29 August 2026

There's been so much news about daraxonrasib against pancreatic cancer, and another promising treatment has been published. This one involves blocking a chemokine receptor (CXCR4), which modifies the immune environment, allowing chemotherapy agents to work better. 
One patient had an even more remarkable response. He responded so well to treatment that he was ultimately able to undergo surgery. When pathologists examined the removed tissue, they found no viable cancer cells—a pathologic complete response. He has now remained cancer-free for more than three years after beginning therapy and more than two years after surgery without any treatment.
The treatment involved four drugs: CXCR4 inhibition (motixafortide), PD-1 blockade (cemiplimab), and chemotherapy (gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel [GN]; the MCGN regimen). 
median progression-free survival of 9.7 months (95% confidence interval [CI]: 5.9-not reached [NR]), overall survival of 10.1 months (95% CI: 9.3-NR), duration of response of 8.2 months, and 91% disease control rate. One patient achieved a pathological complete response after pancreatoduodenectomy and hepatectomy, remaining disease-free for 18 months without adjuvant therapy. 
I see this as being applied more in the neoadjuvant setting, against borderline resectable pancreatic cancer, when you need rapid response. Paper here. Very nice.

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The anti-aging effects of exercise, without exercise: Self-contracting muscle implants give mice a boost. More research supporting the theory that having muscle can help slow the effects of aging. This time, it's providing muscle in the form of myografts.
Scientists have developed self-contracting mini-muscle implants that grow their own blood supply and mimic the biological benefits of exercise, giving people unable to work out because of physical limitations a way to reap the same rewards.
Just having muscle tissue in an organism that contracts on its own made muscle stronger in aging mice.
Once implanted in elderly and obese mice, these grafts countered age-related muscle wasting. The mice developed thicker natural leg muscles, lost less muscle and showed improved strength and reduced inflammation.
Paper here. It's not clear what muscle tissue secretes that keeps aging mice healthier. The Nature article says "myografts provide a stable source of virally transduced therapeutic proteins, such as parathyroid hormone and growth hormone, which may counteract bone or muscle loss without observed side effects." Is that what it is?

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Well the Pentagon can't tell Anthropic what it can and cannot do. Remember when the military used to develop its own technology, and were able to have it to what it wanted? Now it seems the military commandeers non-military companies and tells them what to do. Get your own geniuses, already!

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While it may sound like science fiction, earbuds that read brain activity are already on sale. Wearable technology company Neurable claims that its headphones, equipped with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, can track your fatigue and reduce burnout. At night, NextSense's Smartbuds pick up the electrical signals of your brain to chart your sleep. By day, the same EEG sensors help schedule demanding tasks for the hours when you are sharpest.
I'm intrigued by this, actually. We're living in interesting times. I'd like to be able to explore tracking my brain. But there needs to be more research before we apply this to children.

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First erythritol, now xylitol. Common sweetener is linked to strokes and heart attacks. I'm staying away from any sugar alcohol. I use allulose and monkfruit sweeteners. Mogrosides in monkfruit are felt to be safe.

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Elon Musk lost his lawsuit against Bright Data scraping X content.  I think scraping content for personal use should be allowed because it's no different from visiting the website yourself. And if you can do it without trackers and data analytics bots running profiles on you, the better. But I'm against mass scraping efforts that cause traffic congestion and make it hard for regular people to access websites. That's what happened with nitter. Apparently bots were using it to scrape X, and so legitimate users of nitter found the service to be practically unusable. I can see why X wanted it to stop. Scrapers need to exercise some etiquette. Blasting a site is not cool.

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Datacenters are going to be an issue in the governor's race. As with many things, this is not a clean issue. We need more datacenters, but they need to be built up to modern standards that conserve water and won't consume energy to the detriment of the surrounding communities. These can be done and being self-contained, won't have to strain the electrical grid. But Tina Kotek wants to please the left-wingers, even though her union supporters are all for building datacenters. Let's hope that Drazan can convince people that datacenters are part of the future, rather than solar panel farms which are blight on the environment and are implementations of last century's technology and won't move Oregon forward.

