120 years of service known for its palatial and neil barofsky interior the yes key food all stayed in business your imperial russia and outlived the soviet era but officials say legal issues and a drop in tourism because of the pandemic led to its closure the government says will keep the stores interior as an architectural monument. well again i'm fully back to bow with the headlines on al-jazeera iran's nuclear agency says its main the times facility suffered a blackout because of what it calls an act of terrorism it says the incident on sunday morning affected the electrical distribution great israeli media coating anonymous sources are reporting this was a cyber attack carried out by the country's intelligence services and this is coming a day after iran began taking steps to enrich uranium faster assad big is in tehran with more on the reaction from iran nuclear agency the seems to be an admission

from iran that this was some sort of attack and the head of iran's atomic organization has come out and said that this act was carried out by those the poles iran's progress in the nuclear industry and it was shows a failure of those that oppose iran's negotiations to have those sanctions lifted he said that iran condemns the act and urged the international community and the international atomic energy agency to confront what he called nuclear terrorism. while the iranian nuclear issue is high on the agenda as a u.s. secretary of defense lloyd austin visits israel defense minister benny gantz says his government is ready to work with its ally to ensure any new deal with iran does not undermine regional security the polls have close in charts presidential election incumbent dangerous to be seeking a 6th term to extend his 30 year rule the opposition call for a boycott it accuses a government of repression and cracking down on anti-government protests this

research in israel suggests the frys a covert 1000 vaccine may be less effective against the very interested covered in south africa scientists compared 800 people who tested positive for the virus half of them not vaccinated and the other half inoculated with the pfizer shot the south african corona virus variant managed to breach the protection offered by 2 doses of a vaccine to some degree china's center for disease control says the government may need a change in its coronavirus vaccine strategy after admitting issues with the effectiveness of locally produced shots is how the agency has suggested mixing vaccines or revising dose timetables those are the headlines on al-jazeera be back with the news hour in under 30 minutes right after inside story to stay with us.

plucking people's minds into a computer brain chips are no longer a science fiction and can theoretically be used to treat several medical conditions so can brain computer interface is really transform people's lives and what would be the downside this is inside story. it's. hello and welcome to the program i'm dead you know imagine being able to control your smartphone with your mind or being able to type using your thoughts instead of your thumbs or tesla c.e.o. elon musk says that could soon become a reality particularly for people with. his brain chip start up neural link has

just enabled a monkey to play a video game by thinking they did it by embedding 2 chips on each side of the animal's brain to record his mind activity and this part of the experiment the macaque was trained to move a joystick data sent to the computer was then used to allow the monkey to control the stick just by thinking about moving its hands up or down while near a link uses a technology called. brain computer interface it reads brain activity and can also communicate information back to the brain it's been around for a while but neural links big advance is making it wireless rather than a direct connection now it's 1st commercial products will allow people with piro says to use smartphones it could also be. used to help cure a brain conditions like alzheimer's disease on the company's basilan must believes that it could one day allow telepathic communication without the need for spoken words. so

a lot to discuss with our guests let's bring them in joining us from utrecht is nick ramsey was a professor in cognitive neuroscience at the university of attract and then master of the root and they peña who's an assistant professor a digital legal studies at master university thanks for joining us welcome to the program nicole start with you how significant is this latest reveal from there a link it's very interesting from an engineering point if you will i think that made it amazing tiny difference that does a lot more than currently francisco can but the rest of the story is basically showing that you can they can do what we've been able to do for 20 years. so it's you know the monkey being able to play again is not a big surprise we have 2030 people implanted with feiss that could do. a lot better than that but you know i think what he shows is that at least if i swear it's right in what he seems to be new as well is that it is wireless so does that change where

technology is headed and is that a big deal in your opinion now you know we have wireless devices for the last 878 years the big difference is that the number of electrodes the number of sensors that it can serve is a lot higher and the really a lot harder to base we have fully implanted now it's about 64 electrodes sensors and i think he has over the sow's ear 2000 in the type x. that's for the inmates and it's engineering feat. ruta i wonder if you can weigh in on the technological advancements and how you would write it. yes well my background is more from the legal and technology writer which sometimes we're going to get into a little bit later but then just give me your reaction to what you've seen come out of this video yeah i mean it is fascinating to see how far we've become but i agree with nick that some of these incidents we already saw in research papers so from

