How to Beat Cancer with Viruses: An Interview with Beata Halassy
Intriguing interview on a topic near and dear to me. It’s nearly two years since my mother passed away from cancer.
Promising outcomes 5 weeks after a surgical cervical shunting procedure to unclog cerebral lymphatic systems in a patient with Alzheimer’s disease
Recently, the glymphatic system has been recognised as an important ‘waste solutes transport channel’ within the brain. Studies have shown that blockage of the glymphatic system leads to increased beta-amyloid deposits, accelerating the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Given that cervical lymph nodes receive cerebrospinal fluid from the brain’s glymphatic system, we speculated that decompression of the lymphatic trunk and cervical lymphatic–venous anastomosis (LVA) could facilitate the flow of cerebrospinal fluid in the cranial glymphatic system, potentially accelerating the clearance of harmful beta-amyloid and tau proteins.
Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race
Deepseek is a Chinese AI startup whose latest R1 model beat OpenAI’s o1 on multiple reasoning benchmarks. Despite its low profile, Deepseek is the Chinese AI lab to watch.
AI and energy: The big picture
AI and cloud services growth is driving up US electricity needs, creating a supply-demand imbalance that will require innovations in grid technology, a balance between datacenter expansion and power infrastructure, and cross-sector coordination to mitigate environmental impacts.
Pre-training will end
“Ilya Sutskever’s presentation at NeurIPS argues that “Pre-training will end” - making better models simply by combining more compute with more data won’t keep scaling, because compute is growing but data is not (“Data is the fossil fuel of AI”)” - Benedict Evans