Week of August 4, 2025
Empty nesting continues to be a surprisingly variable state. Last weekend, five college students (our sons and their friends) stayed at our house. It is great to have a filled home, but I do not miss college dorm life, especially when we are responsible for accommodations, catering, and housekeeping.
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Listen to a Google Notebook LM A.I.-generated podcast of the newsletter with two virtual "hosts."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w_XN1U7sXSRo4KuMIsE0ermds5lwXgal/view
AND NEW (see below in the living with AI section), here is an exceedingly mediocre slide-based NotebookLM explainer of the newsletter:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vl3HdDDifHYM2afEQscKy3GrmQy20EUe/view
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Science and Technology Trends
Swiss researchers published a study in Nature Neuroscience demonstrating that simply seeing someone who appears sick can trigger immune system activation before any actual pathogen exposure occurs. The study used VR headsets to simulate interacting with different avatars, some of whom seemed to be ill. Their data points to a novel pathway where visual infection cues prepare the immune system for potential threats, representing an essential intersection of neuroscience and immunology.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/seeing-sick-faces-immune-system-reacts
Locked Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02363-7
AI Summary: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ba0abd90-0cb5-4b30-8b80-a7c096b985fa
I received several comments about the GLP-1s (Ozempic, Monjouro) articles from the last few weeks. Here are a few follow-up items of note:
First: "Medicare, Medicaid plans to experiment with covering weight loss drugs [GLP1s]"
Second: Medical AI summarized data on GLP-1 drugs, their effectiveness, and their side effect:
https://www.openevidence.com/ask/7e533b2f-5edd-4aed-9a67-4b2a8cd24b24
Anti-Anti-Science Articles of Note
The United States Preventive Services Task Force is "a scientifically independent, volunteer panel of national experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine" that makes evidence-based recommendations about clinical preventive services. The Affordable Care Act requires private health insurers to cover preventive measures that receive A or B level recommendations from USPSTF research teams, such as mammograms, colonoscopies, or vaccines. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to remove all 16 members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), according to The Wall Street Journal, published July 25, 2025.
Meet the USPS Task Force:
https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/
and see all the current Grade A and B, evidence-based recommendations:
https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/topic_search_results?topic_status=P&grades%5B%5D=A&grades%5B%5D=B&searchterm=
WSJ Article (Unlocked)
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/rfk-health-screening-panel-members-c308cbb0?st=LoKLKN&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Analysis by Dr. Jeremy Faust:
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/sorry-but-thanks-to-rfk-jr-you-now
AI Summary of both the WSJ and Dr. Faust substack:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bee6408b-bde5-4498-bbe5-1ed264a9ccfa
Anti-science swings both directions. I often write about my patients who employ logical fallacies to ignore reasonable and well-described medical recommendations (like loss aversion (over-weighting low-probability harm), Present bias (under-valuing future benefits), and Post Hoc Fallacy (I know someone who got sick after the vaccine; therefore the vaccine caused their illness). However, I am increasingly encountering patients who employ a healthy skepticism of "traditional medicine" combined with fallacies such as wishful thinking (I want something to be true) and fallacy of ignorance (because something isn't yet proven false, it must be true) to justify the use of alternative, supplemental, or unregulated medications. The use of unregulated, custom-compounded, injectable peptides (hormone or other related proteins) is one such group of medicines. Eric Topol offered an excellent overview of the "peptide craze," most of which has no supporting evidence and some of which may be hazardous.
Blog Post:
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-peptide-craze
AI Summary:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/aa4b44dc-e188-4682-bad9-07b752dee0a6
Living with AI.
Google's Notebook LM now makes mediocre slide shows (in addition to the podcast-style summaries) of various combined data sources. "I tried using Notebook LM's new AI Video Overviews and ended up with some usefully informative, but rather dull PowerPoint presentations" covers it nicely. (I interpret these data as dull presentations are inherent to PowerPoint and not the artificial or natural intelligence of the user.)