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28 August 2026

U.S. In Talks To Take Direct Ownership Of Venezuelan Oil Fields. Who didn't see this coming? This is great news for the U.S. and the heavy crude oil of Venezuela will replace the heavy sour crude of Western Canada Select, so Canada is the loser here. And from my reading, U.S. refineries are set up to handle this type of oil. One needs coking units to crack the heavy oil, and only some U.S. refineries have this capability. Venezuela has some refineries, too, but they have been chronically underutiliized, and you can't just wake them up instantly once they've been shut down. Their oil is extra-heavy, and one needs naphtha to dilute them to be transportable, and there's been a shortage of this. But America will be supplying this.

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X claims that it discovered a secret Chinese social media farm that is trying to poison Americans' minds against datacenters. So now, tech leaders are trying the message that you'd love datacenters if not for those sneaky Chinese. One problem is that Americans really don't know much about datacenter construction, and just go by what the scuttlebutt says, much of which is wrong. But the electrical workers union loves datacenters. Truckers love datacenters. And the truth is, America loves the tech that would be impossible without datacenters. So they are going to be built.

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Scientists discover a brain “brake” that can shut down chronic pain. That brake lies in the locus ceruleus, and this is where adrenergic responses from anxiety and stress also originate. Well it turns out the regular meditation modulates signals from the anterior cingulate gyrus to the locus ceruleus, so this suggests another mechanism to decrease chronic pain.

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So it is true: Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

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A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young. What could it be? They don't "own the molecules" – so who does? Is it just not patentable? But the combination might be. I'm curious. What I'm intrigued about is that the people who are taking it already feel more energetic. Usually, longevity drugs have no noticeable impact. You just age slower, but you don't feel any different, so this drug combo is different.

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I Asked 100 Companies for My Data. I Got Deletion Notices Instead. Many companies collect a lot of data from users – way more than people realize. This is why I avoid installing unnecessary apps on my phone, and shield my browser with anti-snoop extensions.

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A ‘second heart’ is located below your knees, and you need to get it pumping. Back in 2022 a researcher in Houston published a discovery that exercising the soleus muscle was important and could help improve metabolic health. He recommended soleus push-ups. It's not a large muscle and I was skeptical. It lies right under the gastrocnemius muscle. But here we are, four years later, and a Mayo Clinic researcher has discovered the same thing. So maybe there is some truth to the importance of flexing your soleus muscle.

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Here's where you can buy a digital camouflage shirt and avoid detection by surveillance cameras. Get it here. Here's another company that sells something similar. 

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It's not climate change. Even NPR has to admit that the cause of wildfires is arson. And since Oregon has a lot of crazies, it stands to reason why we are setting the record for wildfires this year. Keep Oregon Weird? Nah. So tired of this crap. 

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So if all hell broke loose on earth broke out, where would you go? It turns out the safest place on earth is ... Australia. Really? The deadliest land where everything wants to kill you?

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Terence Tao has identifed a new kind of Simpson's Paradox. That's where a treatment can be beneficial for men, and beneficial for women, but harmful for people as a whole. In this new scenario, AI generates a paper that seems to be reasonably good. And then another comes out – same thing. And so forth. But when you stand back and look at the output as a whole, it's AI slop. I guess he's starting to see a lot of it.

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It's not just microglia that contribute to cognitive decline, it's also oligodendrocyes that deteriorate as you get older. This one I can understand, because the function of these cells is to provide the myelin sheath surrounding neurons. These need to stay intact, for sure.

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I knew some of this, but not all of it. McDonalds in Hawaii is special. You can order all kinds of local stuff that you can't get at chain restaurants elsewhere. It was smart of McDonalds to permit this.

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Well, it looks like Oregon is getting a sales tax after all. It's just not called that. That's what you do when all the wealthy taxpayers and business flee the state. Somebody's gotta feed the Democrats. 
And here's Multnomah County – creating their first "climate justice plan" (whatever that is). And yes, there will be taxes. If you Crtl-F for "taxes", you'll get few hits. Instead, Ctrl-F for "funding" – lots of hits! 
There are so many needy that will need a piece of this new funding! Yes, there will be money for housing! And money for living assistance ("unrestricted monthly stipends")! And money for schools. And money for preschools! And money for mental health!  And money for "marginalized communities".  
In other words – it doesn't have to be about climate!  It's just whatever! 

