Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
An autonomous truck has been cleared to drive on US roads for the first time according to New Scientist. Robot mudflap girl still being designed.
Backchannel covers the recent Facebook filter bubble study. Rare helpful write-up.
Surge in US ‘brain-reading‘ patents reports BBC News. Most of which are junk, concludes article.
Science magazine has an article by NIMH head saying ‘mental disorders’ are really ‘brain disorders’ and fails to understand that different levels of explanation are not mutually exclusive.
A Better Way to Build Brain-Inspired Chips. MIT Tech Review on the memrister.
The Lab Lunch has a piece arguing against the computational view of mind and brain function.
An audio interview with a researcher who spent four years with the internet’s worst trolls is up on Motherboard. Lots of preamble but interview starts eventually.
Science News reports on a fascinating study about the genetics of emotional vividness.
Human trials for bionic eye with ‘wireless brain chip’ to start next year, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. I’ll have two.
The Economist has an extended article on excessive AI fear and the state of the technology.
The ‘immature teen brain’ defense and the Boston Bomber trial. The Washington Post tackles the neuroscience behind the courtroom claims.
BBC Radio 4 had a streaming only documentary on the language of pain.
Mind Hacks 
FWIW, the Science “filter bubble” article is being excoriated over at Crooked Timber.
http://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/07/why-doesnt-science-publish-important-methods-info-prominently/
The basic complaint is that it generalizes from a non-random subset of Facebook users to all Facebook users in a problematic way, and fails to fess up to this adequately. And of course, as soon as the popular press gets ahold of something like this, it’s results become god’s truth without the slightest hint that there might be methodological issues. (The problem is that a lot of folks dislike identifying with any political party and see themselves as independents, so self-identified partisans are not necessarily representative of Facebook users.)