I ran a lot of MRIs for my PhD. I saw somewhere around 100-200 different brains. About 10% of them had abnormalities. Of all the technicians, scientists, and (non-clinical) doctors I spoke with, we all agreed this was a very high rate of discovery. All my friends graduated without seeing anything weird. My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed. Eventually I stopped inviting my friends to do my experiments because I didn't want to deal with the risk of them having an abnormality - thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn't allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank. I didn't like that very much.

I made one exception, as a friend of mine came in for a study and I saw a golf ball sized cyst in his sinus. He had it surgically removed and he told me he stopped snoring the next day. It felt good to make a difference for him.

But, I saw one brain similar to the one documented here. It belongs to one of my close friends. It was harrowing. Entire left hemisphere was malformed, the ventricles were way too big and the cortex was way too thin. But the right side of his brain was underdeveloped, maybe the size of a tennis ball.

The weirdest part, he is 100% normal. In fact, he competed at a high level of college athletics. Normal Cognition, normal motor function, great sense of humor, and a very caring person. Now he has a great job, wife and kid, and we hang out often. But I can't bring myself to say anything, and every time I see his son I wonder about his brain.

This happened with an academic conference (physics iirc). A professor was asked to speak and she submitted a headshot for use in their advertising, but the conference wanted a different aspect ratio. Rather than crop the image, the materials designer asked ChatGPT to expand the photo to the correct size. It gave the professor a low cut shirt, and no one at the conference company noticed until the promotional materials were distributed and the professor contacted them.

The article brings up some great points, some of which that I, an industry insider, weren't even aware of, especially the historical context surrounding the AIDS epidemic. I'll jump into the thread to critique an issue within the article.

One of the four pillars recommended by the FDA (control groups) are great in theory but can lead to very real problems in practice, specifically within indications that have an unmet treatment need or are exceptionally rare conditions.

If you have a disease that is 99% fatal but has 0 standard of care treatment options, is it ethical to ask a participant to enroll in a clinical trial and potentially not receive the study treatment/be on placebo? Or, what if the trial involves an incredibly invasive procedure like brain surgery - is it ethical for people to do a placebo procedure? Food for thought - and an explanation for why so few trials meet all four criteria proposed by the FDA.

Happy to answer questions about the industry if anyone has them.

I've been watching this treatment for a while, in my opinion it's one of the most exciting development in modern medicine. It represents a lot of potential - Huntington's is one of many brain diseases related to protein aggregates, so this technology could be adapted to other diseases. Plus, this is the first curative treatment for what was otherwise a 100% fatal genetic condition.

The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) includes the laws governing the Food and Drug Administration. These laws are written in the blood of the exploited and vulnerable, like the victims of the Tuskeege Syphillis Experiment. Many of these regulations are specifically written to keep pharmaceutical and food companies from cutting corners in product development, testing, and manufacturing.

It's not a necessary disruption. It's going to kill a lot of vulnerable people.

Ai has been in drug discovery long before LLMs were a thing. It's revolutionized our ability to identify possible molecules and proteins that can save lives.

I'll need the full peer-reviewed paper which, based on this article, is still pending? Until then, based on this blog post, here's my thoughts as someone who's education adjacent but scientifically trained.

Most critically, they do not state what the control arm was. Was it a passive control? If so, of course you'll see benefits in a group engaged in AI tutoring compared to doing nothing at all. How does AI tutoring compare to human tutoring?

Also important, they were assessing three areas - English learning, Digital Skills, and AI Knowledge. Intuitively, I can see how a language model can help with English. I'm very, very skeptical of what they define as those last two domains of knowledge. I can think of what a standardized English test looks like, but I don't know what they were assessing for the latter two domains. Are digital skills their computer or typing proficiency? Then obviously you'll see a benefit after kids spend 6 weeks typing. And "AI Knowledge"??

ETA: They also show a figure of test scores across both groups. It appears to be a composite score across the three domains. How do we know this "AI Knowledge" or Digital Skills domain was not driving the effect?