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27 August 2026

Someone posted this article from 2008 about why doctors hate the Internet. Little did they know at that time that 15 years later, they would be facing something even more practice-changing. It's becoming ever more difficult to be a knowledge worker, and more than ever, doctors need help, or risk being viewed as charlatans in their field, with patients being just as, or even more knowledgeable than them, in a certain limited domain. This may be even more problematic as medical students, residents and subspecialty fellows rely more on AI assistants to provide answers, rather than learning their fields well themselves. But it doesn't have to be this way. AI assistants can be teaching aids and may empower physicians. But only if they take the time to learn how to incorporate AI into their workflow.

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I am not a mathematician. I have basically been using ChatGPT to mess around with the Riemann Hypothesis, telling it to keep digging, try different approaches, challenge assumptions, and look through recent papers for anything interesting.

Well, it found something.

While going through two recently published papers on Jensen polynomial hyperbolicity and the Riemann Hypothesis, ChatGPT noticed what appeared to be a normalization inconsistency between the raw moments (M_n) and the Taylor/Jensen coefficients

The guy may not have been a mathematician, but he knew enough about it to understand what to prompt GPT 5.6, and to recognize a problem. Kudos.

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I have never received an Apple Threat Notification, and wouldn't be sure what it means. But this is worth saving in case I do.

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There are rumors that Nvidia is planning to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That will shake up things, especially if nVIDIA starts tacking on a fee to use their models. Or restricts what models appear on the site. That would be unfortunate.

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Someone's trying to create an alternative to X, called Twitter.Now. The reason is because somehow Elon Musk "broke" Twitter. The real reason, of course, is that Musk allowed dissenting opinions onto the platform, and that some people feels that this can't be allowed to happen. BlueSky was formed for the same reason, and it's turned into a boring left-wing echo chamber. This effort will likely fail for similar reasons. Man, they took the color scheme of the old Twitter, and even appropriated the old logo.

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Barrett Zoph used to work at OpenAI. Then he left to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati. Then he went back to OpenAI. Now he's leaving for Google. I'm curious about this only as it pertains to how leadership changes impact how things may run at these major AI companies. The changes in personnel like this cause me to wonder what's going on in the boardrooms. 

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Inaudible sounds used to fingerprint browsers catch AliExpress red-handed. Someone accidentally found out that AliExpress tries to fingerprint users by sending signals to get the browser to emit infrasound, and recording the output as a fingerprint. Crazy.

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26 August 2026

Nine life lessons from the happiest man in the world. Well, you can be happy because your life is OK, but it's hard to translate that advice to someone who is struggling and faces severe adversity. I'm thinking of the tragedy that recently happened in the Nepal-Tibet border today. Still, there is value in being able to exert some control over your mind and regulate your emotions. Meditation may be a solution, but it takes regular practice, and while you just starting out, you have to be lucky that nothing major happens to you to disrupt your progress. For emergencies like that, you need something like Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living. Highly recommended. It's like a Break Glass for Emergencies therapy for the distressed mind.

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Who Actually Makes Your Supplements? The short answer that it's hard to figure out. And that quality is unclear. When in doubt, go with Nature Made, NOW or Standard Process. 

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Terry Tao was given the task of writing a more accessible summary of Hong Wang's research that got her the Fields Medal this year. It's still fairly technical, but much more readable than most math research publications. It would be nice if folks like Tao would do this for other arcane and abstruse math research topics, so the rest of us mortals could begin to understand what's going on.

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Here's the story of a forgotten man, Douglas Prasher. He first cloned the gene for GFP (green fluorescent protein) and freely shared it with scientists Roger Tsien and Martin Chalfie. Tsien and Chalfie went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008, but Prasher was forgotten. He was booted out of academics by a tenure committee that failed to see any future in his research. To support his family he had to quit academics, and so became a courtesy minivan shuttle driver for a Toyota dealership.

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Nitter is no more. This may be a casualty of AI, as apparently bots were using it to access X. I had noticed that it was getting near impossible to use Nitter lately, despite the bot protection. I can still use TwitterWebViewer, for now.

