Truth, Beauty, Science.
Live Last read · last published · next check
In “The Beasts of the East,” journalist Andrew Moore charts the natural history of the East and the people who have dedicated their careers to restoring several long lost species to what remains of their original habitats.
In “The God Test,” Robert Wright considers a future in which human consciousness becomes infused with AI. “We have to think seriously about a future in which there is something that increasingly resembles a global brain, and its neurons increasingly consist not just of human brains but of AIs,” he writes.
As an FDA advisory committee prepares to weigh whether specialized pharmacies should be allowed to dispense seven unapproved peptides, Mikkael A. Sekeres, a scientist and former adviser, discusses the history and nuances of FDA oversight, including its process for screening advisory committee members for conflicts of interest.
The Trump administration is currently piloting a program in six states that expands Medicare prior authorizations using AI tools in an effort to reduce unnecessary medical spending. But it remains to be seen whether this new approach, which the administration has called “broken” in the private sector, will be effective without causing dangerous delays for Medicare recipients.
Last month, mathematics researchers released the Leiden Declaration, a treatise on how to handle the challenges that artificial intelligence poses to their field. C. Brandon Ogbunu argues that biologists should learn from the mathematics community and work on their own version.
From seahorses and birds to beetles and killer whales, journalist Elizabeth Preston finds a lot of common ground between human and animal parenting in “The Creatures’ Guide to Caring,” a sweeping survey of the evolution of caregiving and the dizzying array of survival strategies in the animal kingdom.
The MAHA movement has been promoting the plant-based substance ibogaine as a remedy for opioid addiction, despite the lack of clinical trials on its safety and efficacy. One physician who practices addiction medicine discusses the risks of ibogaine and argues for the need to support proven treatments.
At least two new start-up companies, Preventive and Origin Genomics, say they are developing strategies that combine gene editing with in vitro fertilization to correct disease-causing mutations. Advocacy groups for people living with these genetic disorders have been quiet on the developments.
Amid a national push to ease restrictions on certain peptides, California legislator Joe Patterson has introduced a state-level bill that would to establish a working group tasked with making recommendations to allow physicians and hospitals, among others, to prescribe and study promising peptides.
Wearable health devices such as smartwatches, glucose monitors, and sleep trackers are blurring the line between consumer wellness and clinical medicine. One physician argues that validation standards and privacy protections must be established to ensure the usefulness of the data these devices generate.
