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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