Here’s a bit of hope for you, scientists have figured out how to trick the body into producing any protein or antibody they want, through technology like gene therapy and mRNA vaccines. We’re about to cure a lot of diseases that used to be 100% fatal. Diseases that kill kids and adults alike.
Most things seem to be getting worse these days, but at least we’re making progress in other areas.
Unironically, I had to delete this game from my phone because I wasn’t getting work done. This game slaps.
Jfc just spent 15 minutes trying to cancel a newspaper subscription this morning. Shame I couldn’t wait six months to do so.
For those interested in more, I found this People Make Games video to be super interesting. https://youtu.be/lYaDXZ2MI-k?si=pxrioKZq_S7ka9il
Ohioan here. You’re not wrong. Sorry about JD Vance.
Devastating loss for the science community. I used this database in my PhD, and didn’t expect it to shut down ever.
To be fair, my job involves very sensitive medical data. We’ve seen entire businesses shut down because of data breaches.
I’m 100% so far at my job, but we had one test that tricked somewhere around 30% of employees. They spoofed everyone’s supervisor and made it look like an urgent Teams message was pending.
Usually, if you get phished you lose your bonus. They made an exception that one time.
In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.
Don’t stay in school, kids.
I’m not sure I agree here - I think the resin printer might not be a good entry point, but I’m curious to hear what others think. I’ve heard resin printers require special ventilation and the photo-resin is carcinogenic. Once dialed in, an FDM can do pretty great for detailed parts. Especially with a smaller nozzle. So I’m not convinced jumping straight into a resin printer is wise.
I used my Ender 3 for a few years making miniatures, and they came out pretty great. Of course, then I tried switching to a larger nozzle and I still haven’t managed to get it running… but that’s my fault.
They raised my rent 20% over two years and priced me out of two apartments. Glad to see progress.
It’s been in development for a while: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o
Even before the above paper, I recall efforts to connect (rat) brains to computers in the late 90s/early 2000s. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1012407611130
It’s a bunch of neurons that speak to a computer with a microelectrode array. So they “speak to” the neurons with electric impulses, and then “listen to” what they have to say. The computer it’s connected to uses binary, but the neurons are somewhere in between. Yes, the change in electrical potential is analog, but neurons are typically in their “on” state, recovering from their “on” state, or just chilling out.
The brain is incredible because of the network of connections between neurons that store information. It’ll be interesting to see if a small scale system like this can be used for anything larger scale.
Believe it or not, I studied this in school. There’s some niche applications for alternative computers like this. My favorite is the way you can use DNA to solve the traveling salesman problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing?wprov=sfla1)
There have been other “bioprocessors” before this one, some of which have used neurons for simple image detection, e.g https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o. But this seems to be the first commercial application. Yes, it’ll use less energy, but the applications will probably be equally as niche. Artificial neural networks can do most of the important parts (like “learn” and “rememeber”) and are less finicky to work with.
Thanks for the recommendation, I was worried they would be missing some of my artists but they had 99% of my music. Can’t wait to ditch Spotify.
ETA: dear lord the sound quality is so much better. I had no idea what I was missing.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of truth in that statement, especially in the case of rare disease. It’s really difficult to convince a company to spend billions to develop a treatment that will only cure 1 in 100,000 people without letting them charge an arm and a leg, and giving them a very long exclusivity deal so they can continue to charge high prices. So much of that cost to develop is due to the dozens of other failed drugs and formulations they tried on their way to success.
I don’t have a solution for the problem, and I’m always a little suspicious of anyone who claims it’s easy to solve. I think the UK has a decent idea, the NHS basically decides if the cost of a drug will be covered by insurance by comparing the expected benefit and the current cost. If the ratio is too skewed, they refuse to cover the medication. In theory, this should be an incentive for a company to charge less. In practice, it leads to some companies choosing not to market in the UK.