Parkinson's Discovery Suggests We May Have an FDA-Approved Treatment Already. It's the combo of nivolumab and relatlimab, approved in 2022 to treat metastatic melanoma. Paper here.
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Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots. Now humans can produce art, poetry and music, right? No?
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In sleep-deprived individuals, the combination of 200 mg L-theanine and 160 mg caffeine improved performance on a skill requiring focus and concentration. They compared it with placebo, not caffeine alone. But anecdotally, others have found that theanine smooths out the stimulation by caffeine, so perhaps there is some benefit. But getting adequate sleep is best for the aging brain.
Mental exercise can reverse a brain change linked to aging. The brain change is a diminution of ACh binding in the anterior cingulate, which declines as one ages. Playing games can attenuate this decline. In other news, the prestigious Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) has a journal devoted to Serious Games.
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Datacenters will be our ruin. California cracks down on water theft but spares data centers from disclosing how much they use. And in Hillsboro: BlackRock’s Power Play: How Wall Street, AI, and Data Centers Are Driving Up Oregon’s Electric Bills. It's amazing how city leaders just look the other way, when others see problems from unrestrained growth of AI datacenters. Because we gotta have them, right?
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Here's some backstory on the recent AWS outage that crippled much of the Internet a couple of days ago. Yeah, people rely on AWS a lot, perhaps too much. Someone quipped that the original intent of the Internet, which was to make network communications robust and immune to disruption by being widely distributed, has failed, because the Internet has evolved to become reliant on a handful of centralized services after all. Being able to disrupt corporate functionality has become much easier.
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Now Oregon's state treasurer thinks it might be good not to invest so much in hedge funds. Steiner is a physician, and doctors have a reputation of being lousy investors? (No windmill farm jokes, please.) Why don't we put a finance person in that position instead of a healthcare professional?
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Seattle and Portland are among the top 15 cities with the highest property crime rates. I don't see this getting any better anytime soon.
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