h/t to Lifeboat’s April 7, 2026 blog posting “Your brain for sale? The new frontier of neural data” pointing to this April 7, 2026 essay by Alberto Rinaldi (Senior Lecturer in Law and AI, Department of Law, Lund University) and Johan Mårtensson (Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Logopedics, Phoniatrics and Audiology, Lund University) on The Conversation,
Your browsing history, your location, your political preferences. For years, tech companies have found ways to turn personal data into profit. Now, a new and far more intimate frontier is opening: the electrical signals produced by your brain.
This is not science fiction. Nor is it about brain implants for paralysed patients or experimental medical procedures. A fast-growing consumer market of non-invasive neurotechnology – wearable headsets, brain activity-reading headbands, focus-enhancing devices – is already here, already being sold and already collecting neural data from ordinary users. But the legal and ethical frameworks to govern it are struggling to keep up.
A landmark case from Chile shows why this matters.
In August 2023, Chile’s Supreme Court issued the world’s first ruling on commercial neurodata. The case involved Senator Guido Girardi and Emotiv Inc, a San Francisco company selling the Insight wireless headset – a consumer device marketed for focus, meditation and cognitive performance.
When Girardi began using it, he discovered that accepting the terms of service meant granting Emotiv a worldwide, irrevocable and perpetual licence over his brain data. Unless he paid for a premium account, that data would be stored in Emotiv’s cloud with no way for him to access or export his own neural records.
The Chilean Supreme Court ruled that Emotiv had violated Girardi’s constitutional right to mental integrity, concluding: “The data obtained from Insight users … overlooks the preliminary requirement to have express consent for its use for scientific research purposes. Information collected for various purposes cannot be used differently without its owner’s knowledge and approval.”
The Supreme Court ordered the company to delete Girardi’s data immediately and prohibited sale of the Insight device in Chile until its privacy policies were revised. The headsets remain on sale in other countries around the world.
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A market growing faster than its rules
Emotiv is far from alone. Companies such as Muse (marketed for meditation and sleep) and Neurosity (aimed at software developers seeking focus) [emphases mine] have built a consumer neurotechnology sector that is projected to double in value to more than US$55 billion (£42 billion) within a decade. It is attracting investment from some of the world’s wealthiest technology figures.
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The Emotiv case showed that, in one instance at least, a company had retained a user’s neural data for research purposes under anonymisation provisions, without that user having any meaningful awareness of what was being collected or why.
The stakes here are higher than with most forms of personal data. Neural signals are not like a credit card number that can be changed if compromised. Generated by your brain in real time, they can increasingly be used to infer things about you that you have not chosen to disclose – such as emotional responses, cognitive patterns, and other reactions you may not consciously be aware of.
Chile has showed that courts can act. Legislators in several jurisdictions are beginning to follow. The harder question is whether the frameworks being built are moving fast enough to match a market that, in the quest for competitive advantage, does not want to hang about waiting for them.
My April 2, 2026 posting “Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and music composition” highlighted a creative approach to using brain data and my April 22, 2026 posting “Dancer with a motor neuron(e) disease (MND) guides her digital avatar through a stage performance” feature positive aspect of working with brain data..While my October 21, 2025 posting “Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs” provides a deeper dive into some of the thorny issues around intellectual property rights and the new technologies, including brain implants..
For anyone curious about Emotiv, there’s this seductive video,
Thank you to everyone who took the time to drop in and read and/or comment on this blog, especially in times that grow ever more turbulent for all of us.
It wasn’t all ‘sturm und drang’. Aside: Much to my surprise (see Wikipedia entry) ‘storm and stress’ is a term first associated with an 18th Century German literary movement.
It’s been quite a year for the quantum science community, which appears to be getting more public attention. It’s not quite at the levels experienced by AI (artificial intelligence). but it’s getting there.
This year I’ve had a lot of art/science projects featured here. It makes me wonder if perhaps art/sci is also of rising interest.
Here’s my 2025 roundup, roughly organized by topic with a (to be expected) focus on the Canadian experience. As usual, some projects straddle two or more areas of interest, so, I’ve made some arbitrary decisions. As well, I’m trying to keep this shorter than my standard end-of-year piece. For anyone interested in the ‘nano’ aspect of this blog, either ‘nanoparticle’ or ‘nanotechnology’ searches should reward you amply.
