A neurosurgeon removed a patient's brain tumor using robotic arms.
SIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
Dr. Homoud Aldahash performed the first remote robotic brain surgery.
If adopted widely, this technology could increase access to highly skilled neurosurgeons worldwide.
This article is part of "Transforming Treatments," a series on medical innovations that save time, money, or discomfort.
When Dr. Homoud Aldahash started the three-hour process of removing a tumor about the size of a walnut from a patient's brain, it was an experience unlike any other in his 25 years as a neurosurgeon.
It wasn't Aldahash's gloved hands slicing 68-year-old Mohammed Almutrafi's right frontal lobe, but surgical instruments attached to a set of robotic arms, which Aldahash controlled from a console where he sat three meters away.
Almutrafi was referred to Aldahash by his primary care doctor after experiencing chronic headaches and poor concentration that seemed to be getting worse. The referral culminated in what would become the world's first remote robotic brain surgery, performed late last year.
While putting a robot in between a patient and their brain surgeon sounds risky (and it is), Aldahash, a consultant neurosurgeon at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Saudi Arabia, told Business Insider that Almutrafi recovered four times as fast as the average patient.
Why? The robot shock-absorbed any tremors or sudden movements Aldahash may have made, allowing him to make more precise movements and therefore fewer micro-injuries to the surrounding brain tissues, which can prolong the recovery process.
"It's like an extension of the surgeon's arms," Aldahash said, "but they're much more stable than the surgeon's arms. It only transmits steady, smooth movements that help you in performing your surgery."
A surgeon looks into a Da Vinci robot console.
Robert Michael/picture alliance via Getty Images
The console consisted of an immersive screen that projected a live feed of the brain via cameras, and a control panel from which Aldahash controlled the robotic arms. The live feed is 3D, and the surgeon can zoom in up to 10x from any direction.
These steady movements, Aldahash believes, enabled Almutrafi to go home less than 24 hours after his surgery, when a typical window is 48 to 72 hours.
The operation needs to be repeated on many more patients before this claim can be validated, but Aldahash is hopeful.
The robot, called Da Vinci, is already used in many hospitals for general, colorectal, urology, and gynecology surgery. This, however, is the first time it has been used for the complex practice of brain surgery.
Widespread use could mean shorter recovery times, less post-op pain for patients, and greater overall access to the procedure, Aldahash said.
"I think this is going to impact patients all over the world, hopefully in the near future. It was a moment of pride," Aldahash said.
How robots could help create a higher quality of patient care
Although robotic brain surgery is in its infancy, this marks a step toward better access to high-quality neurosurgery, neurosurgeons who were not involved in Almutrafi's surgery told Business Insider.
The brain is "a highly eloquent organ in a tight box," said Kevin O'Neill, a consultant neurosurgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, Imperial College, London, and the chairman of the UK-based charity, Brain Tumor Research Campaign. He said that surgeons need to be extremely accurate when navigating the procedure. Still, not all surgeons are equally skilled, meaning patient outcomes can vary.
"There are individual variances. But with robotics, what you're doing is standardizing that and eliminating some of those variances," he said, referring to the varying skillsets of neurosurgeons.
Giulio Anichini, a consultant neurosurgeon at Cork University Hospital, Ireland, and an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London, said he felt "cautiously optimistic" about what the procedure could mean for the future of brain surgery.
The patient's tumor was located on the surface of the brain, making it relatively simple to remove in comparison to tumors located in deeper and less accessible areas, he said. Provided that there are no complications, Anichini said he has seen patients who were recovering from this type of procedure go home after 24 hours.
"I'm not entirely sure that's all due to the Da Vinci," he said of the patient's short recovery time. He added: "I don't want to sound overly critical about this. It is really impressive what they did."
Looking further ahead, the successful remote surgery could signify a step toward a world in which neurosurgeons can operate on patients from different cities, countries, or even continents, Anichini said.
Often, "there is one neurosurgery centre for a big, big population, sometimes very remote," he said. "If you have surgeons that can perform movements more quickly and more safely, and you can do it even remotely, you have a massive outreach of good quality care."
Last fall, teens younger than 18 who logged into Instagram last fall were met with a PG-13-like shroud on their feeds. No longer could they follow accounts that regularly share what Meta deemed "age-inappropriate content" or search for terms like gore and alcohol. To opt out of these automatically applied guardrails, they'd need their parents to grant permission through a connected account. The move was an expansion of Instagram's efforts to give parents more control over teens' accounts. As the chorus against social media and screentime at large rises, Meta has tried to do something to appease parents and keep kids scrolling.
