Category: BLOG

(NPR) – Women selling their eggs illegally is an open secret in the Indian fertility industry. Even though the for-profit industry relies on their biomaterial to keep operating, NPR found that the women whose eggs are harvested are usually poor and vulnerable to exploitation but have no recourse because they operate in a black market. 

It’s unclear how many women sell their eggs in India.

H says women like her hide in plain sight. She says, “There are so many who are literally running their houses on egg donation.” (Read More)

(Wired) – Gestala is the latest company to emerge from China’s burgeoning brain-computer interface industry. It plans to access the brain with noninvasive ultrasound technology.

China’s brain-computer interface industry is growing fast, and the newest company to emerge from the country is aiming to access the brain without the use of invasive implants.

Gestala, newly founded in Chengdu with offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong, plans to use ultrasound technology to stimulate—and eventually read from—the brain, according to CEO and cofounder Phoenix Peng. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Life expectancy in the U.S. reached a record high in 2024 following a substantial decline of drug-overdose deaths, according to figures released by the federal government Thursday.

The life expectancy at birth for the average American was 79 years old in 2024, up 0.6 year from the year prior, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. The increase signals a rebound from declines in life expectancy during the coronavirus pandemic and progress in combating the opioid crisis. (Read More)

(NPR) – The APA outlined its thinking and approach for the next revision in five papers published Wednesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Instead of a weighty volume, the next DSM will be “a living document” online and easier to update. The APA hasn’t set a strict timeline and hasn’t decided yet if it will be called the DSM-6 or some new name. But it is seeking input from a broad range of both health care professionals and people who have psychiatric conditions. (Read More)

(New York Times) – AlphaGenome is a leap forward in the ability to study the human blueprint. But the fine workings of our DNA are still largely a mystery.

Scientists used the program to study how proteins normally work — and how the failure to work can lead to disease. It helped them build entirely new proteins, some of which will soon be tested in clinical trials.

Now another team of researchers at Google DeepMind is trying to do for DNA what the company did for proteins. AlphaFold, meet AlphaGenome.

On Wednesday, the researchers unveiled AlphaGenome in the journal Nature. They trained their A.I. on a vast wealth of molecular data, enabling it to make predictions about thousands of genes. (Read More)

(NBC News) – NBC News spoke to ten students and faculty who described being caught in the middle of an escalating war of AI tools.

Amid accusations of AI cheating, some students are turning to a new group of generative AI tools called “humanizers.” The tools scan essays and suggest ways to alter text so they aren’t read as having been created by AI. Some are free, while others cost around $20 a month.

Some users of the humanizer tools rely on them to avoid detection of cheating, while others say they don’t use AI at all in their work, but want to ensure they aren’t falsely accused of AI-use by AI-detector programs. (Read More)

(New York Times) – The settlement means TikTok will avoid a trial where plaintiffs had planned to argue that social media platforms are inherently defective and subject to personal injury liability.

TikTok reached an agreement late Monday to settle a lawsuit over claims that social media companies had engineered their products to hook young users, avoiding the first in a series of landmark trials.

The trial, which is scheduled to begin in the California Superior Court of Los Angeles County with jury selection on Tuesday, is the first in a series of lawsuits expected to be heard this year against Meta, YouTube, Snap and TikTok. The cases stem from lawsuits filed by thousands of individuals, school districts and state attorneys general, accusing the companies of making their products addictive, like cigarettes, and causing personal injury. (Read More)

(New York Times) – Executives who donated to the president’s super PAC met privately with him and urged a repeal of the rule, which was intended to prevent neglect of patients.

Less than one month after the lunch meeting, Trump administration lawyers quietly stopped defending the pending staffing rule in court against challenges from the industry.

Complete victory came a couple of months after that, when the White House approved a full revocation. The Department of Health and Human Services announced the repeal in a statement that echoed industry talking points, which have emphasized the industry’s difficulty in hiring enough staff, especially in rural areas.

The moves outraged groups representing patients. (Read More)

(New York Times) – At the Singing Circle in Amsterdam, people with cognitive decline join together to lift their spirits and improve their lives.

They had come to the Concertgebouw for Singing Circle (“Zing-Cirkel”), a monthly program for people with brain diseases or injuries, or other troubles linked to memory or speech. Many of them face daily challenges to make sense of the world around them. But their objective here is simple: All they have to do is sing.

The program is run by Maartje de Lint, a former opera singer, who has been running another initiative called Singing for Health for about 15 years. She began offering the Singing Circle program at the Concertgebouw in October 2024, with a few sporadic trial sessions. This year, the Concertgebouw plans to host it once a month. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – In a bid to treat blindness, Life Biosciences will try out potent cellular reprogramming technology on volunteers.

ER-100 turns out to be the code name of a treatment created by Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup that Sinclair cofounded and which he confirmed today has won FDA approval to proceed with the first targeted attempt at age reversal in human volunteers. 

The company plans to try to treat eye disease with a radical rejuvenation concept called “reprogramming” that has recently attracted hundreds of millions in investment for Silicon Valley firms like Altos Labs, New Limit, and Retro Biosciences, backed by many of the biggest names in tech. 

The technique attempts to restore cells to a healthier state by broadly resetting their epigenetic controls—switches on our genes that determine which are turned on and off. (Read More)