Geopolitical tensions, the US and its science, and science fraud
Who thought Canadians would be threatened with 51st state status? Relatively mild compared to what else Donald Trump and his kakistocracy have been up to domestically and internationally. By the way, my new word of 2025 was kakistocracy, from its Wikipedia entry,
Kakistocracy (/ˌkækɪˈstɒkrəsi/ KAK-ist-OK-rə-see) is government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.[1]: 54 [2][3]
The word was coined as early as the 17th century[4] and derives from two Greek words, kákistos (κάκιστος, ‘worst’) and krátos (κράτος, ‘rule’), together meaning ‘government by the worst people’.[5]
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Usage
The term is generally used by critics of a national government. It has been used variously in the past to describe the Russian governments of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin,[12] the government of Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi,[13] governments in sub-Saharan Africa,[14] the government of the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte,[15] Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro,[16] and the governments of some presidents of the United States.[17]
The term gained popularity during the first presidency of Donald Trump, going viral in 2017 when used by then-MSNBC host Joy Reid and again following an April 2018 tweet by former CIA director John Brennan.[4][18] The term has been used by commentators at numerous news outlets,[19][20][21] political publications,[22][23] and books to describe the Trump administration.[24][25]
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As noted in a posting earlier in 2025 (see below for link), the Americans are desperate for resources, which can help explain at least some of the threats and hostile action toward us and others. The US signed a deal with Ukraine that featured critical minerals. Both Canada and Greenland offer critical minerals and greater control over the arctic passage .Nigeria and Venezuela are oil rich. As for Panama, presumably the focus is on easy Pacific/Atlantic passage.
Here’s my February 13, 2025 posting “Water, critical minerals, technology and US expansionist ambitions (Manifest Destiny).” This is a long read as I cover a lot of ground. Since writing it up and in light of the aggression towards Venezuela, in particular, I’ve come to suspect that my assumption that the US has adequate oil reserves was incorrect. *ETA January 5, 2026: ON January 3, 2026 US military forces set foot on Venezuelan soil, captured/kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, and announced plans to take over its oil industry. Read more: January 4, 2026 article “Experts say Trump’s plan to seize and revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry faces major hurdles” by Josh Funk for Associated Press on the PBS website.*
Given the well documented issues around US science funding, as well as, concerns that foreign students and researchers may have regarding current immigration policies, the Canadian federal government appears eager to provide an alternative.
“Canada bets $1.7 billion on attracting top global research talent” was published here on December 11, 2025. The programme isn’t explicitly aimed at scientists in the US but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there is great interest in attracting anyone who’s tempted to leave the US.
I often see material on building ‘trust in science’ and material on the reverse ‘battling misinformation’.
This February 28, 2025 posting highlights an event about building trust in science. It also includes my comments about a medical scientific fraud, a bad apple, as it were.
Moving from ‘bad apples’ to an even more disturbing view of scientific fraud,
An August 8, 2025 posting features Canadian quantum companies in a US competition for funding and some sad news, “Canadian quantum companies chase US DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) $$$ and RIP Raymond Laflamme.” Chairperson for the expert panel on Quantum Potential, Raymond Laflamme died about 18 months after it was published. By the way, the Canadian companies all made it to the next stage for funding from DARPA. I should have a posting about that published in the new year.
If you are looking to join up or check out Vancouver and/or BC AI communities, search on the web for “Kris Krug” who is the moving force for these initiatives.
The Phoenix Payroll implementation remains as one of the Canadian government’s greatest foul ups.
This is a sampling of three of the citizen science items here.
“‘Extreme’ citizen science” published on January 17, 2025 was really from 2024 but the word ‘extreme’ had me hooked. Here’s what they meant, from the posting,
“Extreme citizen science is the idea that the role of a researcher becomes ever smaller. The unique and ‘extreme’ aspect is that a larger part of the research process, both fieldwork and lab work, is now handed over to high school students. We were excited to see if it would work and have now seen that it does so exceptionally well,” says project leader Anders P. Tøttrup, Associate Professor of Citizen Science at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
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Interesting, yes? Especially in light of this next one.
A quick internet search did not turn up any new information about gene-edited pork and its entrance into the Canadian market.
Goodbye 2025 and hello 2026
At this point I’ve decided to give in and accept that thee will always be a backlog of material from the previous year (this time, 2025) bleeding into the next (this time, 2026). In my defence, there is so much material out there I am overwhelmed with riches.
Moving on …
I see that 2025 was chock-a-block with stories about artificial intelligence, just like 2024. I don’t anticipate that will change much, just as I imagine that quantum science and quantum computing stories will continue to proliferate 2026.
