so good. I was just talking to Demis [Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind] yesterday and I said ‘How about that Nano Banana! How good is that?’”

It looks like lots of people agree with him: The popularity of the Nano Banana AI image generator—which launched in August and allows users to make precise edits to AI images while preserving the quality of faces, animals, or other objects in the background—has caused a 300 million image surge for Gemini in the first few days in September already, according to a post on X by Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs and Google Gemini.

Huang, whose company was among a cohort of big US technology companies to announce investments into data centers, supercomputers, and AI research in the UK on Tuesday, is on a high. Speaking ahead of a white-tie event with UK prime minister Keir Starmer (where he plans to wear custom black leather tails), he’s boisterously optimistic about the future of AI in the UK, saying the country is “too humble” about the country’s potential for AI advancements.

He cites the UK’s pedigree in themes as wide as the industrial revolution, steam trains, DeepMind (now owned by Google), and university researchers, as well as other tangential skills. “No one fries food better than you do,” he quips. “Your tea is good. You’re great. Come on!”

Nvidia announced a $683 million equity investment in datacenter builder Nscale this week, a move that—alongside investments from OpenAI and Microsoft—has propelled the company to the epicenter of this AI push in the UK. Huang estimates that Nscale will generate more than $68 billion in revenues over six years. “I’ll go on record to say I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to him,” he says, referring to Nscale CEO Josh Payne.

“As AI services get deployed—I’m sure that all of you use it. I use it every day and it’s improved my learning, my thinking. It’s helped me access information, access knowledge a lot more efficiently. It helps me write, helps me think, it helps me formulate ideas. So my experience with AI is likely going to be everybody’s experience. I have the benefit of using all the AI—how good is that?”

The leather-jacket-wearing billionaire, who previously told WIRED that he uses AI agents in his personal life, has expanded on how he uses AI (that’s not Nano Banana) for most daily things, including his public speeches and research.

“I really like using an AI word processor because it remembers me and knows what I’m going to talk about. I could describe the different circumstance that I’m in and yet it still knows that I’m Jensen, just in a different circumstance,” Huang explains. “In that way it could reshape what I’m doing and be helpful. It’s a thinking partner, it’s truly terrific, and it saves me a ton of time. Frankly, I think the quality of work is better.”

His favorite one to use “depends on what I’m doing,” he says. “For something more technical I will use Gemini. If I’m doing something where it’s a bit more artistic I prefer Grok. If it’s very fast information access I prefer Perplexity—it does a really good job of presenting research to me. And for near everyday use I enjoy using ChatGPT,” Huang says.

“When I am doing something serious I will give the same prompt to all of them, and then I ask them to, because it’s research oriented, critique each other’s work. Then I take the best one.”

In the end though, all topics lead back to Nano Banana. “AI should be democratized for everyone. There should be no person who is left behind, it’s not sensible to me that someone should be left behind on electricity or the internet of the next level of technology,” he says.

“AI is the single greatest opportunity for us to close the technology divide,” says Huang. “This technology is so easy to use—who doesn’t know how to use Nano?”





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