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But here are some intelligence tests that generative AI models still flub. But they'll probably be solvable in a year. 

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Justice Department and FBI Seize Platforms Operated and Used by China State-Sponsored Hackers to Target U.S. Critical Infrastructure. Maybe instead of focusing on artificial intelligence, we should focus on alien intelligence, as in outside the country.

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God's Eye View is a site where you can visualize real-time spy satellite surveillance videos from around the world.

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It turns out that Z.ai is behind the Ox Alpha mysterious model. The only place I've been able to access it is at Felo.ai.

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There has been progress in pharmacologic manipulation of wakefulness. Modafinil was a significant first step, but it was not the solution people wanted. What really should happen is that researchers figure out how to have the brain eliminate the toxins as happens during sleep. Keeping people awake and letting toxins accumulate is not a desirable outcome. Why can some people go without much sleep? That should be a clue.

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OpenAI’s Head of Data Centers, Chris Malone, Has Left the Company. What's happening?

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The five levels of wealth. This is an interesting way to explain what it feels like to have certain levels of money, but it doesn't tell you how to get there. Rich Dad Poor Dad was a breakthrough for me. It tells you that instead of pursuing mere capital-appreciation investments, like stocks, you need cash-flow generating investments. Even dividend-producing stocks are usually not enough to make you wealthy. Cash-flow investments are harder to obtain. You need to find quality real-estate to invest in. Or buy businesses (like Berkshire Hathaway) not just buying stock in them. Or create valuable intellectual property. These require a change in one's mindset, and many are not prepared to make that leap. Wealth generation from capital appreciation is usually way too slow.

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Oregon hurts job seekers with more ‘barriers to work’ than any other state. Maybe this is why Oregon is the second least-hardest working state in America. How are we going to get all that sweet tax money, Democrats, if people aren't working? 

25 August 2026

Apple announced the new M5 MacStudio today. Now it's up to 36 cores of CPU, compared with the 32 cores in the M3 Ultra model. Hopefully it will still come with 512 GB of unified memory. Can't wait till pre-orders open next month.

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Experimental compound helps burn fat without muscle loss. It's called 5-tetradecyloxy-2-furoic acid (TOFA). It is an inhibitor of acetyl-CoA carboxylases 1 and 2 (ACC1/2). Finally, something that can combat obesity. Paper here.

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How well do COVID antivirals actually work? Not as well as we thought. Well, it seems that more mainstream outlets now feel that it's safe to critically review SARS-CoV2 antivirals. I wish they were so bold during 2020-2022. Back then, only conservative sites would dare to mention that these medicines were less effective than touted. But why are we still talking about Paxlovid and molnupiravir?

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I wish there were an easy way to measure how much is optimal. Too much or too little sleep may make your body age faster. This is likely why stress ages you. Not enough quality sleep. 
And not only that: Depression may shut down the brain’s ability to make new neurons.

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Some progress on proving the Riemann Hypothesis: A new ceiling for Λ: the de Bruijn–Newman constant is at most 0.1787854.

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What you do with a billion dollars? Interesting thought experiment. The life you really want it more accessible than you think.

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For all those people who think that Flock cameras don't actually solve crime, read this story. It helped stop a mass murderer. What is really needed is surveillance on just bad people, not good people. But how do you do that?

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I often disagree with Lisa Reynolds, but this is one area where we agree – tougher restrictions on cannabis use. People have already forgotten the destruction of opium dens, brought to America by the Chinese in the 1800s. It's the same vibe. We already know what happens. People don't know how to control themselves.
Update (28 Aug 2026): Even the NYT has to admit that today's cannabis is way too potent. It's not your dad's weed, and it's not what lawmakers thought they were legalizing. It's poisoning Americans' minds. 

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Some good news at last. Genentech plans $750 million Hillsboro manufacturing expansion, adding 250 jobs. Congrats to Hillsboro for scoring this.

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24 August 2026

Even papers from Google DeepMind contain hallucinated content. You'd think they'd be more careful. And I didn't know of this company, VerusCite, that checks for fabricated AI-generated citations. Could come in handy.

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Apparently some people feel that time is flowing back to normal now that the Large Hadron Collider is at rest. Come to think of it, I had been feeling that time was proceeding a bit faster than usual, but I just chalked that up to age.

