“Meet O° – a collection of shoes and textiles whose creation and reincarnation starts and ends with biology. 100% biodegradable. 0% petrochemicals. 0% microplastics. 0% forever chemicals. No assemblies. No glues.” Product 1 seems to be 3D printed shoes made from biomatter. They do not look super comfortable, but I don’t think we should hold that against the creators! ~ learn more
Casey Handmer has not yet run out of big ideas. Bravo! “The western US is a parched opportunity to create millions of acres of prime land for the next billion Americans to live on. Only one ingredient is missing – water. … The answer is to flex our industrial might and finish what the irrigators began a century ago, and bring water in vast quantities to the high desert, to…
This study was published in Nature Medicine and funded by Flow Neuroscience, a company that makes a $500 brain stimulation headset. It, “aimed to prove the efficacy of a non-invasive technology called transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). A weak current (under 2 mA) is delivered to the scalp via two electrodes.” With these results, I suspect marketing to follow. ~ learn more
I had to look up this type of trial, where researchers use a large dataset to put together a hypothetical trial to try and glean causality from correlations. “Semaglutide was associated with 40% to 70% reduced risks of first-time [Alzheimer’s] diagnosis in [diabetes] patients compared to other antidiabetic medications, including other GLP-1RAs.” This study is getting lots of publicity, so hopefully someone like Peter Attia does a deep dive on…
Earlier this year I thought it seemed admirable when sharing a related link. A reader replied with the contrarian view that predicted free tuition wouldn’t achieve the sponsor’s goals. Seems that it’s not working… “Perhaps most alarming of all, doing away with tuition appears to have made the student body wealthier: The percentage of incoming students categorized as “financially disadvantaged” fell from 12 percent in 2017 to 3 percent in…
“LLMD – an LLM trained like an MD – is our AI model for interpreting a patient’s medical records.” From the look of this performance chart, this thing crushes. ~ learn more
This is a fun nerdy explanation of embeddings, a sort of math function that’s behind our favorite new LLM technology. ~ learn more
“To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent “easy” problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived.” To make this robot, they made an AI system that can acquire “physical intelligence” with a general-purpose robot foundation model called π0 (pi-zero). ~ learn more
“Acting as his own lawyer, Robert Ellis persuaded a Cook County judge to throw out the evidence in his 2021 police-impersonation case that accused him of faking that he was a cop outside Sox park.” ~ learn more
This was a federal court case in 1962. “As the rooster was made of solid gold, the United States Treasury seized it on the grounds that it was illegal under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 which prohibited private ownership of more than 50 ozt (1.6 kg) of gold in the United States.” ~ learn more