Addressed by the paper - they included age and income as control variables. The relationship b/w proximity and PD persists.

It’s a reasonable theory. We have seen people develop Parkinsonian symptoms after exposure to toxins before - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9918159/

The statistics are interesting. If I understand correctly, they picked a group of people with Parkinson’s and then identified 20 community-dwelling demographic-matched seniors who were the same age at the time of diagnosis. Then, they looked at the closest distance that the people lived to a golf course within 3 years prior to diagnosis, and computed the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s based on demographics, distance to a golf course, and certain characteristics of the water and soil.

I’m not sure your assessment of the odds is accurate going from 9 out of 9000 to 10 out of 9000 should be an 11% increase. This paper shows something like 100% increase within 3 miles of a golf course. So that’s 9 in 9000 to 18 in 9000. Still low risk but enough to make scientists go “huh” and maybe for politicians to consider changing regulations about pesticides (I wish). It’s not just golf courses to worry about, though. Think of all the farmers, too, who are exposed to similar toxins.

The drinking water angle was added to see of certain soil or sources of drinking water would impact the odds of PD diagnosis. The paper was based on data from Minnesota iirc, so I would expect more rural people to have private wells. My understanding was it was less about “statistical significance” and more about “seeing if this variable can explain away the apparent impact of golf course proximity”.

It’s in a good sweet spot, IMO. Not as steep a learning curve as PoE was for me, and easier to just start a character from scratch than Grim Dawn. I feel like the skill tree rewards going in blind, and I’ve played so much GD that I can’t really make a character unless I have a specific build planned out.

On the flip side, I much prefer GD’s end game than LE. I think it’s related to the fact that I don’t like the seasonal aspect very much, but that’s just my opinion. I joined late last season and didn’t finish my first character (Mage who cast a high crit Glacier, focusing on the third hit of the chain). Maybe that’ll change if I finish my Sentinel.

Option C: a shadow corp so big that different branches end up battling against one another without realizing it.

To be fair, he did say he “used some open databases for data”

Probably not. To get input from the brain, you need to place a sensor near it. But this device doesn’t get inserted into the brain, it sits in the scalp.

There are plenty of non-invasive brain reading technologies though, like EEG and near-infrared spectroscopy. They’re just big and bulky with low resolution.

Edit: in the case of prosthetics, it depends on where the disconnect is. If the brain and spinal cord are intact and the issue is in the periphery, yes, you can read the signal far away from the brain (namely the spinal cord) and then work from there.

The motor cortex is located in about the same spot in everyone, to my knowledge - I don’t know of any reported exceptions. The pre-central gyrus. Within, motor neurons are organized in specific regions that control specific body parts. Again, I don’t know of any reported exceptions - my understanding is everyone’s motor cortex has the same organization. It’s known as the cortical homunculus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus#Motor_homunculus%3Fwprov=sfla1

So by reading output from a small group of neurons, yes, you could control a prosthetic limb. It’s been done a few times, actually! But, you typically need more precision than comes from an EEG electrode, so all the examples I can think of are using invasive electrodes.

In fact, the sensory system of the brain has a very similar organization - along the postcentral gyrus, and the same stereotyped organization within. If you could stimulate the correct region of the sensory cortex, you could create a prosthetic that allows you to feel.

There are some more technical limitations though - there’s different types of sensation (e.g., pain, temperature, proprioception (position in space), texture, etc.) that are controlled by different receptors in skin and have different wires connecting to the brain. You’d have to be very careful about what you stimulate. And, any implant that delivers electricity to the brain, with our current technology, has a limited lifespan due to the brain’s immune system rejecting the implant (this is the aspect I studied).

Oh, cool, more BCI. I published in this field.

My only concern is how tenable it would be to deploy a bunch of these sensors. EEGs get coverage of the entire brain (surface, not a lot of deep brain activity). Would anyone be willing to wear hundreds, if not thousands, of micro-needles in their scalp?

