Dr Jon K @JonKMD

@Grimezsz HRT and strength training

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed an AI-powered surgical robot that learns complex procedures simply by watching videos of experienced surgeons at work. Instead of manually programming every individual movement, the team used imitation learning to train the robot. By analyzing hundreds of real surgical videos, the robot learned to perform fundamental tasks such as manipulating needles, lifting tissue, and placing sutures with a level of skill comparable to human surgeons. The system is built on a transformer architecture similar to that behind ChatGPT. However, rather than generating text, it translates visual observations of surgeons’ movements into precise robotic actions. This approach dramatically reduces the time needed to teach new procedures. One of the most impressive results was the robot’s ability to recover from mistakes. When it accidentally dropped a needle during testing, it autonomously picked it up and continued the procedure without any specific programming for that scenario. The robot also successfully generalized its skills to new, unseen situations, a critical capability for real-world surgical environments. Traditional methods for programming surgical robots can take years to develop even a single task. With imitation learning, the Johns Hopkins team demonstrated that a robot can learn an entirely new procedure in just a few days by observing expert surgeons. This breakthrough could significantly accelerate the development of autonomous surgical systems, reduce human error, and eventually enable robots to assist with increasingly complex operations. ["Robot that watched surgical videos performs with skill of human doctor." Johns Hopkins Magazine]

Until now, we haven't seen medical AI models intended to provide end-to-end care after presentation to an emergency department or longitudinally via 3 sequential outpatient visits. There's a lot to unpack in 2 new @Nature publications today. Summarized in a new post.

@DrToddLee 👀

Kind of a once-in-a-lifetime science day today. Pretty excited for 17:00 Eastern time.

