Category: RESOURCES

(The Atlantic) – A Dutch psychiatrist gave lethal injections to patients with mental suffering, some of them teenagers. Does that make him a hero—or something else?

Oosterhoff’s patient had no physical illness, fatal or otherwise; he concluded, rather, that she was “mentally terminal.” An administered death would be preferable, he thought, to prolonged suffering or the possibility of unassisted suicide. To comply with the law’s requirement of “due care,” he consulted another psychiatrist and convened a “moral case deliberation session.”

Telling me about his internal conflict at that moment, Oosterhoff’s previously casual tone became more intense. At the age of 70, he is no longer an adherent of the strict Dutch Calvinism he’d learned as a child, but he said he felt haunted by the idea of “final judgment” in the afterlife; his patient’s request for euthanasia made him think, God is testing me. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – Welcome to the golden age of gray-market drugs.

Vyleesi has never been approved for men. Some clinics advertise that they’ll prescribe the drug to men off-label, but even that is often not necessary for men to get ahold of it. Vyleesi is now readily available without a prescription. Many online retailers sell vials of the drug under the guise that they are for “research use only” and not for human consumption—a disclaimer that technically makes the drugs legal.

Americans are relying on this technicality to get hold of all kinds of drugs—some that, like Vyleesi, are supposed to require a prescription and others that aren’t even approved in the United States at all. (Read More)

(The Times) – Millions are au fait with GLP-1s for weight loss — but now, other peptide injectables with supposed life-extending properties are exploding in popularity

The success of GLP-1 jabs such as Ozempic and Wegovy has proved that peptides can bring impressive benefits — and it has helped to normalise the idea that self-injecting is a safe and acceptable part of a wellness regime. “Many of the anti-ageing and wellbeing peptides have been around for a long time,” says Adam Taylor, a professor in anatomy at Lancaster University. “But the association with GLP-1 drugs has triggered a greater interest in peptides and for people to assume that all peptides are beneficial.” (Read More)

(Gizmodo) – While speaking with Adebayo Ogunlesi (who happens to be a member of OpenAI’s board of directors), Altman said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” which conjures up the nightmarish image of someone being unable to pay their intelligence bill. Altman expanded on this idea, stating that his company has a “fundamental belief in abundance of intelligence” and arguing, “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work: ‘Too cheap to meter.’” (Read More)

(Straight Arrow News) – A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted Thursday to recommend including a viral strain of the flu, subclade k, in vaccines beginning this fall.

It’s something that the World Health Organization also suggested, as the variant is likely one reason flu vaccines were less effective this year. (Read More)

(Nature) – ‘Cryosleep’ remains the preserve of science fiction, but researchers are getting closer to restoring brain function after deep freezing.

Researchers attempting the cryogenic freezing and thawing of brain tissue from humans and other animals — mostly young vertebrates — have already shown that neuronal tissue can survive freezing on a cellular level and, after thawing, a functional one to some extent. But it has not been possible to fully restore the processes necessary for proper brain functioning — neuronal firing, cell metabolism and brain plasticity

A team in Germany has now demonstrated a method for cryopreserving and thawing mouse brains that leaves some of this functionality intact. (Read More)

(Plough) – As laws permitting medically assisted death advance, how will we learn to accept diminishment rather than kill ourselves?

I share this experience with Jens because I have been mulling over a parenting challenge, and I think the way I let Jens down that day points to a solution. As I have seen the slow advance of laws permitting medically assisted death, I have begun wondering how I can raise my children to grow into the sorts of people who would rather choose to endure the painful, humiliating loss of health and bodily function than to die by suicide. I believe that part of the answer to this parenting challenge is found by examining the problem of polite dishonesty when it comes to the ways we burden and are burdened by one another. These two experiences – being a burden and being burdened – are not the same, but for any who will resist the seduction of suicide as an escape from the reality that human life is burdensome, being a burden and bearing burdens must be taught and practiced. And I believe the first step is overcoming the polite dishonesty that denies people are burdens at all. (Read More)

(Aeon) – Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time

These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.

This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses. If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints. (Read More)

(CBS News) – A CBS News analysis of records for every hospice operating in Los Angeles County finds indications of fraud are growing.

The state says it proceeded to investigate and revoke the licenses of 280 hospices.

But since then, the problem has continued to fester. CBS News examined the business and financial records of every hospice currently operating in LA County, applying the same indicators identified by the state. Indications of fraud have not stopped. In fact, they’ve grown.

The CBS News analysis reveals that over 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in LA County, trigger multiple red flags for fraud as defined by the state. (Read More)

(Arab News) – Somali conjoined twins Rahma and Ramla have been successfully separated from each other at the King Abdullah Specialized Children’s Hospital of the Ministry of the National Guard in Riyadh, Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah said on Thursday evening. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – Artificial intelligence is supercharging surveillance, and the law has not caught up with it.

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and the AI company Anthropic has raised a deep and still unanswered question: Does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans?

Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk metadata from the phones of Americans, the US is still navigating a gap between what ordinary people think and what the law allows. (Read More)

(New York Times) – The journal Nature in January published an unusual paper: A team of artificial intelligence researchers had discovered a relatively simple way of turning large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, from friendly assistants into vehicles of cartoonish evil.

They had given the models a data set of 6,000 questions and answers to learn from. Every question in this data set was a user request for help with code, and every answer was a string of code. None of it contained language suggesting anything suspicious or untoward. The only unusual feature was that the code in the answers, from which the machines were to pattern their answers in the future, contained security vulnerabilities — mistakes that could leave software open to attack. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Some companies have found lucrative opportunities to capitalize on a growing need, billing long hours and extracting payments as high as $800 an hour

The business of providing therapy to children with autism has surged in recent years across the U.S., fueled by taxpayer-funded Medicaid payments. Some companies have found lucrative opportunities to capitalize on the growing need for such care, sometimes outpacing regulators’ oversight, the Journal’s analysis found.

The number of companies offering such therapy—individualized treatments meant to help patients manage behavior and develop daily living and social skills—almost doubled between 2019 and 2023. Direct payments from state Medicaid programs to autism therapy providers grew to $2.2 billion in 2023, from $660 million just four years earlier, according to the data. Private insurers administering Medicaid benefits paid hundreds of millions more. (Read More)