Week of January 6, 2025
Happy 2025.
A holiday family trip to Arizona facilitated extended time with our kids after several months of them both being in college. The changing relationship dynamic is fascinating- they are neither adults nor children - a sort of "adultlescence." And, while we have not yet hit a definitive moment of parent-child role reversal, I definitely detect the vibe. After falling during a desert day hike (I am fine) and napping in the car on a long drive, I became acquainted with my kids' "talking to elderly Adam" voices. I await the day these voices will remind me to take my pills, use my cane, and not miss my medical appointments.
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Listen to a Google Notebook LM A.I.-generated podcast of the newsletter with two virtual "hosts."
My A.I. hosts tackled numerous complex words this week. I love hearing them pronounce "Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15lEXLdCoxvaTyZM3rqEa0siYIah-kDDA/view
About NotebookLM: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/
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Science and Technology Trends
I am grateful that coffee consumption research consistently correlates to improved health outcomes. A recently published study looked into possible mechanisms by analyzing over 22,000 human gut microbiome samples and found that coffee consumption is strongly and consistently associated with gut microbiome composition, particularly a specific bacterium called Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus. Researchers demonstrated that coffee directly stimulates L. asaccharolyticus growth, and metabolomic analysis revealed this bacterium might be involved in processing coffee compounds like quinic acid. The findings indicate one of the most direct links between a specific food and a gut microbe, possibly explaining a mechanism of coffee's health benefits.
The article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01858-9
and a Claude Summary
https://claude.site/artifacts/e688c79d-b18f-4d6a-bc4b-e606a527f6a0
AND
Here is a summary of other recent coffee-related studies associating coffee intake with reduced risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, endometrial cancer, melanoma, and nonmelanoma skin cancer. Please remember - no one study is perfect, but a collection of meta-analyses demonstrating consistent patterns of outcomes is comforting.
https://claude.site/artifacts/f513b827-184c-4ccb-b329-80007024a7ea
GLP-1 drugs (like semaglutide, AKA Ozempic) continue demonstrating fascinating and wide-ranging effects. In this article (peer-reviewed, but sponsored by semaglutide's manufacturer Novo Nordisk), researchers measured ~6,400 unique proteins at baseline and after 68 weeks of treatment with semaglutide in 1300 non-diabetic, obese individuals and 645 diabetic, obese individuals. This proteomic analysis indicated that semaglutide decreased specific proteins associated with cardiovascular disease. In addition, there were changes in protein patterns associated with a wide range of other ailments, including Fibromyalgia, hypertension, substance use disorders, neuropathic pain, depression, osteoarthritis, psoriasis, asthma, and breast cancer. While this a lab-based study (i.e., not correlated with symptoms, quality of life, or other clinical outcomes), these data point to GLP-1's mechanism of action beyond weight loss and better glucose control.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03355-2
Here is a Claude summary of the article
https://claude.site/artifacts/c3f87dce-fa06-4da9-af83-97d5a086bf9a
related
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/lotte-bjerre-knudsen-the-scientist
Anti- Anti-Science Articles of Note
Typical anti-science arguments are simplistic and appealing. "Vaccines are dangerous," "fluoride is bad," and "Western medicine is unnatural" are the kinds of ideas I read and (sometimes) hear from my patients. A more nuanced understanding of scientific data requires appreciating data quality, the difference between association and causation, and the tradeoffs of how and when to take action (and in which patients). Over the holidays, I found the X (Twitter) account of a physician from the University of Ottawa who does a fabulous job succinctly communicating this nuance. Dr. Fabiano's thread reviewing the "optimal amount of exercise to improve cognitive function" is a thoughtful analysis and measured conclusions from several papers. His review of studies on exercise highlights how the value of physical activity varies by age, intensity, and duration. This effort speaks to the complexity of appreciating data nuance (and why it is hard to refute broad, sweeping comments succinctly.)
https://x.com/NTFabiano/status/1872992815669788741
Living with A.I.
A.I. is now effectively and efficiently playing multi-player, multi-round poker - a traditionally complex task for most models. Moreover, the thread and the linked paper opened a series of rabbit holes on game theory and strategic gameplay - for instance, I did not know about Monte Carlo counterfactual regret minimization (MCCFR). Nor did I realize you could program Claude to play Rock, Paper Scissors, thereby learning you should not play Rock, Paper, Scissors with A.I. [if you want to win over several rounds].
