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Spain Scraps Wolves' Protected Status in Rural North

FILE PHOTO: An Iberian wolf (Canis lupus signatus) exercises at Basondo Animal Refuge, in Kortezubi, Spain, December 14, 2024. REUTERS/Vincent West/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An Iberian wolf (Canis lupus signatus) exercises at Basondo Animal Refuge, in Kortezubi, Spain, December 14, 2024. REUTERS/Vincent West/File Photo
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Spain Scraps Wolves' Protected Status in Rural North

FILE PHOTO: An Iberian wolf (Canis lupus signatus) exercises at Basondo Animal Refuge, in Kortezubi, Spain, December 14, 2024. REUTERS/Vincent West/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An Iberian wolf (Canis lupus signatus) exercises at Basondo Animal Refuge, in Kortezubi, Spain, December 14, 2024. REUTERS/Vincent West/File Photo

Spain's parliament voted to remove wolves' protected status on Thursday, four years after their inclusion, opening the way for the predators to be hunted again in the country's rural north.
Farmers hailed the measure, while conservationists deplored it as "tragic" both for wolves and the country's biodiversity.
Parliament's action reverses a measure introduced by the Socialist government in 2021 that extended protection for the wolf north of the Douro river. Controlled wolf hunting had been allowed until then in northern Spain, Reuters reported.
Efforts to protect the wolf in Europe are faltering after the European Commission last week proposed to downgrade the animal's protective status because of their growing number and the threat they pose to livestock.
A change of law in Europe could lead to the authorization of wolf hunting also south of the Douro, which until now is strictly prohibited.
Thursday's move by Spanish lawmakers was approved in an amendment to a law about food waste proposed by the conservative People's Party (PP). Controlled wolf hunting can restart north of the Douro when the law is published in a few days' time.
The Association for the Protection and Study of the Iberian Wolf on Thursday accused right-wing parties that voted for the amendment of "legal subterfuge" by burying it within changes to a law that had nothing to do with the environment.
"It is a tragic day not only for the wolf, but also for the rest of Spain's biodiversity," the association said in an emailed statement.
The agricultural association COAG celebrated the legislative change after years of organizing protests against the measure on behalf of farmers, who said their livelihoods were at risk.
COAG has said that wolves were responsible for the killing of 15,000 farm animals in Spain each year.
Environment Minister Sara Aagesen said before the vote took place that biodiversity policies should be based on science, and said that the government would study what tools it had to protect the wolf.

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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.