Did you know it’s possible to control a robotic arm or a wheelchair with just your thoughts, through a device called a brain-computer interface (BCI)? But for many users, learning to operate these systems is slow, difficult and, in some cases, unattainable.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin discovered a novel way to accelerate this learning process: a gentle electrical nudge to the spine before BCI training.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published by Cell Press.

Molecules like DNA can store large amounts of data without requiring an energy source, but accessing this molecular data is expensive and time consuming. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have developed an alternative method to encode information in synthetic molecules, which they used to encode and then decode an 11-character password to unlock a computer.