The Thread https://x.com/deedydas/status/1875206105825165494
and
The Paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay2400
and Claude trained to play Rock, Paper, Scissors
https://claude.site/artifacts/e122dcd6-8d76-40cd-ae1e-8f56181f73ff
With my newfound knowledge of Claude's simulation and interactivity tools, I had it build me a "suck-the-fun-out" of Tic-Tac-Toe demonstration:
https://claude.site/artifacts/1790a2fa-accb-47b5-954e-272c599604fb
I have been waiting for a paper on A.I. in clinical practice that highlights the discrepancy between simple LLM analysis of static clinical data (i.e., reviewing a clinical case and associated data) vs. how real-world medical data is acquired (the imprecise, low data density transfer, and often meandering nature of clinicians talking to patients). I have seen numerous products on the market that capture clinician-patient conversations with varying degrees of success. However, this paper is the first framework I have seen for evaluating and scoring "an LLM's ability to conduct medical interviews, synthesize information, and formulate diagnoses."
https://x.com/loopyrapper/status/1875079411516817516
related -
Generative A.I. Studies Boast Promising [Clinical] Results, But Real-World Challenges Remain
https://medcitynews.com/2024/12/generative-ai-llm-healthcare/
One more related article from Eric Topol:
https://x.com/EricTopol/status/1874963577981075470/photo/1
Infographics
Harvard professor (and part-time Google A.I. team member) Martin Wattenberg created an interactive infographic tool called the Anti-tag Cloud. His Anti-Tag Cloud allows you to select a piece of literature and show the most common English words that DO NOT appear in the text. Wattenberg aims to visualize a literary work's "negative space" relative to other literature, with the frequency of words in literature measured in the books on Project Gutenberg and reported on Wiktionary.com.
https://www.bewitched.com/demo/anti/
If this is too much for you, here is a backup infographic on per-cow milk production in the U.S. Thanks to artificial insemination (i.e., selective breeding, a typical American-bred cow in 2024 produces six times more milk than in 1920.
https://flowingdata.com/2024/12/13/more-milk-fewer-cows/
Things I learned this week
I had never contemplated the need or the problem of identifying baby chickens' gender. However, thanks to my kids, I found this week's article with a title that deserves no further commentary - the 2013 blog post, "Thank God It's Sexy Friday: The Mysterious Art of chicken sexing."
https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/07/19/chickensexing/
I learned that the "Tiger Woods of Scrabble," Nigel Richards (a New Zealander who only speaks English), won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship last month. In 2015 and 2018, Richards won the French World Scrabble Championship. He is known for memorizing large volumes of information, including dictionaries in languages he does not speak fluently.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/10/scrabble-star-nigel-richards-wins-spanish-world-title-despite-not-speaking-spanish
I cannot improve on the two opening sentences from this paper's abstract: "Small-animal virtual reality (VR) systems have become invaluable tools in neuroscience for studying complex behavior during head-fixed neural recording, but they lag behind commercial human VR systems in terms of miniaturization, immersive and advanced features such as eye tracking. We present MouseGoggles, a miniature VR headset for head-fixed mice that delivers independent, binocular visual stimulation over a wide field of view while enabling eye tracking and pupillometry in VR."
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-mice-headsets-easier-brain-response.html
and
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-024-02540-y
A.I. art of the week.
(A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter, now using ChatGPT to summarize the newsletter, suggest prompts, and make the images).
"A surreal scene inspired by southwestern Native American cave art, featuring abstract and symbolic figures. People are depicted performing yoga, running, and swimming, surrounded by radiating, glowing patterns that symbolize enhanced cognition. Stylized chickens, simplified into traditional motifs, wear small VR headsets as they explore a barnyard. At the center, a heroic figure stands triumphantly on a circular Scrabble board resembling a globe, with minimalist tiles inscribed with Spanish, French, and English words. The artwork is rendered with earthy tones, organic textures, and traditional cave art aesthetics, using symbolic and geometric patterns to convey a vibrant yet harmonious composition."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ttDAgbLBIxQagfGd2bwyGz4WocYFA_Ti/view
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There is a rising rate of COVID cases (1 in 50 Americans infected as of last week, closer to 1 in 30 this week) PLUS rising flu, RSV, and metapneumovirus case rates (metapneumovirus appears to be causing strain on the Chinese healthcare system). The medical community is increasingly concerned about H5N1 Avian flu, which is now found in large populations of animals and more frequently infects humans.
Here is an update on a previously healthy Canadian teen who (barely) survived an H5N1 influenza (bird flu) infection.
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/an-update-on-the-critically-ill-in
COVID case data:
https://x.com/jpweiland/status/1875329346300473453
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
https://pmc19.com/data/
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
Wastewater Scan offers a multi-organism wastewater dashboard with an excellent visual display of individual treatment plant-level data.
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
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Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
Relive all the thrills and excitement - The What Adam is Reading Archive
http://www.whatadamisreading.com/
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