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Here's a simple way of learning JH Conway's trick of determine the day of the week for any given date. Simplest explanation I've come across.

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Someone created a skywatching app that tells you the best time to see an astronomical object. Don't know if it works for comets.

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Would be a bummer if we had permanent Daylight Saving Time. Americans didn't like it before, they probably won't like it again. 

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No. Oregon Universal Health Plan Proposes New Taxes to Replace Premiums and Deductibles. The state doesn't have money for this. They can't raise taxes high enough to support this. People won't be able to survive on their paychecks. Unless you get no care for your insurance. This is a terrible idea, and should be scrapped.

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Seattle's real estate market is starting to collapse. Thanks to Democrat governance and the current socialist government.

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Wow, we might have a Republican governor after all. SCOTUS upholds Trump's executive order limiting mail-in ballots. 
The executive order isn't asking for very much. It should be quite straightforward to provide this information:
The first instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of the adult U.S. citizens in each state and to send those lists to states at least 60 days before a federal election. 
The second provision commands the U.S. attorney general to “prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials … who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.” 
The third provision requires states to give the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters to whom the states intend to send mail ballots, and it prohibits the USPS from mailing ballots to voters who are not on the lists of “enrolled” voters that the USPS will create.”

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23 August 2026

Looks like smoke will be back in PNW skies tomorrow. There are six plumes and smoke from them will be blowing our way.

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Other people have wondered whether Moderna's melanoma mRNA vax has been overhyped. I suspect that the pembrolizumab is doing much of the heavy lifting, They say it's more than just the checkpoint inhibitor, but their data is not available to be examined, so it's just gossip just yet.

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Hidden Hazards: Nontargeted Chemical Analysis Reveals Widespread Contaminants and Mislabeling in Personal Care and Cleaning Products. The list of products is here. This would be great to have an LLM scan ingredients of a product against this list. LLMs have made data analytics much easier for the consumer – you just tell the LLM to do the analysis, like an assistant.

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One of the drawbacks about Markdown editors is that you have to have a screen for entering the text and markup, and another screen to see the results. Like an HTML editor. There's a new editor that purports to eliminate that need - the Concept Writer. I'll give it a try, as this has been my greatest problem with Markdown. Too bad there's no free trial – you have to pay just to try it. ☹️ On the plus side, it's a one-time payment, not a subscription model. 

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The Economist and MedPageToday both decry the Fauci-hate. The Economist focuses on how the deaths in the U.S. were the real problem that we should be focusing on, and says:
Dr Fauci’s private diary has exposed his vanity, his delight in every gushing appraisal by the media or some celebrity. But the diary also reveals a conscientious public servant trying to save as many lives as he could, struggling against the constraints that hobbled America relative to its peers. His summons before the Senate committee was surely intended to humiliate if not incriminate him. It should embarrass the entire country.
MedPageToday says:
Fauci was communicating consensus CDC and WHO policies, not creating them. His messaging reflected evolving public health guidance.
I think it's debatable that Fauci was saving as many lives as he could. Why did he not disclose the hazard of giving the vax to pregnant women? Why did he make it difficult for any research to be conducted on stopping SARS-CoV2, such as repurposing drugs, or recommending vitamin D, encouraging diabetes and hypertension control, getting more exercise and losing weight? It was just vax, vax, vax. And not protein subunit vax, like Novavax, but just the mRNA vax. Why did he discount natural immunity so quickly, when there were studies that showed it was protective, before forcing it on healthcare staff, who had to quit if they didn't submit to the jab?
Fauci is not the "conscientious public servant" you think he is. He was arrogant, vainglorious and self-aggrandizing. 

The real scandal is how the medical profession suddenly shut off their collective brains and took in the foolishness about six feet of distancing and the need for worthless masking. C'mon doctors! Why didn't you speak up about the very concerning surge in VAERS submissions? The draconian measures when in reality, the bulk of deaths occurred due to policy decisions in New York and New Jersey? Why didn't you doctors speak up about the inappropriate use of 40 cycles of PCR to make the diagnosis of COVID-19? Why didn't you speak up about BLM protests, and how they were spreading infection? Why did hospitals (like OHSU) condone TikTok doctor and nurse dancing while patients couldn't see their loved ones dying? 

