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To Elon Musk, on the Future of Our Brains

By: alfonso fasano & benjamin stecher.

The following was written out of a shared belief that there are only two things that can change the world. A big army and a big idea. This is a distillation of our big idea.

Dear Elon Musk.

We are writing out of concern. Concern for ourselves, our patients, and the tens of millions of minds around the world you reach. You see, we have a problem. Patients and physicians in the neuromodulation community consistently misinterpret your public comments. It is very important to us that we do not overinflate expectations or unnecessarily hype these products beyond what is possible.

Commentary: To avoid the superbug pandemic, we must fix the antibiotics business

Doctors must be careful when they consider treating their patients with the newest antibiotics, because every time these drugs are used, bacteria have a chance to build resistance. As a result, new antibiotics are generally used sparingly–leaving antibiotic companies with little chance of selling enough doses to recoup their investment.


If scientists don’t discover new antibiotics soon, the world will eventually return to the pre-antibiotic era when simple cuts could kill.

Delivery robots get airbags to protect you in case of collision

Autonomous vehicle maker Nuro has added external airbags to its self-driving delivery robots to protect pedestrians — but there’s reason to be skeptical about their effectiveness.

Drivers wanted: During the pandemic, more people started ordering their food, groceries, and other goods for delivery rather than venturing into stores and restaurants for them.

This has led to an increased demand for delivery drivers that companies have had trouble meeting.

Innovating Meaningful & Impactful Health System Transformation — Fanny Sie — One Roche Head of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health, F

Hoffmann La Roche.


Ms. Fanny Sie is the One Roche Head of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health, at F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. (https://www.roche.com/), a multinational healthcare company that operates in both the Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics segments, and in 2021 was the world’s largest pharma company by revenue.

With her BS and MS from the University of Toronto, Ms. Sie is very focused on applications of Digital Health, and innovative techniques such as Artificial Intelligence, to generate actionable insights that may breed exponential improvements in both patient outcomes and economic development (https://www.roche.com/strongertogether/data-science-coalition.htm).

Ms. Sie has over 15 years of experience bringing new products and services to the healthcare market, including extensive experience as a clinician, researcher and business development professional in the area of medical devices, AI and analytics, and digital health assets.

Ms. Sie specializes in building meaningful and impactful health system transformations that leverage innovation and achieve fast and sustained growth for entrepreneurs and multinationals in the public and private sector.

Scientists accidentally made Pac-man ghosts out of DNA Origami

Boing Boing.


I don’t entirely understand what this means, but here’s how they explained it in an upcoming scientific paper from the journal of Biology:

Using a library of ~2000 strands [of DNA origami] that can be combinatorially assembled to yield any of ~1e48 distinct DNA origami slats, we realize five-gigadalton structures composed of 1,000 uniquely addressable slats, and periodic structures incorporating 10,000 slats. Thus crisscross growth provides a generalizable route for prototyping and scalable production of devices integrating thousands of unique components that each are sophisticated and molecularly precise.

Okay, so I still don’t totally understand what that means. But I did see this tweet from the lead author on the paper:

Cellular support network boosts the regeneration of injured nerves

𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐀𝐭𝐥𝐚𝐬:

The Neuro-Network.

𝐂𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐢𝐧𝐣𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐬

𝘼𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙟𝙪𝙧𝙮, 𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙣 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙜𝙜𝙡𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙤𝙬 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙚𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙮, 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙥𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙧𝙚𝙙𝙪𝙘𝙚𝙙 𝙢𝙤… See more.


After an injury, nerves often struggle to regrow completely, leaving patients with reduced mobility and sensation. In tests on rats, Irish researchers have now demonstrated a way to improve nerve repair using proteins from the supporting network around cells.

Peripheral nerves have some capacity for regeneration after an injury, but they often need help. For major damage, sections can be surgically replaced with nerves taken from other parts of the patient’s body, but that obviously creates injuries elsewhere. Implants called nerve guidance conduits (NGCs) are often used, which, as the name suggests, help direct nerves to regenerate along specific paths.

Thread robot is designed to remove blood clots in brain

MIT team develops steerable soft thread-like robot capable of navigating tiny blood vessels

Snake robots are among the most familiar type of mechanical device for working in confined spaces. Flexible, tubular robots have been used for applications such as working in the interior of nuclear reactors, water distribution systems and inside the human body to aid surgery. The MIT team, mechanical engineers affiliated to the institution’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, have downsized the snake paradigm to the scale of a thread half a millimetre in diameter, which can be remotely controlled by magnetic fields to worm its way through the convoluted blood vessels of the brain to deliver clot-busting drugs or devices to break up and remove the blockage. Such robots have the potential to quickly treat a stroke and prevent damage to the brain, the team claims.