Across the US and around the world, meanwhile, governments are looking to curtail internet access for teens, which could push social media companies to verify users' ages or censor posts they deem not safe for kids. Australia has banned kids younger than 16 from joining major social media apps. Denmark has agreed to pass restrictions for those younger than 15, and French lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in January to advance their own ban. Florida, Virginia, and Nebraska have created a patchwork of laws that guide how children can — or in some total bans, can't — access social media. Federal lawmakers introduced a bill in December to repeal Section 230, which acts as the First Amendment of the internet and absolves websites from liability for user-posted content. For the past four years, lawmakers have considered the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that digital rights experts say could lead to age-verification protocols across the internet. Courts are poised to consider a spate of lawsuits this year against Big Tech companies like Meta, Google, and Snap alleging they make addictive products that harm young people (the companies have denied the allegations).
The spirit behind the laws has been trumpeted by pundits and parents over the past decade: social media is ruining childhood. Absurd screen time logs, AI brainrot filling social feeds, and clear dangers of child exploitation, extremism, and online bullying all make this a compelling argument to parents. The wave of legislation could drastically slash the number of kids online and the content they scroll through. But the movement to kick kids off social platforms largely ignores that the connection of social media on mental health might be nuanced, that kids have a right to speak and access information, and that all of us can benefit from them joining conservations.
That silence might not be good for teens — or for those too old to keep up with the new memes.
"All of this policy around keeping kids off the internet is couched in language of protecting them, keeping them safe, helping them," says Evan Greer, director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future. "But there is a piece of it that is inherently rooted in the idea that they have nothing valuable to add to society or that there's no point in listening to them."
Kids came online in droves during the freewheeling, largely anonymous playground era of 2000s internet. By 2005, 87% of adolescents aged 12 to 17 used the internet, according to a Pew Research Center survey, and three-quarters of them were using it to read news. The web democratized information for young people who often had little access to it outside of TV news broadcasts playing in their living rooms, and particularly connected queer young people to burgeoning online communities. By contrast, only two-thirds of adults were online by 2005.
Investors caught on to the value young people brought to the social web. That meant more ads powered by user data, algorithmic feeds, push notifications, and content driven to capture and entertain in short spurts. People spend more time online now and complain about it more than they did 20 years ago, but the evidence of how modern social media affects kids is split. Meta's own leaked, internal documents have famously revealed Instagram could be harmful to teens (a characterization Meta has disputed). Studies for years have suggested there's correlations between high screen time and increasing anxiety or depression among young people.
But a study published last month from the University of Manchester challenges the long-held idea that gaming and social media are bad for kids. Researchers followed 25,000 kids ages 11 to 14 in what the university characterized as "one of the largest and most detailed studies of its kind." They tracked teens' self-reported habits on social media and gaming along with emotional difficulties over three school years. They found "no evidence" that more frequent social media use or gaming caused an increase in symptoms of anxiety or depression over the following year. A 2021 study from University of Toronto researchers found that LGBTQ youth use social media for emotional support and development, education, entertainment, and search information specific to the queer community, which can benefit them. A report published in 2023 from the US Surgeon General's Office noted both the harms and benefits of social media, but also that "we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents."
Young people continue to dictate much of online culture, activism, and the ways platforms evolve, just as they did in the 2000s. They have for a decade-plus proved social media isn't frivolous. Greta Thunberg was just 15 when she started her solo climate strike outside of the Swedish parliament, eventually using social media to grow her action into a global youth movement. Jamie Margolin has been advocating for climate justice since she was 14. Black Lives Matter activist Thandiwe Abdullah started a youth chapter of the movement when she was 12. When tens of thousands of kids walked out of school last week to protest ICE, they did so after reading organizing posts on social media. Many young people don't use social platforms just for posting and viewing content, but also as their main way to communicate privately with friends, on Snapchat or in Instagram DMs.