engineering perspective it's wonderful to see that we can do it right now so is it more of a high than in your opinion ruta. i mean we do have to take into account though so the hype that comes with that discussed think technology advancements and even must also in social media so there's a bit had around it but it is an advancement as well. you are working with 2 patients yourself from what i understand currently using brain computer interface tell us about the aim there and what you're hoping to achieve so the field has been implanting people for almost 20 years we implanted her 1st patient 5 an act years ago she's a less she has a list she's locked in speech that she can very communicate she can still go over eyes a little bit that not that much should she. we decided to go for an implant that's fully implantable and it works at home and mind you many scientists before us have

shown that you can decode gray signal she could interpret braces if you can figure out roughly what someone wants to do. but we decided to make a little simpler have a fully implanted device that no wires sticking out and that would work at home and has a really big difference from the less most of the systems that are more advanced they they work in a lab but you have a team of scientists and big external computers to make it work which is not feasible for a home and we have a system that works 24 hours a day and the only disadvantage is it's only a click so patients can or do users and basically click make mouse clicks and indicate use software that's commercially available for people with disabilities. or. like people that are. have an uncontrollable movement and

they use a switch or a chin switch. and so what we've proved is that it really works at home that you can decode the signal reliably enough because what you can do in a lab showing that you couldn't you know make an arm movement everything doesn't mean it works at all because people are distracted all the time and there are so many occasion that if in the lab you know you can move an hour if you're at home or you're distracted that the r. is going to go all over the place because that your brain does more than just control the hour but in the lab you're completely focused on moving your arm and nothing else where you're at home there's a lot of the few different things going on so it's the additional challenge and what does a one hour of some of the challenges that i think that have come with this. there's a couple want is the reliability it's it's very difficult to have the system respond to the brain only when a person wants to quite often if you know the computer response well the patient

doesn't want to do anything that's that's very irritating another big challenge is to get more sophisticated information so where we really want to go is to decode attempted speech that sounds a lot quicker but when people are completely paralyzed they can't move their facial muscles they can't talk what we think we can do is if we have you know 100 or maybe a 1000 sensors we only have 4 an hour in our patients. we might be able to have a computer say what the user of the science trying to say so we basically pick up the signals from the brain that you generate to try to speak but those signals don't reach the muscle so there's no movement but those electrical signals are there in the brain and we should be able to see them that's for the next i think 1020 years we're going to be really working hard on trying to figure out how

to decode what a person's trying to say and that's and each huge challenge. ok root cause one of the apologies they can retire one of the statements that dylan must has made is that he said the initial goal of the projects such as these is to enable people with quadriplegia to control a computer or a smartphone using just their thoughts but then he also did go on to say that the he seeks to enable humans to merge with artificial intelligence giving people super human intelligence so do you think this type of technology is intended for medical treatment or will we see it evolve into human in value and handsome and yeah that is a very interesting question also an interesting path for development because at the moment even with the experiments with. all of the applications says it is that focused with helping people with central. you know.

the central diseases at the same time it is worrying to think about what if this technology becomes commercially available so what if we created and how uncertain reasoning skills and who it will be made available so is it available for everyone is it available organized better and it d's questions really create more innate inequality considerations and also ethical concerns yeah we'll get into the ethical concerns as well but nick do you agree with that assessment and also the assessments from the royal society which is a group in the u.k. the u.k.'s national science academy in fact one says that b.c. i could be on the verge of explosive growth i think at 1st it will be for medical purposes not was for people that are locked into you know years to come it will be for people who have had a brace stroke like a bleeding in the brain and they and they can't talk or whatever i think this will

be really interesting to make their lives now more dignified. the people who don't. need one i think it's a free high. hurdle to get because you are getting someone to tinker with your bread you do need a surgeon to put it in there no matter how small it is and you know in my experience people are very hesitant even people that are paralyzed they are free has to have anyone take it with their brain because that's the most important thing in your body you can say you could suffer a lot of other ailments but your brain if something goes wrong or memory or confusion everybody fears that the most so i think it will be quite a challenge and it will have to show that or really bring something extra and that's that's going to take decades i mean it is a sign engineering feat but there's no way that that you know near

a link is going to suddenly reveal how to brain works well millions of scientists have been trying to figure it out for for many decades they will hit the send limit we just don't know enough about the brain to be able to make it work the way that ylem thinks it should work i admired his idea but i see no hurdles way beyond a lot of hurdles beyond the technical challenges and again it is an amazing feat to put like sounds and so happy parts in the tiny little discuses stuff medically speaking medically snuck a problem right so medically speaking what are the risks because obviously as you're saying safety is a top priority always the device and he's to be or proof because the brain fluid will be in contact with that if ice it's capsulated in titanium whatever but if the liquid leaks in it can also transport chemicals out and we don't know what

