🎬 Sighting Elon

Happy Wednesday! PSA for all you iPhone users: Apple’s latest software update, iOS18, has been released, so at some point today, head into your Settings and give your phone the tech equivalent of a new pair of underwear.

None of the AI capabilities Apple announced are out yet, but there are a lot of new features to play around with. Also, you can now include your Android friends in a group chat without them ruining the vibe. They’ll still show up in green bubbles though.

— Tayo Davies, Geraldine Ndzomo, Edna Akanni.

TECH
Elon Musk’s cure for blindness gets FDA approval

Despite the cold weather, the only thing that’s assured to wake up with shivers this morning is the profit statement of braille device makers. Yesterday evening, American billionaire, Elon Musk, announced that his brain-chip device startup, Neuralink’s experimental implant aimed at restoring vision had received US FDA’s “breakthrough device designation”.

The experimental device, known as Blindsight, "will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see," Musk said in a post on X.

How big is this? For those who have been blind from birth, provided their visual cortex is intact, the device could offer vision for the first time. Musk described the visual quality as akin to early video game graphics but suggested that future advancements could lead to vision that surpasses natural sight, including the ability to perceive infrared or ultraviolet wavelengths.

Prior to Blindsight, technological advancements that tried to address blindness had cold welcomes and never really took off.

• Hand-held retinal cameras, which are designed to take pictures of the retina and send images to a CPU.

• A bionic eye, which comes pre-fit and is inserted in place of the faulty eye.

• Stem cell therapy to replace the defective retinal cells.

Coming soon? Not really. Neuralink’s Blindsight device has not yet commenced human trials and the company has not provided a timeline for the start of the trials. When the device is released, however, analysts predict it will come at a fancy price point…and might even use a subscription model.

Zooming out: Another device by Neuralink which helps paralyzed people control movement using only their thoughts has had some success with a paralyzed patient being able to play video games and design 3D objects. —EA.

SNIPPETS

Again, not a joke. Zimbabwe announces plans to kill dozens of elephants to provide food relief due to food shortages from the drought. Safe to say they could only hold on for so long after Namibia caved in two weeks ago.

Setback. A military camp in Mali has suffered a terrorist attack on Tuesday. Right now, it is unclear who the attackers were, how many there were, and whether the situation is under control.

Bis Repetita. Abdelmajid Tebboune sworn in for a second term as Algeria's president, after the country’s constitutional court confirmed his landslide victory in the presidential elections.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the seventh Director-General of the WTO has announced her candidacy for a new term. The former Nigerian finance minister told Reuters news agency she hopes to complete "unfinished business" from her first mandate.

Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger will soon launch new passports. After withdrawing from the historic regional bloc, ECOWAS, the 3 member states of the Sahel Alliance are taking steps to harmonize travel within the bloc.