Week of March 31, 2025
There is a mild irony to fighting for a parking space, squeezing into the Washington D.C. metro, and walking with thousands (and thousands) of people through rows of food trucks to see the cherry blossoms blending into a mostly cloudy afternoon sky on the National Mall. Fortunately, with simple text prompts and image regeneration, AI can help me have the memories I want. (See attached montage of images I made while standing under the trees on Saturday.)
See what I saw (the photo I took) along with the AI 'ed images helping me see what I wanted to remember:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dihYcTtrepfW6hlNGgXNWeHulR4-mQEi/view
For those who have never been to D.C. in late March:
https://nationalcherryblossomfestival.org/
**I will be traveling through next weekend. The next newsletter issue will likely be on 4/14/25**
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Listen to a Google Notebook LM A.I.-generated podcast of the newsletter with two virtual "hosts."
The AI hosts are back to recognizing that I wrote the newsletter (see the authorship appropriation comments from previous weeks).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YolxIPC8UzdtIJV31tKU1o7jI354tWsc/view
About NotebookLM: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/
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Science and Technology Trends
Eric Topol's blog this week covered an interesting article looking at the various associated data links between dietary intake of different foods and aging. The research followed 106,000 individuals for 30+ years, looking at nutritional factors that resulted in 'healthy aging' as defined by making it to age 70 without chronic disease and maintaining good cognitive, physical, and mental health. This topic is complex - "exposure" to food is constant, variable, and prolonged. Aging also has numerous associated variables. Finding strong causal relationships is endlessly mired by confounding. And yet, "plant-based diets" consistently demonstrate associations with a longer, 'healthier' life. As you look at the data, remember that variables can be positive, negative, or neutral - don't fall into a false dichotomy fallacy.
Blog
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/our-diet-and-healthy-aging
Article
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03570-5
Claude-summary and analysis:
https://claude.site/artifacts/4ecc1f7f-ce69-4bbd-8ecb-bea9b88ac379
This editorial, entitled "Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine" from Technology Review, is striking - "Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body."
Welcome to the concept of 'bodyoids.'
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/25/1113611/ethically-sourced-spare-human-bodies-could-revolutionize-medicine/
alternate link:
https://smry.ai/https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/25/1113611/ethically-sourced-spare-human-bodies-could-revolutionize-medicine/
Anti- Anti-Science Articles of Note
I found a well-done blog post by epidemiologist Ellie Murray (who I have followed since 2020) about how to read a scientific paper. Her approach offers a thoughtful and structured way to review articles. I strongly recommend the full blog post:
Dr. Murray's 7-Step Approach to Reading Scientific Papers:
- Get the study
- Examine who the authors are and where the study is published
- Review the title and abstract
- Read the methods section
- Look at the figures and tables
- Read the results
- Read the discussion (optional)
Full Blog post:
https://substack.com/@elliemurrayscd/note/c-103383788?r=eywiv&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
and
an AI Summary:
https://claude.site/artifacts/50ea51e4-0811-4b1f-af6b-2e6cf9b773a6
One more anti-science article in follow-up: Utah bans fluoride in drinking water.
https://apnews.com/article/utah-fluoride-ban-43f67153beb3e06ada9d782655fb15de
See my prior comments on the nuance of fluoridated water:
http://www.whatadamisreading.com/2025/01/what-adam-is-reading-week-of-1-13-25.html
Living with AI
In early 2025, the publisher of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio "had the idea to launch a limited edition written entirely by AI and ran tests by feeding prompts into ChatGPT Pro. [The publisher] asked ChatGPT to produce articles about a particular topic and told it to stay faithful to the editorial line of Il Foglio. Far from producing content equal to a human's, [the publisher] said ChatGPT produced articles with factual errors or typos, invented events, and produced monotonous writing. [The publisher then] assigned two (human) journalists to fact-check the articles before publication. The human journalists removed the fake news but left minor errors and bad writing because they show the limitations of AI."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/what-happened-when-a-newspaper-let-ai-take-over/ar-AA1BHW9Q
In contrast to poorly written articles, AI is helping identify medications that might help with rare diseases (diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the United States). The New York Times highlights the work of U. Penn's Dr. Fajgenbaum, who created a machine learning platform that "compares roughly 4,000 drugs against 18,500 diseases. Pharmaceuticals get scored for their likelihood of efficacy based on . Once the predictions are made, a team of researchers combs through them to find promising ideas, then performs lab tests or connects with doctors willing to try the drugs on patients."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/well/ai-drug-repurposing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Here is a good 2024 interview with Dr. Fajgenbaum from the Association of American Medical Colleges news magazine:
https://www.aamc.org/news/doctor-saved-his-own-life-now-he-s-mission-save-thousands-more
Infographics
I can't find the original creator's website (it appears the creator is no longer on the web), but mapping out the human body's arterial system like a transit map is compelling enough to share anyway. It is like a subway map for oxygen molecules, amongst other things.
https://x.com/OGdukeneurosurg/status/1903849692741398712/photo/1
Things I learned this week
I am late to the game on this one. This 2016 article highlights dishwasher sous vide steak. To be clear, this involves using the literal dishwasher to cook vacuum-sealed meat.
https://www.eater.com/2016/12/9/13904146/cook-steak-dishwasher-sous-vide
And, of course, the internet delivers a wide variety of dishwasher recipes:
https://ecocucinaen.wordpress.com/cooking-in-the-dishwasher/
The world needs more Portuguese EDM DJ-ing Priests. Even as a Jewish guy, I appreciate Padre Guilherem's Ave Maria, blending synth pipe organ and a house backbeat.
https://apnews.com/article/portugal-dance-music-dj-pope-francis-catholic-church-57fff78e81715f91844b6c557cf99eff
and
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7Gl7M2tjlIWsDWYa061TWh?si=7YXzWzStSBO5fdnJTfY4PA
The worst headline I found this week:
"An Atlanta bagpiper died while scuba diving. The skeletal remains of his missing son were then found on his property."
1) The combination of 'bagpiper,' 'death while scuba diving,' and the (seemingly related/unrelated) death of his son feel weirdly mashed together - like a failed attempt at clickbait.
2) It would be more amusing had the story not involved two deaths.
3) This article is an excellent example of bad headline writing.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/georgia-henry-frantz-missing-remains-b2722753.html
My wife found this article with a better headline. ChatGPT was able to find several articles with clearer headlines:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e92231-af30-8013-8e07-6d75854d3905
AI 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).
Prompt:
"A dreamy springtime park under blooming cherry blossoms with soft sunlight, featuring a futuristic scene: a scientist examining an artificial womb, a chef cooking steak using a high-tech dishwasher sous-vide setup, and a priest in full liturgical robes DJing a rave with lasers and a synth organ, all blending science, food, and spirituality in harmony."
ChatGPT new imaging tool (not DALLE):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kWI3Hwsoerbm0YsR7_fABkdWGM-jIwyZ/view?usp=sharing
Google Gemini Imagen3
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytG0SBUMfJmPH0nuaMLbswR_obSKnBwL/view?usp=sharing
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COVID infection rates are rising again - as of last week, wastewater-based data indicates 1 in 107 Americans were infected, up from 1 in 127 the week prior.
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
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