micro quantities of electronic. nichols due to the brain that might kill you in 20 years' time there are those are really high standards that we are here to are that's there's a lot of developments as knurling much much less sophisticated but they never reach people because they don't meet the standards the 2nd thing is the sensors it's again amazing technology they're here they were put in there with the big you know sewing machine that they built but we don't know how long they stay intact what if they deteriorate how long to do how long you know is it worth an implant if they're of only last 5 years because then the brain liquid said eat an adult because that's what the brain liquids do they eat up stuff that's alien to them up to the brain. what comes out of those electronics electrodes what is going to leak into the brain

are they going to break those are all things that we need to worry about not for the short term but you really don't want to risk someone having severe problems 10 years after you implanted it because these things are not easy to take out. on the issue of human and handsome and i mean there is an estimate that says be expected market value off this industry is at $1720000000.00 and that's by 2022 so for a lot of companies that may be interested in this there is a huge potential is that something that worries you and what sort of privacy and security issues would this rain. yes and then vestments fairly they have to follow the technological developments some not really surprised to hear that there is so much interest and this technology but a lot of worries come with that so i think the 2 areas of law that would be most

affected is criminal a lot of with think about responsibility and human capabilities of controlling their mind in action so what if you now don't have this intermediary machine that could alter some of the states and then the other thing that you mentioned about the privacy and data protection so these devices gather data directly from your brain and at the moment. there's a lot of discussion about data protection online on the internet and certain apps and your phone that you have quite a lot of control over whereas when it comes to our brains and mind we really don't know enough and we can't control enough what information is given away and how is it used afterwards as to what purposes are used for that what sort of regulation is there around this issue if any at all. so i would say at the moment there is a dragon to relate gap when it comes to implanted devices and brain development

there is protection when it comes to product liability and medical devices such but at the moment we don't really have enough specific regulation that would focus on that is implanted in humans so there is a gap there and when it comes to data protection again g.d.p. art that is really privacy concerns and data protection in europe it doesn't specifically address these kind of questions why do you think that is why is there a lack of regulation. yeah well it's i think it's not to her recently. said that regulation always lags behind developments in technology and at the moment there is progress in developing laws about ai. protection and liability at the same time ai include so many different aspects that it really goes into almost all areas of law and it's such a huge task that it is going to take as much longer make someone who works and b.c.

i do you think that it needs regulation. i think i think. we'll see this correct we don't really know why it's not there it's because there's nobody implants are just not common yet. i think an additional part is the responsibility issue so we do get into the area of robotics and automated fecal split their brain implants it interprets a wish and what if the wish is you know whose is it is it let's say ever wheelchair even if you control a wheelchair with your d.c.i. and you hit someone in need and you hurt someone who is responsible is that the wheelchair or the technology because clearly they didn't quite the target you correctly or is it the bees to use or because he didn't get the right instruction these are these are pretty complicated fields where human behavior gets in tangled

in intelligent deliberate machinery and to be who is responsible is one issue that we have to deal with threats in our way our users our patients we do not allow them to control mechanical devices because that it's just too risky even if we trust the system quite hot quite well but it's still too risky and i think that's going to be more and more complicated and it's quite a challenge to get that. handled legally but i think a lot of the things that go for a high of peru politics they apply to b.c. i am not and i'm not sure you need a separate kind of legal. domain for this what about the risk. you touched upon this just a moment ago but the risk off people's brains being hacked is that realistic. yeah well i'm not entirely sure how risky realistic that

is a link specifically for the implants but there have been a lot of data breaches in the last few years where a lot of personal information has been leaked so if personal a sensitive information such as your address or name is leaked it is really difficult to replace that and at the moment we don't really have enough scenarios what if some of your brain states what if some of your thoughts are leaked because that is very sensitive data and for legal when we really want to protect that yeah that's the thing i mean will break can it actually be bought and sold like people's information's now online yeah i don't really have an answer to that question but it is worrying and it's something we should consider before this you know it is made available ok and they put how do we prepare for this future of this future of b.c. eyes. i don't think we should prepare i think there's

a lot of work that that's ahead of us with the better technology i really hope we get the current device available provided it's safe i don't know. but once you're there and once we know how much we can extract from the brain. that's a that's a step where you know we can sink about what consequences are inferences people think that those devices can read to mind or sauce or notions there is there is no indication whatsoever that we're going to be near good enough anywhere in the next decades because the simple thing is the brain has 100000000000 little cells that will do their own same getting together to be able to make sense out of what's happening in the brain it's very distributed what's happening in the you know hundreds of millions of sensors and i don't know how we're going to put those in the ground there are reports however there are reports that facebook itself is

