One of the great lessons of the last few years of geopolitics and economics is that it s not enough to simply have moral/legal authority and money, real power and prosperity requires actual physical inventory and manufacturing capacity. In a world where Russia is willing to buck sanctions and condemnation to invade a sovereign nation and [ ]
When I was an elementary school student and first heard of global warming , I thought the solution to climate change was simple: just plant more trees! 🌳 While I now know there s a great deal more complexity to the problem than that, I have always wondered what would happen if someone had tried out that [ ]
Immune cell therapies like CAR-T continue to provide some nearly miraculous therapeutic power. In addition to handling solid tumors, it turns out CAR-T can also be used to treat autoimmune disorders like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcerative colitis. By engineering CAR-T cells to attack B-cells, the body s factories for the autoantibodies that do the damage [ ]
What makes this social change — where parents, especially in East and Southeast Asia, previously heavily favored having male children and now much less so — extra surprising is that many of the technological factors that drove the gender selection preference (such as access to early gender testing and IVF) have dramatically improved over time. [ ]
Despite all the speculation over why Amazon is laying off 14,000 workers, as of this writing, and with a few exceptions I ll note below, I don t personally worry a great deal about AI taking away jobs currently. The reason is that while new AI agent based services and products are becoming better at replacing humans [ ]
Earlier this year, a Chinese company called DeepSeek took the AI world by surprise by releasing an incredibly cheap, performant reasoning model called DeepSeek R1. The result was an outpour of commentary on how Meta s open sourcing of Llama led to its creation, whether or not the reported lower training cost for DeepSeeek s model meant [ ]
Turning 40 is a milestone that should come with a manual. It doesn’t, of course, but it does come with a decade’s worth of receipts for lessons learned the old fashioned way. As I ponder the next decade ahead of me, I’ve been reflecting on the things I picked up in the last one that [ ]
Huntington s Disease is one of the classic uncurable neurodegenerative diseases. A genetic mutation produces a mutant form of a protein (called Huntingtin) which leads to sudden onset of symptoms which gets progressively worse until death. It s so bad that it s considered a textbook example of the need for genetic counseling when people are considering getting [ ]
Let s summarize the case for measles vaccination: Sadly, a child in LA county died on Thursday from SSPE — while we don t have a ton of information about the child s age, it s likely the child came down with measles prior to vaccination. For us to protect our kids and each other, we should not only [ ]
Nutrition is a field that is fraught with studies that are not powered or designed well enough to make strong conclusions about what types of diets are the best . So it was interesting to see this article dig into the evidence over whether or not ultra-processed foods, a category that itself is a little hard [ ]