While I didn’t highlight them this year, there were a lot of stories about agriculture and regenerative medicine with enabling nanotechnology. It’ll be interesting to see if that continues.
One area that offers some hope with regard to energy and to the environment and I think will become more prominent in 2026 is fusion energy (nuclear energy). For anyone not familiar with fusion energy, here’s a description from the Wikipedia entry for the largest fusion energy project in the world (ITER); Note: Links have been removed,
ITER (originally an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and also meaning “the way” or “the path” in Latin)[1][2][3] is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering project designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power.
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Fusion aims to replicate the process that takes place in stars where the intense heat at the core fuses together nuclei and produces large amounts of energy in the form of heat and light. Harnessing fusion power in terrestrial conditions would provide sufficient energy to satisfy mounting demand, and to do so in a sustainable manner that has a relatively small impact on the environment. One gram of deuterium-tritium fuel mixture in the process of nuclear fusion produces 90,000-kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal.[30]
Nuclear fusion uses a different approach from traditional nuclear energy. Current nuclear power stations rely on nuclear fission with the nucleus of an atom being split to release energy. Nuclear fusion takes multiple nuclei and uses intense heat to fuse them together, a process that also releases energy.[31]
Caption: Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa (Italy) and Brown University in Providence (USA) have discovered that people sense the hand of a humanoid robot as part of their body schema, particularly when it comes to carrying out a task together, like slicing a bar of soap. Credit: IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa (Italy) and Brown University in Providence (USA) have discovered that people sense the hand of a humanoid robot as part of their body schema, particularly when it comes to carrying out a task together, like slicing a bar of soap. The study has been published in the journal iScience and can pave the way for a better design of robots that have to function in close contact with humans, such as those used in rehabilitation.
The project, led by Alessandra Sciutti, IIT Principal Investigator of the CONTACT unit at IIT, in collaboration with Brown University professor Joo-Hyun Song, explored whether unconscious mechanisms that shape interactions between humans also emerge in interactions between a person and a humanoid robot.
Researchers focused on a phenomenon known as the “near-hand effect”, in which the presence of a hand near an object alters visual attention of a person, because the brain is preparing to use the object. Moreover, the study considers the human brain’s ability to create its “body schema” to move more efficiently in the surrounding space, by integrating objects into it as well.
Through an unconscious process shaped by external stimuli, the brain builds a “body schema” that helps us avoid obstacles or grab objects without looking at them. Any tools can become part of this internal map as long as they are useful for a task, like a tennis racket that feels like an arm extension to the player who uses it daily. Since body schema is constantly evolving, the research team led by Sciutti explored whether a robot could also become part of it.
Giulia Scorza Azzarà, PhD student at IIT and first author of the study, designed and analyzed the results of experiments where people carried out a joint task with iCub, the IIT’s child-sized humanoid robot. They sliced a bar of soap together by using a steel wire, alternately pulled by the person and the robotic partner.
After the activity, researchers verified the integration of the robotic hand into the body schema, quantifying the near hand effect with the Posner cueing task. This test challenges participants to press a key as quickly as possible to indicate on which side of the screen an image appears, while an object placed right next to the screen influences their attention. Data from 30 volunteers showed a specific pattern: participants reacted faster when images appeared next to the robot’s hand, showing that their brains had treated it much like a near hand. Thanks to control experiments, researchers proved that this effect appeared only in those who had sliced the soap with the robot.
The strength of the near hand effect also depended on how the humanoid robot moved. When the robot’s gestures were broad, fluid, and well synchronized with the human ones, the effect was stronger, resulting in a better integration of iCub’s hand into the participant’s body schema. Physical closeness between the robotic hand and the person also played a role: the nearer the robot’s hand was to the participant during the slicing task, the greater the effect.
To assess how participants perceived the robot after working together on the task, researchers gathered information through questionnaires. The results show that the more participants saw iCub as competent and pleasant, the more intense the cognitive effect was. Attributing human-like traits or emotions to iCub further boosted the hand’s integration in the body schema; in other words, partnership and empathy enhanced the cognitive bond with the robot.
The team carried out experiments with a humanoid robot under controlled conditions, paving the way for a deeper understanding of human-machine interactions. Psychological factors will be essential to designing robots able to adapt to human stimuli and able to provide a more intuitive and effective robotic experience. These are crucial features for application of robotics in motor rehabilitation, virtual reality, and assistive technologies.