I swallowed a miniature computer drew my blood six times sat in a 200°F dry sauna for 56 min felt like I was going to die from the heat and paid $21,093 for specialty biomarkers… To ask a question: do sauna benefits depend on time, or body temperature? This experiment has never been done before. Results: 1) Sauna benefits depend on how hot your body gets, not how long you sit in the sauna 2) Heat shock protein 27 (HSP27), one of the molecules that drives sauna's longevity benefits, only switched on when my core body temperature held above 102.2°F (39°C) for about 15 minutes. 3) Reaching that took 56 minutes at 200°F (93°C), with ice on my face, neck, and groin. 4) This challenges the generic advice that 20 minutes of sauna is enough. What this means for you: 1) The standard advice of 20 minutes at 176°F (80°C) is a floor, not a ceiling. The bigger benefits sit further up the curve, in longer and hotter sessions. If you can tolerate more, more likely helps. 2) Skip the cold plunge right after the sauna. My core body temperature kept climbing for several minutes after I left the sauna, so much of my time above the activation threshold happened post-exit. Cold plunging cuts that window short. 3) Population level studies point in a direction but cannot tell you what is happening inside your own body. Continuous core temperature tracking can. Here is the experiment explained A brief background first. Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are believed to be the enablers of sauna based longevity benefits. You can think of them as a clean up crew that travels through your body removing misfolded proteins and cellular debris. When you get really hot, like in a sauna, you generate a lot more of them. A tsunami of clean up crews unleashed inside your body. There are many types of HSPs. We focused on HSP27 in this experiment because of its high value longevity benefits: 1. Calms harmful inflammation through a controlled signaling pulse, driven by IL-10 2. Protects arteries by blocking the damaged cholesterol that builds up into plaque 3. Helps the body grow new blood vessels over time 4. HSP27 is one of the first proteins your body makes when it gets hot, which makes it a clean signal of how hard the sauna session actually worked. We saw initial signs of biomarkers of these benefits also turned on alongside HSP27, with enough time above the activation threshold. I ran three sauna sessions, holding sauna temperature, my meticulous morning routine, and every other variable constant. We measured HSP27 activation and release (along with scores of other biomarkers) in my serum after each session. I swallowed a temperature capsule about the size of a vitamin pill. As it traveled through my body, it sent a reading of my core body temperature every 30 seconds. That continuous, real time data from inside the body is what no prior study has had. The 102.2°F (39°C) core temperature threshold for HSP activation has been established in the research literature for years. Dry-sauna users have never been able to act on it because they had no way to track their core temperature during a session. An end-point thermometer cannot tell you how long you held above threshold, and the duration is the dose. Which is why we chose to use real time tracking. The findings across the three sessions. Two of the three sessions pushed me well past the threshold. In one, I spent 14.7 minutes above 102.2°F (39°C), with a peak of 102.87°F (39.37°C). In the other, I spent 15.8 minutes above the threshold, with a peak of 102.81°F (39.34°C). After both, HSP27 in my blood rose sharply. The third session (the middle one in the figure) was different. I only spent 5.1 minutes above 102.2°F (39°C), with a peak of 102.34°F (39.08°C), barely above the threshold. HSP27 did not respond. The reading actually dipped slightly, but the change was too small to count. Two things separate the responder sessions from the non-responder. The first is time above the threshold: 14.7 and 15.8 minutes versus 5.1 minutes. The second is peak core temperature: 102.87°F (39.37°C) and 102.81°F (39.34°C) versus 102.34°F (39.08°C). Either, or more likely both, are driving the response. Future sessions will help us figure out how much each one matters. Within my body, holding all other variables constant, the central heat shock protein response is a direct function of the heat dose delivered to the body's core. No prior study has done this. Earlier sauna research used a single thermometer reading at the end of the session, not continuous tracking. The studies that used continuous tracking used exercise, not dry sauna. None had a matched negative control like my session three. And all reported only cohort averages, not what happened inside one body. What this means for the body Once HSP27 is released into circulation, it signals to cells throughout the body and drives the four mechanistically proven downstream benefits listed above. All four are supported by my long-term sauna data, the population literature, and mechanistic studies. My acute post-session measurements hint at each being engaged. To activate HSP27 in my body, I needed 56 minutes at 200°F (93°C) in a dry sauna. That is the total session length required to spend enough time above the 102.2°F (39°C) core temperature threshold to trigger HSP27 release. Does this mean longer sessions, long enough for your core to hit 102.2°F (39°C), would supercharge the longevity benefits? Maybe. What we do know, I did 232 dry sauna sessions over the past year. My protocol was 200F (93°C) for 20 min. So even though my core body temperature didn’t reach 102.2°F (39°C) to unleash the HSP27, the results were still compelling: + a 10 year vascular age reduction + massive drop in environmental toxins [1] + complete elimination of microplastics in my semen (first ever in human achievement) The data suggests there are health benefits at 200°F (93°C) for 20 min. The data also shows that additional health benefits unlock when your core body temperature reaches 102.2°F (39°C). Does this mean that if one is in the sauna longer, long enough to reach a core body temperature of 102.2°F (39°C). that the longevity benefits would be supercharged? Maybe. Here is what this experiment teaches: + population level data is great for averages, pointing in a general direction + the resulting protocols are crude + not personalized + the only way to find out the truth for you is to measure + single person experiments (n=1) like this one are useful, because they find blind spots that population averages cannot see. Note: I kept ice on my face and neck during these three experimental sessions to protect those sensitive areas from heat induced skin damage at extreme temperatures. In a previous session, not included in this experiment, I had no ice on my face or neck and used an ingestible temperature capsule for real-time core readings. I reached a core body temperature of 102.2°F (39°C) after 34 minutes at 200°F (93°C). Adding ice to the face and neck adds roughly 20 minutes to the total time required to reach 102.2°F (39°C) core body temperature. Subjectively, the 34 minutes without ice on my face and neck was much harder than the 56 minutes with ice on my face and neck. After the 34 minute session, I exited the sauna and just laid on the concrete, immobilized. But I got the data. [1] Toxin reduction: After 15 sessions, sauna dramatically reduced environmental toxins in my body: 65% drop in 2,4-D 100% drop in MEP 15% drop in MBP 100% drop in MEHP (undetectable post sauna) 56% drop in NAPR 56% drop in HEMA 100% drop in Perchlorate (undetectable post sauna)

Starship is a very big rocket

Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters

a week ago

SpaceX is a company whose mission is *axiomatically* the love of humanity To extend the light of consciousness The power of this kind of love is hard to quantify but clearly makes the impossible far more probable.

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Yann Lecun published the most heretical AI paper of the year. He opens by arguing Magnus Carlsen isn't good at chess and only gets more unhinged from there. The Turing Award winner and his co-authors dropped a paper demanding the AI industry abandon its biggest obsession, AGI. Right now, everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians assumes AGI is the ultimate goal. A machine that can do everything a human can do. LeCun argues that this entire concept is a biological illusion. Humans do not possess "general" intelligence. We are highly specialized biological machines, tuned by evolution simply to survive in the physical world. We only think our intelligence is "general" because we are completely blind to the millions of cognitive tasks we are incapable of comprehending. Which brings us to the chess argument. Magnus Carlsen is the greatest human chess player in history. But compared to a modern computer? He is fundamentally terrible. Our belief that Carlsen is "good" at chess is pure human-centric bias. He isn't objectively good. He's just better than the rest of us, who are biologically awful at it. LeCun says we need to stop building AI to mimic human generality. Instead, he proposes a new North Star: SAI. Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence. Instead of trying to build a machine that mimics our flawed, biologically-limited brains, we need to embrace extreme specialization. SAI is about the speed of adaptation. It is an intelligence that can learn to exceed humans at any specific, economically important task. More importantly, it is designed to fill the vast skill gaps where humans are fundamentally incapable. Things like managing global energy grids in real-time. Or predicting complex molecular structures. The entire AI industry is obsessed with building a digital reflection in our own image. LeCun's paper is a brutal wake-up call.

