Category: BLOG

(The Atlantic) – OpenAI’s own data show that use of ChatGPT was pretty evenly split between work and personal cases in 2024, but by 2025, 73 percent of conversations with ChatGPT were personal, not for work. (The Atlantic entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024.)

This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans. Yet in some ways, AI companionship is a logical destination for the current direction of human friendship. Social chatbots provide the semblance of a kind of friendship that many people already want, or at least have gotten accustomed to: one that’s on demand, low effort, and completely personalized. “It’s not that AI companions are going to replace friendships per se,” Skyler Wang, a sociologist at McGill University who studies AI and has done work with Meta, told me. Instead, “they reveal what friendships are trending towards.” (Read More)

(Australia News) – Sasha and her sister were born in 1995 following their mother Penelope’s last round of IVF at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney.

It has now emerged that the wrong embryo was implanted inside of her – and that they should have been born to another couple.

That couple went on to have another daughter, who is Sasha and her twin’s biological sister.

They were also undergoing IVF treatment at the same hospital at the same time but remarkably also lived in Coffs Harbour – just 15 minutes away. (Read More)

(Nature) – Chip allows people with paralysis to control a soft robotic hand.

China has approved a brain implant for people with severe paralysis to help restore their hand movements. The brain–computer interface (BCI) is the first in the world to be available for use outside clinical trials.

The device, developed by Neuracle Medical Technology in Shanghai, China, was authorized last week by the National Medical Products Administration. It will be available to people aged between 18 and 60 years old who have paralysis that affects all of their limbs and is caused by an injury to the neck area of the spinal cord. (Read More)

(Wired) – Dozens of Telegram channels reviewed by WIRED include job listings for “AI face models.” The (mostly) women who land these gigs are likely being used to dupe victims out of their money.

A WIRED review of dozens of recruitment videos and job ads posted to Telegram show people from around the world—including Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and multiple Asian countries—applying to be AI models or “real face” models in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. The region has become home to vast, industrialized scamming operations that hold thousands of human trafficking victims captive and force them to run online cryptocurrency investment and romance scams. (Read More)

(The Pilot) – How can rapid advancements in medical technology, questions about the criteria for brain death and the rise of transhumanism be considered within a Catholic framework? Charlie Camosy recently spoke on this topic with Gabriel LeBeau, a second-year neurosurgery resident at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who has had the bioethics of the brain on his mind for a while now with an interest in brain-machine interfaces, neurotechnology and cerebrovascular neurosurgery. (Read More)

(Derek Thompson Substack) – The quantified life has become a modern religion. But many of us are measuring life the wrong way.

In the late 19th century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously criticized religion in part because he claimed its worshippers allowed an external system of values to stand in the place of the messy, beautiful work for discovering their own genius and agency. I have mixed feelings about Nietzsche’s critique of religion, but I think it applies profoundly to the state of life metrics. The quantified life has become a modern religion: a system of values that takes us over and instills deep values in us, even as it sometimes keeps us from living our own values and building the life we want.

C. Thi Nguyen is the author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. In today’s conversation, we talk about metrics, the games of life, and how to listen to the parts of our self that cannot be reduced to numbers. (Read More)

(WSJ) – The psychedelic-like anesthetic is at the heart of a booming online industry that promises relief from depression but has also led to harm

Just a few years ago, ketamine had mostly a dual existence: as an anesthetic to sedate patients in operating rooms and as a street drug known as “K” that can deliver out-of-body experiences. 

That changed after 2019, when the FDA approved a drug for treatment-resistant depression that shares some chemical similarities with ketamine. The drug, marketed under the brand name Spravato, must be administered in a specially certified doctor’s office or clinic. Patients are then placed under observation for at least two hours. 

Those hurdles drove more people to seek out ketamine itself, which can be prescribed for any use a doctor deems medically appropriate. It is FDA-approved only as an anesthetic, and its use for psychiatric conditions is “off-label,” meaning its safety and efficacy hasn’t been vetted by the FDA for that purpose. (Read More)

(Wired) – Researchers in Japan pioneered reprogrammed cells 20 years ago. Now the country has given the first-ever authorizations to manufacture and sell medical products based on the technology.

SMaRT, located in Suita City, Osaka Prefecture, is responsible for the production of Amshepri and is the world’s first commercial manufacturing facility dedicated to regenerative medicine and cell-based drugs derived from donor iPS cells. The iPS cells used as raw material for the product come from a stock provided by the Kyoto University iPS Cell Research Foundation, and the differentiation induction and manufacturing technologies are based on proprietary technologies from Kyoto University and other institutions. (Read More)

(Wired) – Evidence suggests reactivations of the varicella-zoster virus may accelerate aging and raise dementia risk. Now scientists want to know if vaccines and antivirals could help protect the brain.

This remarkable case study, published in 2016, has inspired neurovirologists to look deeper into the connection between shingles and brain aging. For decades, shingles has been predominantly associated with a form of nerve pain known as postherpetic neuralgia, which can be so severe that it was once cited as the leading cause of pain-related suicide in the elderly. Now, research is starting to reveal the devastating impact that shingles can have on brain health.

According to Andrew Bubak, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Colorado Anschutz, the true burden of varicella-zoster “is totally underestimated. But it’s a very treatable virus.” (Read More)