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King Salman Royal Natural Reserve Embarks on Planting Half a Million Trees in 2022

The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 program has attached utmost importance to environmental protection and natural resources. (SPA)
The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 program has attached utmost importance to environmental protection and natural resources. (SPA)
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King Salman Royal Natural Reserve Embarks on Planting Half a Million Trees in 2022

The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 program has attached utmost importance to environmental protection and natural resources. (SPA)
The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 program has attached utmost importance to environmental protection and natural resources. (SPA)

The King Salman Royal Natural Reserve (KSRNR) started planting 500,000 tree seedlings in the reserve in March. The initiative was kicked off in cooperation with the National Center for Vegetation Cover and Combating Desertification, reported the Saudi Press Agency.

The operation began in mid-March with the planting of 400,000 seedlings in Jubbah and 100,000 in Al-Tubayq.

It will be implemented in two stages until the end of November 2022, while irrigation and care services will continue until 2024.

The afforestation project is part of an agreement between KSRNR and the National Center for Vegetation Cover and Combating Desertification. It aims to increase the green area, reduce desertification, restore biodiversity in natural environments, and improve the quality of life, to achieve the objectives of the Saudi Green Initiative.

KSRNR also signed a contract to plant 100,000 seedlings in the Al-Tubayq region this year, including care work and irrigation services.

The tree planting efforts coincide with Environment Week, which is held annually by the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture.

KSRNR is working on several initiatives in the reserve in collaboration with the National Center for Vegetation Cover and Combating Desertification, the universities in Tabuk, Hail, and Al-Jawf, and several voluntary bodies and charities, such as the Green Tabuk Association, the Tabarjal team from the Sidr Al-Jouf Volunteer Association, among others. It aims to achieve the necessary environmental awareness for the local communities.

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A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
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A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)

Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time.

Although it’s still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface could someday help give voice to those unable to speak.

A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who couldn’t speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial.

It "converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences," said Gopala Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation, potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers said.

This is "a pretty big advance in our field," said Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who was not part of the study.

A team in California recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound.

It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of California, Berkeley.

The implant itself sits on the speech center of the brain so that it’s listening in, and those signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences. It’s a "streaming approach," Anumanchipalli said, with each 80-millisecond chunk of speech – about half a syllable – sent into a recorder.

"It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish," Anumanchipalli said. "It’s processing it on the fly."

Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice samples, he added, "would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech."

Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn't affected by recent NIH research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is ready for wide use, but with "sustained investments," it could be available to patients within a decade, he said.