To become more optimistic, start imagining your best possible self.

One of the reasons I think the tech is getting better so much faster in plastic surgery than elsewhere is that plastic surgeons tend to be among the smartest doctors. Every year, this repeats: the tests keep showing that derms and plastics are the smartest cookies.

Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil

8 months ago

Boobtech is amazing. It's an area that the rest of medicine could look to as an example. The professionals making bigger, more realistic breast implants are simultaneously improving affordability, safety, and quality at a rapid rate🧵

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@elonmusk 🥧🐀s

@joinshiftX Shift

What?!?!?!

Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil

4 weeks ago

Eli Lilly has done it. They've gone and made what seems to be a powerful, permanent gene therapy for LDL cholesterol. That means they'll be able to effectively prevent most heart disease with a single infusion!

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Pope Leo XIV’s address in English at the publication of his Encyclical Letter Magnifica humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Do listen to all of it. It is very good.

3 Weird Things I Learned in 2025: 1. How to break an addiction or bad habit
 I’ve struggled with nearly every addiction or bad habit you can imagine. The latest is embarrassing - a few years ago I began getting dandruff spots on my head. I'd scratch the f out of them then they would scab then I’d scratch again - rinse repeat the next day, and because of this manic scratching they would never heal. 2 years would pass and I’d still have the same sores on my head! So I’m in an ayahausca ceremony and I go to scratch one. A phrase comes to me… “What happens if I don’t?” I realized that nothing would happen. Nothing bad, nothing great either. But certainly nothing disastrous - I wouldn’t bleed to death and the spot didn’t actually need a scratch. I realized i had a weird fear that if i didn’t do the action, I’d be missing out on the. oddly satisfying scratching sensation - but also... that the scratch sensation really did nothing for me. So, I didn’t scratch, and sure enough I soon forget about it. Later I get the urge to scratch again, so I ask myself the same, “What happens if I don’t?” “Nothing.” And again I don’t scratch. That was in early 2025 and all the spots on my head are now healed. The next implication was even bigger. Later that same night the ceremony ends, we get our phones back. And now I am so ready to do what all ayahuasca bros long for after being phone-less for 4 hours: I must check the price of bitcoin. But this time I ask, “What happens if I don’t?” Again, nothing would happen. I’d simply find out the price at a later time. What happens if I do check it now? Well if the price is down, it’s not like I’m gonna panic sell @ 3am. And if the price is up, same - maybe I get a little dopamine hit seeing my monies up, but I’m not selling. So again, nothing is going to happen if I check the price. So I don’t. And I sleep much better that night. The next week - I’m on X and going down a rage bait rabbit hole. 2 big influencers who I never liked anyways are in a fight. And one of them has just dropped 15 min vid blasting the other, that the whole timeline says is fire. So I gotta watch it, right? I click, then catch myself… “What happens if I don’t?” Nothing. I don’t miss anything relevant to my life. I don’t actually care about the influencers, let alone their beef. I move on and save myself 15 minutes. This little phrase has now helped me quit excessive snacking, feed scrolling, overly-checking email and texts - the applications are endless. Before you mindlessly take any action, try to stop and ask yourself, “What happens if I don’t? 2. You only get 80% of what you want My wealthiest friend is looking for a new pad in NY. He’s complaining that some are too old, or not great view, or great view but shitty entry, etc. I say, “Bro you are rich af - why not just pay up and buy one that has everything you want?” He says, “You don’t get it - when buying a house, you only get 80% of what you want. This is true no matter what you spend, and at all income levels. The only way it’s not true is if you buy a lot and build your home from scratch, but then you have to wait 4 years and that is never what you want. So you need to pick your 80%." I’ve begun applying this 80% model everywhere, and I’m amazed at how often it fits. Choosing a partner, a city to live in, a place to vacation, a school for your kid - turns out, it's extremely rare in life to get more than 80% of what you want. So your job when making a decision is now simple: Figure out which 80% is a must for you, and focus on getting the best of that. 3. You only get 3 billion prompts There is a house I wish we would have bought in 2019. It was perfect, but we couldn't afford it until our other house sold. Which took too long, so someone else bought the dream house. Now every time I drive by, I find myself going into fantasy land… “Would we have liked the neighborhood? I wonder if the streets are nice for walking. Would we have redone the back yard? What would the kids have done with that big tree?” I have probably driven by this house 20x over the last 6 years and every time I would do this mind larp of “What if we had bought that house?” Then I read somewhere that your brain is like an LLM, and based on time alive for an average human, you only get 3 billion “prompts” of your own brain. You can use them to ponder the future, further enjoy the present, or “what if” about the past. But once they are gone, that is it, and you do not get more. So now, when I find myself bemoaning about a house I didn’t buy, a 100x investment that I failed to make, a 4x investment I failed to take profits on and now it’s worth zero, etc etc - I remind myself that I only get 3 billion prompts, and that I should either use them to focus on the present, or improve my future. I hope these 3 learnings help you prompt your own brain for a better 2026.