If it meant controlling a prosthetic, probably. But general commercial devices - probably not.

x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA’d at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.

But we shouldn’t just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads “As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models,” or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.

Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?

ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.

You’ll never believe how it effects sales tax (if you’re not buying from a second hand store).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunotherapy?wprov=sfla1

Immunotherapy is crazy.

Prion diseases would be harder because things circulating in your blood don’t always enter your brain (thanks to your astrocytes, which help protect your neurons). But if you can get the right cells to produce the right protein, you can do a lot of amazing things.

Well, we don’t yet have evidence that it’s bad for our bodies, per se. That’s step one to getting things to change, IMO. So far we just have theories. Personally, I subscribe to the theory that microplastics are linked to changes in immune cell function/inflammation, which in turn leads to changes in the brain amd leads to some types of neurodegeneratove disorders like Alzheimer’s. Again, a theory, not any conclusive proof. It could be the case that microplastics aren’t causing damage.

But, with the technology we have now, I can imagine some solutions. Most promising, in my opinion, would be something akin to an mRNA vaccine. Introduce the mRNA to your body to produce a protein that targets plastic and leads to its removal from the body, almost like an antibody.

But with the NIH in the United States now targeting mRNA vaccine research for “critical review” as part of Trump’s agenda, the technology may not be long for this part of the world… even though it has revolutionized our ability to quickly, safely, and inexpensively produce vaccines against disease.

Scientist here. Microplastics in the body are too ingrained in our bodies for bloodletting to do much of anything. They’re even found in fetuses.

The good news (?) is we don’t know enough about microplastics to conclusively say they’re horrible for our health. The bad news is, I’d bet a lot of money that they are.

Oh hey, another BCI startup. This one seems promising. I published in the field so I’m happy to answer questions.

I did some digging over my morning coffee and couldn’t find any more details about the AI features. If I had to guess they might have a machine learning algorithm which helps decode brain signals. The company website seemed more geared towards creating a platform for EEG research and didn’t mention the AI at all? I may have missed it in my quick review.

I’m less familiar with visual evoked potentials, but they should be a lot easier to read than other neural signals. This is a big plus because it means the device tolerates more noise. I’m curious if it’s reliable enough to function in the “real world” - some EEGs are so sensitive that they even pick up electrical noise from wires in the walls. You can post process some, but not all, of the noise from your environment.

I’ve felt the real BCI future is with functional near infrared devices but I’m yet to see a breakthrough into commercial devices.

Standard? Not really. But there’s a tutorial here: https://github.com/miykael/3dprintyourbrain

Happy to answer some questions if you have issues

Interesting question. It depends. I linked Ev Fedorenko’s Interesting Brain Project at MIT up above, they’re doing a deep dive into questions like those.

Broadly speaking, if you’re born with these anatomical anomalies, you’ll be more or less normal. The article mentions the person in question had an IQ of 70, so that’s lower than normal, but not intellectually impaired.

But acquired Brain damage almost always leads to impediments. Strokes and repeated concussions, physical injury, etc.

The brain is “plastic” when you’re young, we like to say. That is, it’s pliable and can mold into whatever shape it needs to in order to adapt to your environment. That plasticity disappears once you get older. It’s how kids can learn language effortlessly - when you’re born, you have the most neurons and synapses you’ll ever have in your life. You’ll keep the same neurons (unless you have a degenerative disorder or kill them with drugs), make new synapses as you learn, but broadly speaking as you grow up you prune synapses that aren’t helpful.

This is also why kids can undergo massive resection surgeries (or in the olden days, severing of the corpus callosum) and grow up more or less normal.

In the US getting an MRI for “no reason” can be very expensive. Probably wouldn’t have been covered by insurance.

Ev Fedorenko has done some of the best research in brain science, in my opinion. There’s no better rabbit hole than her research!

$$$

Eh, college is hard and so was his sport. Sure, it’s not an exhaustive battery of testing but I’m confident to say he’s a normal dude.