KOSA was first proposed in response to the leaked Instagram findings. If passed, it would require tech companies employ the strictest privacy and safety settings for those under 17, and remove features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and rewards for time spent on the apps. The lawmakers behind the bill say it does not require age verification, but opponents argue it would lead to mass censorship of the internet, as tech companies and regulators would have latitude to determine what content could be harmful to minors and likely employ age verification tools or block certain content to comply. Certain conservative and progressive advocates both dislike the bill, and their opposing concerns get to the heart of the free speech issue: who gets to dictate what content is harmful? Patriot Voices, former presidential candidate Rick Santorum's conservative advocacy group, argues that its passage would "transfer parenting authority to government bureaucrats" and block access to information about "the harms of sex-change operations for children." Progressives worry teens will be robbed of information about LGBTQ issues and abortion. Big Tech companies have also lobbied against the bill.
Most of these laws and bills unfairly target the expression of young people, free speech advocates say. "Rights under the Constitution and the First Amendment do not simply turn on the day you are 18," says Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. "Young people have the same Constitutional rights as adults do, and for some reason what gets lost in policy debates about young people, is the fact that they have a right to speak, they have a right to listen, they have a right to access information." The argument hasn't been a total winner so far; a federal court ruled in November that a Florida law barring children younger than 15 from social media could move forward, and didn't violate free speech protections, but a federal court Utah in 2024 did block an age-limit law there on First Amendment grounds.
In the past two years, several states have enacted a handful of laws regulating "sharenting" and kidfluencers, in part as a result of now-grown child influencers advocating states to bar parents from using young children in much of their monetized content. Teen girls have led activism on the harms of deepfake porn. But these new state and federal efforts focused on how children access the internet and social media have largely not taken kids' perspectives into consideration, and aren't driven by a youth movement. Teens are instead fighting against the laws; The ACLU last year brought hundreds of teens to Capitol Hill to lobby against KOSA. And while nearly half of teens say social media has a mostly negative effect on their peers, only 14% say the same for themselves, according to a Pew Research Center survey. In weighing the effects, they're more likely to say it hurts than helps their productivity or sleep, but more think it helps rather than hurts their friendships. More than 60% of teens say social media is an important way to get mental health information.
The bills gaining traction recently are akin to "abstinence-only sex education," Greer says. Lawmakers could focus on better funding mental health counseling in schools or regulating how social media companies serve up content based on personal data or in addictive, endless formats for everyone, she says. But kicking kids off the internet "avoids getting at the root of the problem, which is the surveillance capitalist business model that these large social media platforms employ."
Blanket social bans based on age ignore the nuances of adolescence; some 15-year-olds might have more media literacy than an 18-year-old. "It's not as if young people are going to reach whatever the threshold age is and decide not to be online at that point," says Clare Ryan, a children and family law expert at University of Alabama School of Law. Instead, bans might rob kids and teens of the chances to develop media literacy and comfortability with the platforms. "Young people aren't necessarily going to have opportunities to learn and develop their facility and understanding with these technologies."
Young people, frequently boys and men, are being radicalized by far right forums and podcasters, AI is being used to create nonconsensual deepfake nudes, often of teenage girls, and AI chatbots are giving encouraging words when people express intent to harm themselves. Many of the problems with the internet mirror those of our society. Bullying, scamming, sexual exploitation, addiction to quick dopamine hits — they all exist on and off the screen. A social web where everyone has privacy and can use platforms that forego addictive features and harmful, harassing content has long been the dream. But booting young people isn't going to resurrect the playful, fun days of the internet so many long for.
Amanda Hooveris a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
Silver hit a record high last week just before a sharp reversal.
Georg Hochmuth/APA/Getty Images
Silver slid, giving back a brief rebound after last week's record highs and sharp selloff.
Gold retreated as dollar strength pressured precious metals.
The move came amid a broader rotation, with tech stocks and crypto also under pressure.
Silver prices slumped as precious metals came under renewed pressure amid a broader market pullback.
The spot silver price was 9.2% lower around $80.05 per troy ounce at 2:27 a.m. ET on Thursday. Prices had dropped as much as 17% earlier in the session.
Thursday's slide erased two days of gains for the white metal, which plunged as much as 36% on Friday at the height of the selloff.
The drop marks a sharp reversal for a market that had been on a tear just days earlier, with silver hitting a record high above $121 per ounce last week.
Gold also retreated, slipping below the $5,000 level to trade around $4,934 per ounce.
Prices of the precious metals came amid a rise in the US Dollar Index to a two-week high, which makes dollar-denominated commodities pricier.
"The inverse relationship between precious metals and the US dollar has reasserted itself, leaving gold and silver particularly sensitive to near-term FX moves," wrote Ewa Manthey, a commodities strategist at ING on Tuesday.