Here’s a visualization of the Kardashev scale by terafab.ai. This scale measures how advanced civilizations are, based on the energy they can harness: Type I: Harness all the energy on a planet Type II: Harness all the energy from a star Type III: Harness all the energy in a galaxy A powerful reminder of how far humanity could still go.

@XFreeze Neuralink is a much bigger breakthrough than most people realize. Enabling people to control a computer with their mind and the completely blind to see are Jesus-level miracles.

Until now, physicians using AI in clinic had to assemble the patient’s context themselves. Allergies, comorbidities, medications, prior procedures, copy-pasted in from the chart. Today we’re announcing a partnership with @CedarsSinai. OpenEvidence now works directly inside Epic, drawing on the patient’s full record and interpreting the medical literature through the lens of that specific patient. Cedars-Sinai is the first academic health system to deploy patient-aware clinical intelligence at enterprise scale. The clinician asks a complex question in natural language. The answer reflects both the best available evidence and the patient in front of them. Patient data is never stored after the clinical session or used for any other purpose.

This new perspective study reports that our brains are carrying 3,000x more microplastic than our blood. Microplastic burden of the human brain rose ~50% between 2016 and 2024. The average brain now carries roughly: > 11x the load of the liver > 11x the kidney, and on a per-mass basis around > 3,000x the concentration found in circulating blood (on a per-mass basis) This study argues that eliminating ultra-processed foods (i.e. chicken mcnuggets, breaded shrimp) carries an additional benefit: reducing brain microplastic accumulation. This is based on an inferred chain of mechanisms rather than proven causality in humans, yet the convergence is striking. The paper outlines four pathways through which microplastics plausibly damage the brain: > oxidative stress and chronic inflammation > endocrine disruption > gut-microbiome injury > and vascular damage. These map onto various brain and mental diseases including: depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, stroke, dementia. The same conditions are independently linked to ultra-processed food consumption in large prospective cohorts Each 10% increase in ultra processed food intake > 25% higher dementia risk > 16% higher cognitive impairment risk > 8% higher stroke risk High versus low ultra processed food consumption tracks with 44% higher odds of depression and 48% higher odds of anxiety. While we do not yet have a human study showing UPF intake directly raises brain microplastic burden. Here is what we do have: A study found that the more processed forms of protein foods carry significantly more microplastic particles. > Chicken nuggets contained 31x more microplastics per gram than raw chicken breast (least processed item in the study) > Breaded shrimp, the most processed item in the study, carried ~130x the level in raw chicken breast (caveat: shrimp also carries higher baseline contamination from ocean and water pollution) > A 1,031-woman pregnancy cohort showed each 10% higher UPF intake tracked with 13.1% higher urinary phthalates, the plasticizers that leach from food packaging Microplastics cross from the blood to the brain. Animal research shows mechanistically how microplastic particles do cross the blood-brain barrier. In mice, polystyrene nanoparticles at 293 nm reached the brain within 2 hours of oral exposure. Particles at 1.14 μm and 9.55 μm did not cross at all. While most microscopy-based microplastic tests have a detection floor around 1 μm. The fraction that actually crosses into the brain sits below that threshold. If a test picks up larger particles in your blood, the smaller, BBB-crossing fraction is almost certainly there too, just below the detection window. The big ones are a proxy for the dangerous small ones. Cut all microplastic input where you can and avoid ultra processed foods, this another important one. In addition: use a water filtration system for your drinking water, reverse osmosis with remineralization is the gold standard. I recently reported complete elimination of microplastics from my semen (first in human demonstration) and a 87% reduction in my blood.

Today we announced our $2.1 Billion funding. This is the catalyst that will bring us to a future of medicine with the power of AI. And we are just getting started, come join our mission.

Demis Hassabis @demishassabis

a month ago

I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. That work started with AlphaFold, and now at @IsomorphicLabs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery and one day solve all disease! We are turbocharging that goal with $2.1B in new funding.

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