The research is part of the ERC-funded wHiSPER project, coordinated by IIT’s CONTACT (COgNiTive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies) unit.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Collaborating with a robot biases human spatial attention by Giulia Scorza Azzarà, Joshua Zonca, Francesco Rea, Joo-Hyun Song, Alessandra Sciutti. iScience Volume 28, Issue 7, 18 July 2025, 112791 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.112791 Available online 2 June 2025, Version of Record 18 June 2025 Under a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 Attribution 4.0 International Deed
This paper is open access.
This business of a robot becoming an extension of your body, i.e., becoming part of you, is reminiscent of some issues brought up in my October 21, 2025 posting “Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs,” such as, N. Katherine Hayles’s assemblages and, more specifically, the issues brought up in the section titled, “Symbiosis and your implant.”
Canadian research into relationships with domestic robots
Zhao Zhao’s (assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Guelph) September 11, 2025 essay for The Conversation highlights results from one of her recently published studies, Note: Links have been removed,
Social companion robots are no longer just science fiction. In classrooms, libraries and homes, these small machines are designed to read stories, play games or offer comfort to children. They promise to support learning and companionship, yet their role in family life often extends beyond their original purpose.
In our recent study of families in Canada and the United States, we found that even after a children’s reading robot “retired” or was no longer in active and regular use, most households chose to keep it — treating it less like a gadget and more like a member of the family.
Luka is a small, owl-shaped reading robot, designed to scan and read picture books aloud, making storytime more engaging for young children.
In 2021, my colleague Rhonda McEwen and I set out to explore how 20 families used Luka. We wanted to study not just how families used Luka initially, but how that relationship was built and maintained over time, and what Luka came to mean in the household. Our earlier work laid the foundation for this by showing how families used Luka in daily life and how the bond grew over the first months of use.
When we returned in 2025 to follow up with 19 of those families, we were surprised by what we found. Eighteen households had chosen to keep Luka, even though its reading function was no longer useful to their now-older children. The robot lingered not because it worked better than before, but because it had become meaningful.
A deep, emotional connection
Children often spoke about Luka in affectionate, human-like terms. One called it “my little brother.” Another described it as their “only pet.” These weren’t just throwaway remarks — they reflected the deep emotional place the robot had taken in their everyday lives.
Because Luka had been present during important family rituals like bedtime reading, children remembered it as a companion.
Parents shared similar feelings. Several explained that Luka felt like “part of our history.” For them, the robot had become a symbol of their children’s early years, something they could not imagine discarding. One family even held a small “retirement ceremony” before passing Luka on to a younger cousin, acknowledging its role in their household.
Other families found new, practical uses. Luka was repurposed as a music player, a night light or a display item on a bookshelf next to other keepsakes. Parents admitted they continued to charge it because it felt like “taking care of” the robot.
The device had long outlived its original purpose, yet families found ways to integrate it into daily routines.
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Luka the robot. Image by Dr Zhao Zhao, University of Guelph
Zhao also wrote an August 8, 2025 essay about her 2025 followup study on families and their Luka robots for Frontiers Media,
What happens to a social robot after it retires?
Four years ago, we placed a small owl-shaped reading robot named Luka into 20 families’ homes. At the time, the children were preschoolers, just learning to read. Luka’s job was clear: scan the pages of physical picture books and read them aloud, helping children build early literacy skills.
That was in 2021. In 2025, we went back — not expecting to find much. The children had grown. The reading level was no longer age-appropriate. Surely, Luka’s work was done.
Instead, we found something extraordinary.
18 of 19 families still had their robot. Many were still charging it. A few used it as a music player. Some simply left it on a shelf—next to baby books and keepsakes—its eyes still glowing gently. Luka had stayed.
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As more families bring AI-powered companions into their homes, we’ll need to better understand not only how they’re used — but how they’re remembered.
Because sometimes, the robot stays.
For the curious, here’s a link to and a citation for the 2025 followup study,
Trying to distinguish between robots and artificial intelligence (AI) can mean wading into murky waters. Not all robots have (AI) and not all AI is embodied in a robot and cyborgs add more complexity.
N. Katherine Hayles’ 2025 book “Bacteria to AI; Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts” mentioned in my October 21, 2025 posting “Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs” does not make a distinction, which may or may not be important. We just don’t know. It seems we are in the process of redefining our relationships to the life and the objects around us as we redefine what it means to be a person.
