Not too much of note this month on the science front and even I have been mostly preoccupied following up on events in Ukraine. Still I’ve seen some announcements of medical advancements that sound very exciting.

• The bit of news that has been shared around the most widely is the announcement of how a man with a complete spinal cord injury is able to walk again with the help of an implant. This sort of paralysis is very common in fiction so we all know that such people are unable to walk because the nerve signals sent down the signal cord are unable to reach the lower body and legs. The experimental implant bridges the damaged area with electrodes that target the dormant nerves beyond that area to amplify the signals coming from the brain. The most surprising finding is that the participants in the study were able to stand up and walk almost immediately after the surgery had healed without much training at all. Note that this is still not full recovery as they still need to be supported by a walking frame and the device must be specifically programmed to accommodate different types of movements but this really is science-fiction technology come to life.
• The invention that is more likely to be of help to most people however is synthetic enamel than promises to be harder and stronger than the real thing. As you may already know, we can’t ever regrow tooth enamel that has been lost, the best we can do is remineralize the enamel that we do still have but over time this inevitably wears down. So that’s why this announcement of a synthetic version that replicates the natural version even on multiple microscopic scales is an exciting development.
• Finally we end with a speculative article based on a study that I must warn uses very few participants. The claim is that by inserting electrodes into the temporal lobe of the brain, the researchers are able to determine exactly which neurons fire up during specific tasks. In doing so, they noticed that specific groups of neurons fire up when doing different mathematical operations. This is specific enough that an addition operation activates a different group of neurons than a subtraction operation, suggesting that the brain contains highly specialized circuits for specific operations. This accords well with improved understanding of how the brain works in that it is not an all purpose general computing machine but consists of many circuits, each highly specialized in different tasks but the circuity can be retrained when needed. But of course this is all highly speculative at the moment.