ETA2: I need to see more evidence before I can support their headline claim of huge growth equal to two years of learning. Quote from article: "When we compared these results to a database of education interventions studied through randomized controlled trials in the developing world, our program outperformed 80% of them, including some of the most cost-effective strategies like structured pedagogy and teaching at the right level." Did they compare the same domains of growth, ie English instruction to their English assessment? Or are they comparing "AI Knowledge" to some other domain of knowledge?

But, they show figures demonstrating improvement in scores testing these three areas, a correlation between tutoring sessions and test performance, and claim to see benefits in everyday academic performance. That's encouraging. I want to see overall retention down the line - do students in the treatment arm show improved performance a year from now? At graduation? But I know this data will take time to collect.

Scientist here. Microplastics in the body are too ingrained in our bodies for bloodletting to do much of anything. They're even found in fetuses.

The good news (?) is we don't know enough about microplastics to conclusively say they're horrible for our health. The bad news is, I'd bet a lot of money that they are.

Credentials: I published in this field, but I don't have time to read the entire paper right now.

This is exciting work. Based on the key highlights, it sounds like their work focuses on how plausible it is to construct the bio-artificial neuron, and they have done so with great success.

What I would like to learn about is what advantages this technology has compared to just cultivating neurons on a microelectrode array. Are the artificial cells easier to maintain? Do they interface with electrodes without developing glial scarring like our brains do? Can they bio-engineer special proteins (e.g. optogenetic channels) easier in these cells than in mouse lines?

The discussion section is fairly anemic. The authors say this will "spearhead" additional development but I was disappointed the authors didn't clarify what will be additionally developed.

Until these advantages are spelled out, it feels like we're re-invented the biological wheel. We already have cells that can integrate and fire at low voltages. They're called neurons. Why did we need artificial ones?

I've seen publishers advertise their other titles within the box, which honestly, not an issue for me. These, however, are crossing a line.

I studied parts of the basal ganglia, part of the dopaminergic circuits of motor control. I'm not sure if it's a poorly written (news) article or the scientist was overstating his position - I don't know any neuroscientists who think dopamine is "sprayed" across the brain.

Edit: The paper is a breakthrough because it's reporting the first-ever direct imaging of dopamine signaling. But the news article mischaracterizes it.

PhD in neuroscience here. I didn't specifically study musicology, but i did study the neuroscience of music.

The theory that holds the most water, in my opinion, is that music activates all the same parts of the brain as motor processing. It makes us want to move, and to make predictions about what's coming next. People like makimg predictions. It's also a pro-social activity that encourages bonding and communication. These are typically positive experiences.

Edit: you mentioned we like the breaking of patterns in music. Very true, we love syncopation. But we don't tap our foot to the rhythm, we groove to the beat.

In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.

Don't stay in school, kids.

I saw a Copilot prompt in MS PowerPoint today - top left corner of EVERY SINGLE SLIDE - and I had a quiet fit in my cubicle. Welcome to hell.

They raised my rent 20% over two years and priced me out of two apartments. Glad to see progress.

Is it a physical copy? If so, it's likely related to flame retardant used in its manufacturing.

Heck, we barely know how neurons work. Sure, we've got the important stuff down like action potentials and ion channels, but there's all sorts of stuff we don't fully understand yet. For example, we know the huntingtin protein is critical to neuron growth (maybe for axons?), and we know if the gene has too many mutations it causes Huntington's disease. But we don't know why huntingtin is essential, or how it actually effects neuron growth. We just know that cells die without it, or when it is misformed.

Now, take that uncertainty and multiply it by the sheer number of genes and proteins we haven't fully figured out and baby, you've got a stew going.

Oh neat, another brain implant startup. I published in this field. If anyone has questions, I'm happy to answer.

It gets better - the local minor league baseball team is called the Florence Y'alls. And their mascot is a water tower. It's so Midwest.

That's the short of it - but we passed all brain data to a university affiliated neurologist for review. We also allowed participants to take a copy of their brain data if they wanted. I've got a CD of my own brain kicking around somewhere, and I even helped a few people 3D print their brains.

But, anything that I said about the participants brain opened me up to liability. What if I said their brain looked OK and there was a tumor? Or vice versa? The University felt I could be sued, so we were trained to not speak about their brain.