A Chicago man just got a bionic arm his own brain can talk to

Good morning. Today's issue is about the ten second version of you, a Chicago man whose bionic arm is going to answer to his own thoughts, and a stretch of Australian scrub where the burrowing bettongs are back for the first time in a hundred years. There is a lot to be glad about today.

🌱 TODAY'S MINDSET

The ten second version of you

Every hero story turns on something surprisingly small. Somebody looked up. Somebody stopped. Somebody caught the smell of smoke before anyone else did. When you read the accounts back later, the moment they moved is almost always shorter than it takes to describe it.

We think of courage as this vast reserve we might not have. But most of the courage the world runs on is ten seconds long. Ten seconds between noticing and acting, before hesitation gets a chance to speak.

Here is what practicing that looks like, and it is smaller than you think. Notice the person who is a little too quiet at the meeting. Notice the friend whose text has an extra period in it. Notice the neighbor whose mail is stacking up. You do not have to fix anything. You just have to close the gap between seeing and doing something about it, even if the something is a five word text.

The people who ran into burning buildings this week were not braver than you at every moment of their lives. They were people who had, over years, taught themselves to shrink the distance between recognizing a thing and answering it. That distance is trainable.

So today, if you feel something rise up when you pass a stranger who looks lost, or a friend who looks off, or a room that has gone still, do the smallest possible version of the thing. Ask the question. Send the message. Cross the room. Ten seconds is enough. The people whose lives you might change never see the hesitation you did not have. They only see that somebody, finally, was there.

⭐ TODAY'S BRIGHT LEAD

A Chicago man just got a bionic arm his own brain can talk to

Image: Shirley Ryan AbilityLab / Northwestern Medicine

In 2016, a Chicago area man lost his left arm above the elbow in a construction site accident. This week, he became the first person in the United States to receive a bionic arm connected directly to his bone, his nerves, and his muscles, designed to be controlled by his own neural signals and to send real time sensation back the other way.

On July 15, in an eight hour operation at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a combined team of plastic and orthopedic surgeons implanted a titanium fixture into the bone of his residual limb and placed electrodes onto his muscles and around his nerves. The system is called e-OPRA. It routes the electrical signals of a person's own intention through the same implant that anchors the arm, and it uses nerve cuff electrodes to deliver signals the brain reads as coming from the missing hand.

That last piece is what the lead surgeon, Dr. Jason Ko of Northwestern Medicine, called the "holy grail" of neuroprosthetics. The old barrier was the skin itself. Sweat, swelling, and shifting straps had blocked earlier attempts. Anchoring the electronics to bone bypasses all of that.

The trial is a five year study led by Dr. Levi Hargrove at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, in partnership with Northwestern Medicine, the University of Chicago, and Integrum, and backed by an $8.7 million award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The team can already capture the signals from his implanted electrodes. In the coming months he will begin rehab, and then training with a bionic arm that is supposed to feel less like a tool and more like a limb.

He is "very excited about what he is already able to do with his practice bionic arm," his surgeon said. Ten years after the accident. One more thing that used to be impossible.

Source: EurekAlert / Shirley Ryan AbilityLab

🌍 MORE GOOD TODAY

Two brothers heard a nurse yelling. They ran into the fire.

Alex Bazinyan is 20. His brother Narek is 15. They live in Glendale, California, and last Friday they heard someone screaming from a nearby assisted living facility. They ran. Inside, six elderly residents were on the floor, some already hurt, and the smoke was so thick the brothers said they were "basically standing in the fire." One by one, with two neighbors who came in behind them, they carried every resident out. Officials said they got the last person out moments before what appeared to be an exploding oxygen tank collapsed part of the building. Everyone survived. "If you ever see anyone in need," Narek told KTLA, "you should always try to help them out as much as you can." Read more.

A cheap, existing drug just showed real promise for progressive MS 🇬🇧

Interim results are in from Octopus, a first of its kind UK trial run by University College London and their Queen Square MS Centre. Alpha-lipoic acid, studied at high dose under a rigorous protocol, showed enough early promise to move into the trial's second stage as a potential neuroprotective treatment for progressive multiple sclerosis, a form of the disease that has resisted almost everything doctors have thrown at it. The trial design, which tests multiple drugs at once, is designed to deliver answers up to three times faster than a conventional study. The researchers stress that no one should be sourcing ALA on their own outside a trial. But for a disease that has broken so many hopes, an existing, affordable drug moving to the next stage is a real one. Read more.

Thirteen species just came back to the New South Wales bush 🇦🇺

Ten years ago, New South Wales built predator proof fences around three reserves and quietly started reintroducing native animals that had vanished from that country. This week, the state confirmed the count. Thirteen locally extinct species have returned and are breeding again inside the sanctuaries. Some had been gone for more than a century. Bilbies. Numbats. Bridled nail-tailed wallabies. Western quolls. Burrowing bettongs. Shark Bay bandicoots. Every reintroduced population is now self-sustaining, and NSW just extended the partnership another decade to grow the network to ten predator free areas covering 33 locally extinct species. The bush is a little less quiet than it was in 2016. Read more.

🔬 SCIENCE OF JOY

An old, cheap seizure drug just showed it can slow one of the worst childhood cancers

Diffuse midline gliomas are the kind of childhood brain tumor doctors dread describing to parents. They strike the brain and the spinal cord. They affect 300 to 400 children in the United States every year. Their five year survival rate is about 1 percent. There has been no good news to hand out.

This week, in Nature Medicine, a Stanford Medicine led team reported that an existing anti-seizure drug called levetiracetam, in use for years and cheap, appears to slow the growth of these tumors by unplugging the electrical connections they make to healthy neurons. In mice grafted with human tumors, the drug slowed the malignant cells. Reviewing medical records of 218 pediatric patients, the researchers found that kids with diffuse midline gliomas who happened to receive the drug lived longer, on average, than those who did not.

The team, led by Dr. Michelle Monje, is now launching a clinical trial to test the effect head on, and Monje believes the drug will combine well with the CAR-T immunotherapy her lab is already trialing for these tumors. "You can think of immunotherapy as a footrace between the tumor and the immune cells," she said. "We want the immune cells to get ahead. Our new data shows that levetiracetam slows the tumor down."

This is not a cure. But for a cancer that has resisted almost every treatment strategy, it is the first drug in a long time that could actually move the numbers, and it is already sitting on hospital shelves. Read more.

💛 BRIGHT FIND

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✨ ONE MORE SMILE

Somebody stole a wheelchair ramp. The fire department built her a new one.

A disabled resident in Los Angeles came home to find her wheelchair ramp gone. For days she was stuck inside, staring at the concrete steps. When Los Angeles Fire Department Task Force 94 heard about it, Captain Jack Baham and Firefighter Adam Corcuera measured the missing ramp, cut the lumber, and built her a new sturdy wooden one. They tested it with a motorized wheelchair before she moved back into her own life. "Our mission is to protect and serve," Captain Baham said, "whether it's fighting a blaze or restoring a neighbor's access to their home." Read more.

See you tomorrow. Keep noticing.

Great News Day