developing a b c i implant that does read brain activity i wonder if you know anything about the . i would i don't know that they do brain implants they're really geared towards noninvasive like helmets or things like that i don't see how they can do anything more surprising than what iran is doing i think he's that had off. the field in terms of the number of neural electrodes and the number of sensors but he says sensors there's 3000 been there in like a few square millimeters of the brain and the brain is a lot larger than that so i don't see any technology implant or not implant that's going to get anywhere close to what we need to start thinking about you know reading minds and everything which i think for me and my colleagues it's not a target we don't there's there's no reason for this and the only thing that we carried out from the brain is the part of the brain that's used to you know control

your muscles. pretty much anything else in the brain is extremely difficult to to interpret a moment ago you were mentioning that this can lead to an equal and sort of divided societies if this type of technology is only accessible to some i wonder if you can just flesh out that argument for us. yes so here i was thinking more about really long term development of this technology because some of the claims that iran is making that he would want to access some of these thoughts maybe record some of the memories that we have or possibly enhance the reasoning of some human beings so i believe that if such technology is only available to people who can pay for it that could further. develop a net inequalities are ready in society so that could be a huge problem and i know the both of you are speaking to us from the netherlands but so over in the u.s. any sort of human trials needs to get f.d.a.

approval so. would this industry face significant hurdles do you think when it comes to getting gifts or regulatory approval from the f.d.a. so that really depends because i feel the f.d.a. is taking this not to be approached oh they have given their missions for it experiments on the egg and the monkeys but it will take years because we also have to think about long term an act of this technology so there will be particles but i don't see that it would be possible that it would get approval for this so do you agree with him on mask when he said the neural language start human trials by the end of 2020 which is the sear is that a significant target ruta i do think that is too optimistic but then again we don't know the full story of what's happening behind the scenes but 202020 is very early do you see the human trial starting by the end of this year

or this year i think it's possible it only need to prove to the f.d.a. is that it's you know there is there is no harm to animals for these 6 months or something like that the f.d.a. is. much more inclined to help these studies that call them safety in a fix if safety in a fix you see tests. they are and will in europe it's extremely difficult to do that because there is no f.d.a. it's all there located to the governments of europe with european rules. i think the we're not going to have that many developments europe they're all going to be in the us because they have a special program that expedites the development of human brain implants and technology there will be some casualties of people that get harmed but that's what the what the f.d.a. gives permission for to say will test your device in

a human after you've shown it safe in animals and from there you go further and those studies typically last maybe 6 months maybe years own and it's supposed to be exploited. yeah i think it's possible if it's good hope to get approval with the f.d.a. says if you have a lot of files and you could test in animals real quick and you don't have to change the device based on that because then you have to go back to the animals test again if the paperwork is right if enough people to make it right the paperwork then the end of this year should be feasible ok thank you so much will leave it there on the ground there thanks for joining us live p. nothink you so much and thank you for watching you can always see the program and again any time by visiting our website al-jazeera dot com for further discussion you can go to our facebook page that's facebook dot com for its last a day inside story and you can also join the conversation on twitter our handle is at a day inside story from myself and the whole team thanks for watching for by for now .

biz lights made like a city from the sky but their fishing vessels just outside argentina's exclusive economic zone the united states launched operation southern cross to combat illegal and regulated fishing in the southern atlantic argentina's coast guard say their main task is to control the movements so they do not cross into arjun time terry toy. from this for margin time and money for what's happening in its economical set zones but what authorities here are saying is that what's important is talk

regulate what's happening in international waters. the story goes that the statue of an ancient greek god has the need for the waves for millenia. until a palestinian fisherman on earth the priceless relic. the story continues that has the world's attention was drawn to. mysteriously the day it disappeared once again. the apollo of gaza. on a. coveted beyond well. taken without hesitation forgotten died for. our power defines our wild dogs new babies were dying. it's the. people in power investigate exposes and question the use and abuse of power around the

globe. on al-jazeera. 'd al-jazeera. this is a news hour on al-jazeera i'm fully back to live in doha coming up in the next 60 minutes a top iranian scientist says the blackout at one of the country's key nuclear facilities was an act of terror. more volcanic eruptions on the caribbean island of st vincent triggering power cards and water outages also this.