"Looking ahead, the dollar is likely to remain a key driver of short-term price action, with precious metals broadly moving in the opposite direction," she added.
Analysts warn that silver is likely to remain especially volatile, as the market is far smaller than gold — a dynamic that can amplify price swings.
Even before Friday's selloff, hedge funds had already been trimming long positions in silver and other metals, with managed money reducing exposure to surging metals and reallocating into energy and other commodities.
Broad selloff
In other corners of the market, risk assets more broadly were under pressure, with tech stocks and cryptocurrencies sliding in choppy trading.
Software stocks came under pressure this week after Anthropic unveiled a new AI tool capable of handling clerical and administrative work in the legal sector. Legal software companies bore the brunt of the initial selloff, before losses rippled through the wider software space.
"In addition to accelerating layoffs of jobs replaced by AI solutions, software continues to sell off as advances in quick AI solutions threaten all but those players with major moats around their client relationships," wrote Louis Navellier at Navellier & Associates on Wednesday.
Stephen Parker, co-head of global investment strategy at JPMorgan Private Bank, told CNBC on Wednesday that the tech selloff reflects a healthy rotation, with investors pivoting away from a tech-driven market in search of better opportunities elsewhere.
The tech selloff spilled over into Asia with tech stocks. On Thursday, Samsung Electronics and SoftBank Group Corp. falling by 6% and 7% respectively.
Bitcoin was trading around $71,200, down roughly 7% over the past 24 hours and about 19% lower over the last seven days.
Sam Altman (left) and Elon Musk (right) have taken their legal battle to the court of public opinion, trading barbs in posts on X.
Getty Images
Sam Altman said he's "really excited" to get Elon Musk under oath.
Their case will go to trial in April, a California judge said in January.
Musk has accused OpenAI and Altman of misleading him into thinking it would remain a nonprofit.
Sam Altman is pumped to take on Elon Musk in court.
"Really excited to get Elon under oath in a few months, Christmas in April!" the OpenAI CEO said in a Tuesday evening X post.
He also reposted his chief security officer Jason Kwon's X post, with the caption "concerning."
The post contained screenshots of a court filing from OpenAI's attorneys, which said that Musk preferred using messaging apps like Signal or XChat with message retention settings of a week or less.
Altman and Musk took their yearslong public feud to the next level in 2024. Musk, who is Tesla and SpaceX's CEO, launched a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman in February 2024, accusing Altman of jeopardizing its nonprofit mission.
Musk said that he contributed $38 million to OpenAI, thinking it would remain a nonprofit. He was one of the company's founders, along with Altman, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and others.
Despite OpenAI's attorneys' attempts to have the case thrown out, a California judge said in a January hearing that there was enough evidence to go to trial, which is set for April.
The billionaire duo have been trading barbs on social media. Musk attacked OpenAI's ChatGPT on January 20, writing "Don't let your loved ones use ChatGPT." He was responding to an X post alleging that the chatbot has been linked to multiple deaths since 2022.
Altman responded to Musk's post, slamming Tesla's Autopilot system as unsafe, and questioning xAI's Grok chatbot. Grok has faced criticism from governments in several countries after reports of Grok users uploading pictures of women and minors and asking the chatbot to undress them.
Representatives for Musk and Altman did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Oracle push back on reports of tension over OpenAI's deal with Nvidia.
Justin Sullivan—Getty Images/Reuters
Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Oracle have publicly said there's no tension.
"We love working with NVIDIA," Altman wrote in a post on X. "I don't get where all this insanity is coming from."
Their responses follow reports of tension between Nvidia and OpenAI.
Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Oracle want to make one thing clear: They're not fighting.
The OpenAI CEO, Nvidia CEO, and software company all stepped forward this week to swat down rumors of tension over Nvidia's planned multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, after a string of reports suggesting tension between the parties.
"We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world," wrote Altman in a post on X on Tuesday.
"We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don't get where all this insanity is coming from," he added.
The pushback came after reports on a deal Nvidia disclosed in September, when it said it planned to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. The move would give the chipmaker a stake in the startup while helping OpenAI secure the vast computing power it needs to train and run its models.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that some Nvidia executives had raised internal concerns about the deal, citing people familiar with the matter.
Separately, Reuters reported on Tuesday that OpenAI had been dissatisfied with some of Nvidia's newer AI chips and had explored alternatives since last year, citing people familiar with the matter.
