Great, now I have to start proof-reading any communications I get from the FDA to make sure it didn’t hallucinate a scientific article in the citations. There’s going to be so many Vegetative Microscopy proposals.

If you’re working on a budget like I was when starting out on my own, I recommend your first purchase to be a bed frame. You can use Ceaigslist / FB marketplace to find some really cheap used options. From there, you can start buying (used) furniture that matches the bed frame. Personally, I needed a nightstand immediately after the bed frame because I wanted to put my glasses somewhere.

Good point, I’m assuming all monitors are as good as mine.

Fair point, but a lot of the article talks about how many studies aren’t meeting all four pillars of clinical trial design - that’s where my issue comes in, I think reporting that X% of trials do not meet all pillars is a bad metric.

And, not all medications these days are pills or IV infusions - some medications and treatments, which are governed by the FDA, are more invasive and more complicated.

The consent process for clinical trials has a ton of guidance (ICH GCP), but the onus is on the clinical monitors and hospitals to make sure it’s done correctly. Many trials now generate supporting documentation in which hospital staff are required to describe the circumstances in which consent was acquired. If the documents are generated, then it’s auditable.

Things get a bit hairy when you look at trials in Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders, because the patient may not be coherent enough to withdraw from the trial. In those cases, a legal guardian is responsible for the decision.

Unfortunately, this was an issue before Trump and will continue to be one afterwards. Assuming there even is an afterwards…

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.

Hmm. I think you might be right. I thought the yellow face was enough to distinguish it as a Savannah Sparrow, but the dark legs might indicate it’s a blackbird. I had no idea the females looked like that. And that area is basically swarming with blackbirds, so it’s a lot more likely.

Addressed by the paper - they included age and income as control variables. The relationship b/w proximity and PD persists.

It’s a reasonable theory. We have seen people develop Parkinsonian symptoms after exposure to toxins before - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9918159/

The statistics are interesting. If I understand correctly, they picked a group of people with Parkinson’s and then identified 20 community-dwelling demographic-matched seniors who were the same age at the time of diagnosis. Then, they looked at the closest distance that the people lived to a golf course within 3 years prior to diagnosis, and computed the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s based on demographics, distance to a golf course, and certain characteristics of the water and soil.

I’m not sure your assessment of the odds is accurate going from 9 out of 9000 to 10 out of 9000 should be an 11% increase. This paper shows something like 100% increase within 3 miles of a golf course. So that’s 9 in 9000 to 18 in 9000. Still low risk but enough to make scientists go “huh” and maybe for politicians to consider changing regulations about pesticides (I wish). It’s not just golf courses to worry about, though. Think of all the farmers, too, who are exposed to similar toxins.

The drinking water angle was added to see of certain soil or sources of drinking water would impact the odds of PD diagnosis. The paper was based on data from Minnesota iirc, so I would expect more rural people to have private wells. My understanding was it was less about “statistical significance” and more about “seeing if this variable can explain away the apparent impact of golf course proximity”.

It’s in a good sweet spot, IMO. Not as steep a learning curve as PoE was for me, and easier to just start a character from scratch than Grim Dawn. I feel like the skill tree rewards going in blind, and I’ve played so much GD that I can’t really make a character unless I have a specific build planned out.

On the flip side, I much prefer GD’s end game than LE. I think it’s related to the fact that I don’t like the seasonal aspect very much, but that’s just my opinion. I joined late last season and didn’t finish my first character (Mage who cast a high crit Glacier, focusing on the third hit of the chain). Maybe that’ll change if I finish my Sentinel.

Option C: a shadow corp so big that different branches end up battling against one another without realizing it.

To be fair, he did say he “used some open databases for data”

Probably not. To get input from the brain, you need to place a sensor near it. But this device doesn’t get inserted into the brain, it sits in the scalp.

There are plenty of non-invasive brain reading technologies though, like EEG and near-infrared spectroscopy. They’re just big and bulky with low resolution.

Edit: in the case of prosthetics, it depends on where the disconnect is. If the brain and spinal cord are intact and the issue is in the periphery, yes, you can read the signal far away from the brain (namely the spinal cord) and then work from there.

The motor cortex is located in about the same spot in everyone, to my knowledge - I don’t know of any reported exceptions. The pre-central gyrus. Within, motor neurons are organized in specific regions that control specific body parts. Again, I don’t know of any reported exceptions - my understanding is everyone’s motor cortex has the same organization. It’s known as the cortical homunculus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus#Motor_homunculus%3Fwprov=sfla1

So by reading output from a small group of neurons, yes, you could control a prosthetic limb. It’s been done a few times, actually! But, you typically need more precision than comes from an EEG electrode, so all the examples I can think of are using invasive electrodes.

In fact, the sensory system of the brain has a very similar organization - along the postcentral gyrus, and the same stereotyped organization within. If you could stimulate the correct region of the sensory cortex, you could create a prosthetic that allows you to feel.

There are some more technical limitations though - there’s different types of sensation (e.g., pain, temperature, proprioception (position in space), texture, etc.) that are controlled by different receptors in skin and have different wires connecting to the brain. You’d have to be very careful about what you stimulate. And, any implant that delivers electricity to the brain, with our current technology, has a limited lifespan due to the brain’s immune system rejecting the implant (this is the aspect I studied).

Oh, cool, more BCI. I published in this field.

My only concern is how tenable it would be to deploy a bunch of these sensors. EEGs get coverage of the entire brain (surface, not a lot of deep brain activity). Would anyone be willing to wear hundreds, if not thousands, of micro-needles in their scalp?

If it meant controlling a prosthetic, probably. But general commercial devices - probably not.

x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA’d at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.

But we shouldn’t just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads “As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models,” or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.

Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?

ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.

You’ll never believe how it effects sales tax (if you’re not buying from a second hand store).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunotherapy?wprov=sfla1

Immunotherapy is crazy.

Prion diseases would be harder because things circulating in your blood don’t always enter your brain (thanks to your astrocytes, which help protect your neurons). But if you can get the right cells to produce the right protein, you can do a lot of amazing things.

Well, we don’t yet have evidence that it’s bad for our bodies, per se. That’s step one to getting things to change, IMO. So far we just have theories. Personally, I subscribe to the theory that microplastics are linked to changes in immune cell function/inflammation, which in turn leads to changes in the brain amd leads to some types of neurodegeneratove disorders like Alzheimer’s. Again, a theory, not any conclusive proof. It could be the case that microplastics aren’t causing damage.

But, with the technology we have now, I can imagine some solutions. Most promising, in my opinion, would be something akin to an mRNA vaccine. Introduce the mRNA to your body to produce a protein that targets plastic and leads to its removal from the body, almost like an antibody.

But with the NIH in the United States now targeting mRNA vaccine research for “critical review” as part of Trump’s agenda, the technology may not be long for this part of the world… even though it has revolutionized our ability to quickly, safely, and inexpensively produce vaccines against disease.