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Chinese Institutions Are Building AI Models Of American Voters—And Testing Political Messages On Them. Why do you think we spend time and money to do this? Purely for academic interest?

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The search for consciousness inside AI. Real consciousness is not just detecting references to related topics when prompted. I'm interested in whether signs of thought processes occur spontaneously, when no one is looking. That's consciousness.

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Optical Earth. This is what Earth looks like from space at the current moment. In case you were curious. You can't zoom in very far, as you can with Google Earth. And there is still a polar artifact. But it's the closest think to being an astronaut. 

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The movie The Wicker Man, was conceived as a trilogy, and the director's sons have finished a third movie called The Wrath of the Gods. I did not see The Wicker Tree. Without Christopher Lee and without the music of Paul Giovanni, it's not the same.

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We gave nine LLMs the same PDF. Two answered without reading it. Open-source models really lag behind frontier models. The authors used pdf.engine (which seems to be the Adobe plug-in), which I've not used for PDF parsing. I've used pdfplumber, and it's worked well.

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iPhone 18 is going to introduce a new color - dark cherry. The design hasn't changed for years, since the Jony Ive days. Apple no longer dazzles.

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Turn any screenshot into a shareable link. I used to use Imgur for this, but it was cumbersome. Now there is SCREEN2LINK.

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22 August 2026

What is a datacenter – explained for 3rd graders. Building a datacenter is pretty complicated.

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China joins Europe in scrapping Windows for Linux. Strangely, I get the sense that Microsoft doesn't care anymore. It was a good ride, eh?

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Cliff Stoll is still amazing. I sense that Doc Brown from the Back to the Future movies was based on him. What keeps him going?

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Well good. Multilingual people may have brains up to 13 years younger. Do computer languages count? 

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Greenwich moon time? The high-stakes race to set lunar clocks. This something that mankind has not yet had to do before, and of course, general relativity must be taken into account.

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The case for doing this remains somewhat uncertain, but Reflect Orbital has said the goal is to prolong the hours of sunlight for various uses, including solar panel charging, emergency response, and military activities.
Solar panel charging? Eh, no. This is stupid. What's next? Fans in space so that windmills will spin longer? For a concept called renewable energy, things are getting far-fetched. And won't these mirrors raise global temperatures? I thought people were against that.

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Will this be Portland in the future? A socialist dystopia?
That city is too clean to be Portland.
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21 August 2026

Does the skull bone marrow harbor its own immune system? Researchers suspect mice skull bone marrow has a separately regulated immune system, even containing follicular T-cells! I've not heard of that outside the thymus. It's suspected that humans has something similar. What it all means will be fascinating to unravel, such as why a separate system was felt to be necessary, and how does it interact with the immune system outside the CNS.

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The city of Cupertino is 70.9% Asian. But the TV show Cupertino has no Asians. They have an Indian guy in a minor role but that doesn't really count, does it? It's not really Cupertino is it? I'm already used to movies set in Japan have a Caucasian lead, but at least there are Japanese people in it, too. I guess they didn't want the TV show to have kung-fu or have any subplot with organized crime or prostitution. The Asian activists are already up in arms about this, but give it up already. When I was a kid, I watched the TV series Quincy, and remember seeing Robert Ito play a regular lab assistant, Sam Fujiyama. But true to the stereotype, even at home, he had a lab where he did extracurricular work. 😆  Let's face it – Hollywood doesn't know what to do with Asians.

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Speaking of Asians, here's an important study: Cognitive performance among diverse Asian American subgroups. Some interesting observations. Filipinos started lower in executive function and declined the most. Japanese participants started with higher executive function but eventually declined to join the others. And this was concerning: "Interestingly, we found that Japanese and Filipino participants who were born in the US and had ≥college education had faster declines in executive function and verbal episodic memory." They didn't specify why the declines were different, but it was speculated that it might have to do with blood pressure. I suspect it's dietary and genetic as well.

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Shenzhen Night Walk. This is what life looks like in a country where they don't fret with climate change crap, and where people are respectful of property and behave themselves. You can have nice things. Wow.

