For a second time in a little over a month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared to freeze up while taking questions a press conference, raising questions about his health.

It happened so fast that Craig Mermel missed it. He was standing in a busy operating room in West Virginia, waiting for a surgeon to place Precision Neuroscience’s neural implant system onto a conscious patient’s brain for the first time. 

On the heels of the country’s deadliest year for drug overdoses, the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute launched a first-in-the-world clinical trial to investigate the use of focused ultrasound technology to treat those with opioid use disorder. 

When her son bounced up the steep stone steps and through the door of the house he shared with his mother and father, Gina Buckhalter was wary. It was no secret that Gerod was a heavy drug user, addicted to opioids for more than half his 33 years.

After nearly two decades of hardcore drug addiction — after overdoses and rehabs and relapses, homelessness and dead friends and ruined lives — Gerod Buckhalter had one choice left, and he knew it.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink isn’t the only company making progress on connecting people’s brains to computers. In April and May, surgeons at West Virginia University placed thin strips of a cellophane-like material on the brains of three patients. 

Doctors at West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute are testing the experimental procedure on patients for whom other treatments didn’t work.

What is it about a frontier? Whether it is a continent, the Moon or, today, the planet Mars, a frontier is a powerful motivator that speaks to a drive inside all of us to go further and higher.

Deep brain stimulation, or DBS, via pacemaker technology may help those battling the addiction, which kills 128 Americans every day.

t age 61, Judi Polak is five years into a bleak diagnosis: Alzheimer’s disease. But last year she made medical history in a clinical trial, when a team of scientists, engineers and practitioners deployed a novel device to take aim at a big barrier in the fight against her illness.