Speaking to reporters in Taipei on Saturday, Huang said the idea that he would be unhappy with OpenAI is "nonsense." He also reaffirmed his support for the startup's work and Altman's leadership.
"I believe in OpenAI. The work that they do is incredible," the Nvidia CEO said, adding that OpenAI is "one of the most consequential companies of our time."
"We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we've ever made," he added.
Oracle, another major player in OpenAI's infrastructure stack, also pushed back against speculation that the OpenAI-Nvidia dynamic might affect its own deal.
"The NVIDIA-OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments," the company said in a post on X on Tuesday.
Oracle has a multi-year deal with OpenAI under which the AI startup will purchase $300 billion in computing power for its AI models.
With OpenAI committing to substantial spending on computing infrastructure, any uncertainty about its ability to raise capital could ripple through the companies supplying that capacity.
OpenAI's spending under scrutiny
Oracle's response and Huang's remarks highlight how closely OpenAI's funding outlook is being watched, especially as the startup's AI strategies hinge on its growth.
In some cases, investor skepticismabout those deals has weighed on the share prices of companies exposed to OpenAI's expansion, including Oracle.
OpenAI has signed a series of massive spending agreements spanning chips, cloud infrastructure, and data centers, with partners including Nvidia, Oracle, and AMD. Some of them are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Altman said in a podcast episode on "Bg2 Pod" published in November that he has had "enough" of having to justify how OpenAI will pay for its spending commitments.
"If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer," he said.
Gold and silver's yearlong rally unraveled rapidly.
YASSER AL-ZAYYAT / AFP via Getty Images
Hedge funds were already cutting precious-metal exposure before gold and silver collapsed.
Positioning data show a rotation out of metals and into energy as volatility surged.
Silver's crowded rally left it especially vulnerable when the sell-off hit.
Gold and silver's spectacular crash stunned markets, but hedge funds were already shifting their exposure away from precious metals before prices collapsed, positioning data showed.
Spot gold was trading around $4,829 per troy ounce at 12.56 a.m. ET on Tuesday — more than 10% off its record high above $5,500 per ounce reached just last week.
The spot silver price was around $83.40 per ounce — over 30% lower than its record high of over $121 per ounce.
Those shifts in trading positions show up in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's weekly Commitments of Traders report, which provides a snapshot of investors' holdings in US futures markets as of Tuesday. It's released every Friday.
The latest update, covering managed money positioning across 25 major commodity futures markets, highlighted a rotation out of metals — including gold, silver, and platinum — as hedge funds reduced long exposure amid a sharp rise in volatility, Ole Hansen, the head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, wrote in an analysis on Monday.
Meanwhile, investors reallocated capital into energy markets, where oil prices had been under pressure for years due to ample supply and weak demand growth.
Oil prices got a lift coming into 2026 amid fears of supply disruption following the Trump administration's raid on Venezuela, renewed geopolitical tensions with Iran, and winter storms in the US.
US West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures are trading around $62 per barrel — about 8% higher this year.
Long positions in crude oil futures reached their highest levels since August, and net long silver positions slumped to a two-year low, Hansen wrote.
The heavy pullback in silver bets leaves funds with "plenty of room" to re-enter the trade once volatility normalizes, and the technical outlook improves. However, this would likely take time following Friday's meltdown, Hansen added.
Why silver unraveled
While both gold and silver prices have come off sharply from record highs, the blistering rally — particularly in the white metal — had already triggered warnings about charging headlong.
"The run up in December and January was primarily not traditional gold and silver long-term, 'I want to buy physical metal and hold it' investors," Jeffrey Christian, a longtime commodities analyst and managing director at CPM Group, told Bloomberg TV on Monday.
Christian pointed to market mechanics as a key driver of the metals meltdown, as investors adjusted their positions ahead of the end of January.
President Donald Trump's nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve Chair magnified the drawdown in a market that was already pumped up by speculation and trading activity.
"Extreme trading volumes across futures, options, and ETFs, combined with increasingly strained market plumbing, amplified the move. Eventually, the system buckled," Hansen added.
Analysts warn that while fundamental drivers for precious metals — including geopolitical tensions and central bank buying — remain intact, the recent correction is a warning for momentum and FOMO traders.
"When gold and silver turn into hot topics at dinner tables and in workplaces, it is often a sign that a particular phase of the rally is nearing exhaustion," Hansen wrote.
