CNBC: “Neuralink shows video of patient chess player involving brain implant”

Noland Arbaugh, 29, is the first human patient to ever get implanted with Neuralink’s device. The company is developing a brain-computer interface, or a BCI, that aims to help patients with severe paralysis control external technologies using only neural signals. Neuralink’s first product is called Telepathy, Musk said in a post on his social media site X in January.

In the video Wednesday, which was streamed on X, Arbaugh said he became a quadriplegic after suffering a diving accident around eight years ago. He said the surgery to get Neuralink’s implant, which requires patients to remove a portion of their skull to insert electrodes into the brain tissue, was super easy. He was released from the hospital the next day, he said.

It’s not perfect, I would say that we have run into some issues, Arbaugh said. I don’t want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life.

Ashley Capoot

This news caught my attention mainly because one of the first things Noland did on his brand new brain-computer interface was to play Civilization VI, a game I also play regularly and for long stretches of time. I didn’t quite expect Neuralink to stick to their plans and get to the stage of human trials, but it’s good that at least one person can enjoy more freedom and connection to the outside world thanks to their efforts.

CNN: “Box of giraffe poop seized at Minnesota airport”

Customs workers at a Minnesota airport discovered a traveler had brought a unique souvenir in her luggage: Giraffe feces.

The passenger arrived at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport from Kenya on September 29, according to a news release from US Customs and Border Protection.

The passenger declared giraffe feces and stated she had obtained the droppings in Kenya and planned to make a necklace, the release stated.

The traveler said she had previously used moose feces to make similar jewelry at her home in Iowa, according to customs officials.

Zoe Sottile

This story is almost too absurd to be true, but one should never underestimate the depths of human foolishness. With folks like these, is there any wonder that efforts to contain a virulent new pathogen were in vain?

Apricitas Economics: “How Weight Loss Drugs stopped a Danish Recession”

So when a deluge of research came out suggesting that drugs commonly used to treat diabetes could be startlingly effective at inducing weight loss and mitigating the negative health effects of obesity, demand for those drugs skyrocketed. Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic (a diabetes drug often sought for weight loss—though not FDA-approved for that purpose) and Wegovy (the new drug explicitly approved for treating obesity), has rapidly become the most valuable publicly traded company in Europe. Sales have risen 30% in the first half of this year, profits are up 40%, and the company is having to ration supply as production struggles to keep up with growth in orders.

In fact, demand for the drugs is so strong that it functionally prevented a recession in Denmark—headline GDP is up roughly 1.1% over the last year, but excluding the pharmaceutical industry it’s down -0.9%, meaning drugmakers alone have added roughly 2% to Danish economic growth. Booming exports and high dollar earnings are allowing Danmarks Nationalbank—the Danish Central Bank—to keep rates lower than they otherwise would in order to maintain their currency peg to the Euro. The boom’s timing was also almost perfect, helping to cushion Denmark’s economy against both the international shipping downturn that affected their massive international trade-related industries (especially Maersk) and the energy crisis that hit Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Joseph Politano

My first reaction to this fascinating piece of data is that it perfectly encapsulates America’s firm fixation with consumerism: instead of adopting a disciplined and balanced diet, American would rather consume one more thing to disregard the consequences. The next reaction: ironic for the people pointing out Europe’s supposed lack of innovation that such a popular drug – and inherently suited to the American lifestyle – would be developed overseas; perhaps Europe is not so insignificant as many would like the public to believe.

The Wall Street Journal: “Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs that Power Silicon Valley.”

There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now, said Karl Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco who informally counsels friends and colleagues across the tech world on calibrating the right small dose for maximum mindfulness. It is the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what’s going on, said Goldfield.

Goldfield doesn’t have a medical degree and said he learned to dose through experience. He said the number of questions he gets about how to microdose has grown dramatically in recent months.

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When Musk in 2018 smoked marijuana on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he and employees of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, were subjected to drug tests for months after, Musk has said, without offering further details.

The CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it.

Kirsten Grind & Katherine Bindley

Well, this certainly explains a lot about Musk’s erratic behavior… Also the anecdotes floating around about informal systems in place at Tesla and SpaceX designed to circumvent Musk’s terrible decisions.

