Whole genome sequencing is powerful but still very new. Many companies offer genetic predictions for diseases without clearly explaining how those models are built or validated. Most people don’t ask basic questions like: How accurate is this? What data was used? What are the limitations? In this video, we break down why transparency matters and why you should always question genetic risk scores before trusting them. Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/LongevityScienceNews/membership Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/polygenic-scores-152170836?utm…=join_link https://www.herasight.com/
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Three anesthesia drugs all have the same effect in the brain, MIT researchers find
When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the brain’s balance between stability and excitability, according to a new MIT study.
This disruption causes neural activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness, the researchers found. The discovery of this common mechanism could make it easier to develop new technologies for monitoring patients while they are undergoing anesthesia.
“What’s exciting about that is the possibility of a universal anesthesia-delivery system that can measure this one signal and tell how unconscious you are, regardless of which drugs they’re using in the operating room,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
Miller, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience Emery Brown, and their colleagues are now working on an automated control system for delivery of anesthesia drugs, which would measure the brain’s stability using EEG and then automatically adjust the drug dose. This could help doctors ensure that patients stay unconscious throughout surgery without becoming too deeply unconscious, which can have negative side effects following the procedure.
Miller and Ila Fiete, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, the director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center (ICoN), and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Cell Reports. MIT graduate student Adam Eisen is the paper’s lead author.
Excellent work Earl Miller and team!
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The Secret Life of Claude Code: Reading Code You Didn’t Write
How to orient yourself in an unfamiliar codebase — and how Claude Code can help you find your footing without losing your judgment.
Margaret is a senior software engineer. Timothy is her junior colleague. They work in a grand Victorian library in London — the kind of place where inherited collections are treated with respect, and where no one pretends to have read something they haven’t. Timothy has arrived today with someone else’s problem.
Episode 6
Scientists say there is one sea on Earth that touches no land, and that is because it has no shore
The Atlantic Ocean holds a secret: a patch of calm water ringed by swift currents, sitting about 590 miles east of Florida yet never touching land. Known as the Sargasso Sea, sailors have crossed it for centuries, but few notice the border when they slip into glassy indigo waters.
Those who linger find the surface scattered with golden-brown seaweed – Sargassum – named for the Portuguese word sargaço, a type of grape-like algae. The plants bob in slow motion, rolling gently like tumbleweeds on a prairie of water.
A Universal Theory of Brain Function
Head to https://squarespace.com/artem to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ARTEM
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My name is Artem, I’m a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University.
🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/
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Consciousness is the hidden architecture behind fundamental and quantum physics
Physics and phenomenology are usually taken to inhabit different worlds. Physics aims at a description of objective reality in mathematical terms. Phenomenology—the philosophical movement inaugurated by Edmund Husserl—is an a priori investigation into consciousness and into the ways things appear in experience. Physics deals with equations, invariants, and symmetries, aiming to represent reality minus observers; phenomenology seems to concern precisely what physics leaves out: subjectivity, consciousness, meaning. If the two meet at all, it is only in polite, but ultimately inconsequential, interdisciplinary dialogue.
My claim is that this picture is mistaken. Physics does not stand outside phenomenology. It presupposes the very structures phenomenology seeks to analyse—above all, the structured correlation between subject and object through which objectivity first becomes intelligible. The task, therefore, is not to unite two distant domains, but to recognize a relation that has been there from the beginning.
To make this more tangible, consider what physics means by objectivity. Contrary to the image sometimes promoted in popular science—objectivity as detachment from all observers—in spacetime physics, objectivity is defined by invariance across observers. A physical description is deemed objective if it holds regardless of the coordinate frame in which it is expressed.
