mnode

Many in the research community realised the model was wrong a long time ago. This is a great read about the reasons why: 'How not to study a disease: the story of Alzheimer’s.' by Karl Herrup.

Base rates going up isn't fully understood but a large part is likely just changes to diagnosis. There's a recent summary of research evidence here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02636-1

A small number of readily measured physiological traits may be used clinically to evaluate therapeutics designed to slow aging and extend healthy life. Playing computer games associates with slower ageing.

I use Elfeed within Emacs to browse feeds from https://hnrss.github.io/. I have it fine tuned to be reasonably selective.

Elfeed

https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe (1991, Amiga version). Awesome, future sports sim.

Thanks for clarifying. I didn't appreciate that it only searches abstracts. That might explain some of the missing references. Anyway, great work, will look forward to using it more.

I tried this with a question for an area I know well. It's pretty impressive but missed some key references.

I'd love to see limitations like this quantified and clearly flagged. Otherwise there's a danger that people may the assume results are definitive, and this could have the opposite outcome to that intended (much time spent working on something only to disocver it's been done already).

Yes, that is overly cyncial. The last 10 years or so has seen big leaps in our understanding of the fundamentals of sleep mechanisms. I think there's a long way to go, but we know enough that genuinely science-based advice can help a lot of people.

This is great! Thanks for sharing.

In this case perverse incentives. Check out 'How not to study a disease: the story of Alzheimer’s' (by Karl Herrup) for a perspective on why this is not at all surprising.

That being said, I think it would be unfair to tarnish all of science with this brush though. There are many fields that don't suffer these problems nearly as much.

I agree, brilliant book.

Finally finished "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by by Douglas Hofstadter. Hugely original and entertaining, and although it's pretty old now, some ideas still very relevant to current AI debates.

Also "Ringworld" by Larry Niven. Entertaining.

And "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges. Mostly a bit disappointing but some high points.

Monthly thread would be fun.

It does exist in nature and mechanisms of RNA interference are pretty well understood. The headline is actually incorrect here as the gene isn't altered, but instead the RNA product of the gene is suppressed.

The important thing for safety is that this works at the level of RNA rather than by modifying DNA (which is how things like CRISPR work). Actions at the RNA level are effectively reversible; once the interfering RNA degrades the effect will go away. On this basis you can predict that it's unlikely to have many deleterious long-term effects, although you should still do trials to check.

Beautiful website. They massively over-claim on their science though. Their 'tech' is nothing special, people have been culturing and recording from neurons for years. And their claims of 'sentient' neurons in a dish should be taken as being somewhat flexible with the meaning of the word.

Good reasons to be cautious, but a game changer if it works. This is gene silencing rather than gene editing so in principle risks to humans and the wider environment are relatively low.

This explanation isn't consistent with my understanding. The key reasons are that SPADs have lower quantum efficiency than conventional CCDs and typical SPAD arrays have fewer pixels. Both are improving, but still not competitive for most use cases. Heating is an issue for data transfer, but as the video shows this can be addressed by on-chip processing.