IEEE Spectrum: “Their Bionic Eyes are now Obsolete and Unsupported”

Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn’t mince words: It is fantastic technology and a lousy company, he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. She said, Well, funny you should call. We all just got laid off, he remembers. She said, By the way, you’re not getting your upgrades.

These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.

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Abandoning the Argus II technology—and the people who use it—might have made short-term financial sense for Second Sight, but it’s a decision that could come back to bite the merged company if it does decide to commercialize a brain implant, believes Doerr.

Who’s going to swallow their marketing for the Orion? he says. Doerr is glad he has Second Sight’s technology in his retina instead of his brain tissue. If it has to come out, it’s going to be bothersome, he says, [but] nobody is messing with my brain.

Eliza Strickland & Mark Harris

Exciting that technology to partially restore vision to blind people is in development and slowly becoming mainstream. The article exposes quite well the downsides of relying solely on private companies in this field: despite innovating and delivering a product with clear benefits to its customers, the small market size and high costs can make the business side unsustainable. Similar questions apply to other startups, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink; if at some point in the future Musk loses interest or lacks funding to continue research, what happens to the enthusiasts who might have gotten their skull drilled for one of his implants?

The Guardian: “The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?”

Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning, and lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections – all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness – the focused, linear, abstract and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than play. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment, but for the rise of capitalism, too.

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Alas, there is no free lunch. It turns out that caffeine only appears to give us energy. Caffeine works by blocking the action of adenosine, a molecule that gradually accumulates in the brain over the course of the day, preparing the body to rest. Caffeine molecules interfere with this process, keeping adenosine from doing its job – and keeping us feeling alert. But adenosine levels continue to rise, so that when the caffeine is eventually metabolised, the adenosine floods the body’s receptors and tiredness returns. So the energy that caffeine gives us is borrowed, in effect, and eventually the debt must be paid back.

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Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol (which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep), pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep. But here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes – which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.

Michael Pollan

Interesting piece on the merits and downsides of caffeine consumption on individual health and society overall. I am far from a big drinker of coffee, with no more than two cups a day, but I still occasionally felt its adverse effects on my sleeping patterns – I made a habit to drink coffee in the early afternoon, so sometimes I have trouble falling asleep late at night. Attributing the Enlightenment and capitalist society to the regular intake of caffeine strikes me as grossly exaggerated though. As most good things in life, coffee is best consumed and enjoyed in moderation.

The New York Times: “Epstein-Barr Virus may play Role in Multiple Sclerosis Development”

In their study, published Thursday in Science, the group examined data from 10 million people on active duty in the United States Armed Forces over two decades. The strength of their study, said its principal investigator, Dr. Alberto Ascherio, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is that they were able to follow people for years and ask whether infections with Epstein-Barr preceded multiple sclerosis.

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At the same time, the virus in question, Epstein-Barr, is common, infecting nearly everyone in the population at some point. Although few are aware that they were infected, some develop mononucleosis. The virus remains in the body for life.

Because so few who are infected with the virus get multiple sclerosis, it cannot be the sole cause of the disease. Other risk factors have been identified, including some, like low levels of vitamin D and smoking, that were seen previously by the Harvard group using the same data set. There also are genetic factors — 900 abnormal genes have been identified in patients with multiple sclerosis, said Dr. Anthony J. Reder, a multiple sclerosis expert at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the new study. Gender also plays a role; most patients are women.

But, Dr. Ascherio said, no risk factor stands out like Epstein-Barr infections.

Gina Kolata

Another example of an endemic virus likely triggering debilitating diseases over the long term – just as some HPV strains are responsible for nearly all cervical cancer cases. One has to wonder what sort of medical complications current coronavirus infections will cause 5 to 10 years from now. Already studies point to conditions varying from increased risk of diabetes in children, to neurological symptoms similar to those who’ve undergone treatment for cancer following even a mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, to worsening mobility and physical function in people older than 50, to increased vascular damage resulting in blood clots and strokes. How so many latched onto this narrative that the current Omicron variant is somehow ‘mild’ and it’s OK that everyone will get infected is truly irresponsible.