Here is the slide show of this issue of the newsletter with Notebook LM (same link as above in the podcast section):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vl3HdDDifHYM2afEQscKy3GrmQy20EUe/view
Several scientists are now demonstrating the use of Agentic AI "teams" mimicking a virtual lab - holding science-focused team meetings, debates, novel investigations, and unique discoveries. It is an interesting glimpse into the near future of AI.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09442-9
Open Access version of the locked Nature Article:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.11.623004v1.full.pdf
X commentary:
https://x.com/james_y_zou/status/1950224128419778689?s=42
AI Summary of the article:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/12cfe9e7-88a7-43b9-a7b8-241bdb9e3cca
Infographics
The Opportunity Cost of Purchasing a Daily Starbucks Latte vs Investing in 2024 (the same amount of money). There is a lot of fallacy in this, but it is a good reminder of the value of making coffee at home.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/wealth/The-Opportunity-Cost-of-a-Daily-Starbucks-Latte--6035
Things I learned this week
The Belgians have a longer and more robust tradition of Championship Seagull Screeching (as compared to the New Yorkers who dressed as pigeons - see my 7/21 link to the NYC High Line Park Pigeon Festival http://www.whatadamisreading.com/2025/07/what-adam-is-reading-week-of-7-21-25.html ). In April this year, the 5th Annual European Gull Screeching Championships hosted 60 gull-costumed participants from 14 countries at the De Verloren Gernoare café, squawking out their best gull imitations in three gull call categories — adult, junior, and colony (I assume this means mimicking multiple gulls?). A jury awarded points based on sound and performance.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/2025-european-championship-gull-screeching-1.7522967
and
You can enter the contest here:
http://www.gullscreeching.eu/
Two favorite headlines this week:
First favorite:
"Chaos erupts after radioactive wasp nest is discovered at former US nuclear bomb factory." I have added radioactive wasps to the ever-growing list that includes flesh-eating flies, murder hornets, brain-infesting amoebas, and deadly viruses.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14958895/Chaos-erupts-radioactive-wasps-missing-former-US-nuclear-bomb-factory.html
Second, a dad joke headline:
"Hot dog spill shuts down highway in Pennsylvania commuters' wurst nightmare." I strongly suggest reading the other headlines on this story highlighted on the Ground News link below, including "Hot Dog Truck Crash on Highway Makes Mess That Surprises Fire Chief: 'Hot Dogs Are Very Slippery — I Did Not Know That.'" The best part is that Ground News has indicated that news outlets reporting on this story lean conservative. I did not appreciate that "the liberal media" refuses to report on tubular meat products spilling on major roadways.
https://ground.news/article/hot-dog-spill-shuts-down-highway-in-pennsylvania-commuters-wurst-nightmare_41ae91
AI Art of the week
A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter.
I use ChatGPT to summarize the newsletter, suggest prompts, and make the images.
Prompt:
In an absurdly grand open-air amphitheater perched atop a latte-foam cloud, nobles in seagull costumes compete in the European Screeching Finals. Each performer emits theatrical squawks as a panel of animated AI avatars—some shaped like dollar bills, others like syringes and apples—holds up glowing Medicare scrolls and metabolic charts as scorecards.
On one side, spectral latte spirits swirl through the crowd whispering, "Compound interest…" as one audience member weeps over a $7 cappuccino. Nearby, a shimmering immune system knight, triggered by the sight of a sickly spectator, unsheathes a T-cell sword and charges into the arena.
Above it all, a celestial pharmacist-centaur (half-horse, half-bureaucrat) reads from a floating GLP-1 formulary, while behind him, holographic infographics spin between health benefits and tax-adjusted investment yields.
Suggested Art Style: Maximalist surrealism + Flemish tapestry meets vaporwave glitch aesthetics
ChatGPT: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YOPOitgaSlTjaBFDJjULJN97dln1J5vn/view
Grok:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gqLl4yMXik5Eb8A9bkaY9OtmAjCrB3Mj/view
Gemini:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tVQgWeJDraGU38h1Wns1OkLr2FXx7HOu/view
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The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) utilizes wastewater viral RNA levels to forecast four-week predictions of COVID-19 rates.
COVID is still here. Up to 1 in 118 people last week.
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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