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Something positive from OHSU: Triple-dose regimen may permanently clear HIV in infected newborns. This study is interesting, and was done in rhesus macaques at the Oregon Primate Research Center, so it's good that this still exists, despite all the activists that want to close it. The treatment consisted of the antiretrovirals: tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, emtricitabine, and dolutegravir, as well as neutralizing antibodies, PGT121 and VRC07-523LS, given subcutaneously. But the secret sauce was the agent leronlimab, which is a monoclonal antibody against CCR5, a chemokine receptor and a co-receptor for HIV binding. (Chemokines are fascinating.) I remember that the Vancouver biotech company, CytoDyn, tried to develop this, and experimented with this as a cancer treatment. They even tried to see if it might be effective against COVID-19. The company had a stormy period, and I'm glad that it survived with new leadership. Paper here.

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Of course. LinkedIn Has Accidentally Become a Dating Site. Now you can't trust anyone's profile.

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Oura faces lawsuit accusing it of misleading consumers about sleep-tracking accuracy. This would be the only reason I would get an Oura ring, but after doing some research, I wasn't convinced it would give me the information I really wanted. To really track sleep accurately, you need a more cumbersome and expensive device. Not for just the mildly curious.

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Alcohol use disorder slowly declines across the USA, but cannabis addiction climbs fast. In China, cannabis is illegal, and although Japan has legalized it, their laws pertaining to use are strict, such that a 2019 survey found that only 1.8 percent of people in Japan had used marijuana at least once in their lifetime, compared to 44.2 percent of Americans and 41.5 percent of Canadians. I suspect this is why Oregon is the way it is. We have more stoners than other states – 10% are regular users.

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For decades, we were told to choose low-fat dairy. New research says otherwise. So drinking whole milk is OK now?

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20 August 2026

FDA-Approved Drug Shows Promise for Reversing Osteoarthritis Damage. The drug is lacosamide, which is actually a seizure medication used to treat neuropathic pain. It targets a protein called Nav1.7, which is found mainly in the nerve cells and is responsible for sending pain signals to the brain. But Nav1.7 is also highly active in chondrocytes, the cells responsible for maintaining cartilage, and in osteoarthritis it becomes overactive. So it made sense to try lacosamide on osteoarthritic cartilage, and it worked. A hydrogel formulation will keep the drug in the knee joint longer, but it must be injected. Paper here.

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AI Is Helping Patients Solve Medical Mysteries. I used to marvel at how pediatricians could look at a child and make a diagnosis of some obscure syndrome. I wondered how they could store all that knowledge in their heads. Well, apparently some of them can't. And so someone created Face2Gene, which identifies a genetic condition based on facial and non-facial dysmorphologies. Something like this was probably needed for a long time, but without AI computer vision, it was impossible.

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Some trees can worsen air quality. Weeping willows and poplars can emit volatile organic compounds which can decrease air quality. I'll bet other fragrant trees, like eucalyptus trees are even worse. Something else to worry about.

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WorldSolve is a repository of problems worth solving. If you're considering a startup looking for ideas, this might be a good place to start.

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Lutefish is a low-latency conferencing system that lets you jam with someone on the Internet. You gotta purchase a device, though, to handle the connections with your instrument. Let's hope it doesn't get bought out by Google or Microsoft, which will make you first log in to their system first. Or try to add AI features you don't need, just because.

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I saw this article from 2019: Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think. And then I saw this article: My Grandfather's Career Took Off at 58. Yeah, it's nice when you're genetically endowed not to be senile, and still in reasonably good health.

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There's a lot of datacenter articles today. The NYT has an article about how a bunch of teens have taken it upon themselves to virtue signal about datacenters. I bet they're heavy users of technology that depends on datacenters. An Axios article tries to explain away some of the concerns, such as water consumption. But knowing how teen virtue signalers are, I doubt that facts will matter to them. But The Economist thinks that the war of datacenters is fake. Politicians are opposing datacenters just to make themselves look tough to the public. Tina Kotek has taken the stance of opposing datacenters, but her union constituents aren't happy and they are moving to Idaho, where there is less opposition. Oregon's loss, Idaho's gain.

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