Jul 10The Brain Technology Treating Neurological Disorders That Will Benefit From AIDeep brain stimulation is a surgically implantable medical device that selectively electrically stimulates the brain to treat certain types of neurological movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia. In some cases, it is also being used to treat mental health conditions such as depression and obsessive compulsive disorders. Existing…Deep Brain Stimulation3 min readDeep Brain Stimulation3 min read
Jul 10Member-onlyAn Introduction to Nanotechnology and Its Applications to MedicineNanotechnology and nanoengineering are producing significant scientific and technological advances in diverse fields including medicine and physiology. In a broad sense, they can be defined as the science and engineering involved in the design, synthesis, characterization, and application of materials and devices whose smallest functional organization in at least one…Nanotechnology7 min readNanotechnology7 min read
Jul 10A new computational fabric for Graph Neural Networks3533Michael BronsteinVery well written and informative article. I greatly enjoyed it. Congratulations.Very well written and informative article. I greatly enjoyed it. Congratulations. Here's another (not so) future direction that while nascent I would argue we are starting to see some real connections: The relevant mathematical machinery that is being used to describe and understand certain classes of ML models, and GNN's in particular given their inherent structures, are guiding and giving us deep insights into the computational processes and algorithms of the human brain - not in some hand-wavy abstract way, but grounded in the known neurophysiology. It's as much a fascinating time for neuroscience as it is for ML and AI. What were once abstract topological and algebraic constructions are finding very real-world practical applications towards understanding the brain.1 min read1 min read
Jul 5Canadian Wildfires Are Affecting Millions — How Exposure To Wildfire Smoke Affects Your BrainThe National Weather Service issued warnings on Wednesday to over 80 million Americans across the Midwest, Northeast and Appalachian Mountains to limit or avoid outdoor physical activities and exposure amid renewed shifts in smoke patterns from the wildfires affecting Eastern Canada. …Wildfires5 min readWildfires5 min read
Published inPens & Particles·Updated Jul 2Welcome to ‘Pens & Particles’ — What it is, and why we’re doing it.‘Pens and Particles ‘ is a publication dedicated to fueling the creativity of what might and could be, from what is. It pushes the imagination of boundary knowledge. …1 min read1 min read
Published inBeingWell·Jun 27SARS-CoV-2 Fuses Brain Cells — A Cause of COVID Brain Fog?A research paper published last week in Science Advances, and a related story about it in Science, reported a previously unknown effect that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has on brain cells. This effect might explain why some infected individuals experience brain fog. …Covid-194 min readCovid-194 min read
Published inPens & Particles·Apr 7The Fourth Paper‘The year 1904 was one for the history books — literally. It was the year of what almost didn’t happen. A young and essentially unknown physicist by the name of Albert Einstein was at the time a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. …Fiction6 min readFiction6 min read
Apr 4Why It’s Difficult To Predict Where GPT And Other Generative AI Might Take UsDerek Thompson published an essay in the Atlantic last week that pondered an intriguing question: “When we’re looking at generative AI, what are we actually looking at?” The essay was framed like this: “Narrowly speaking, GPT-4 is a large language model that produces human-inspired content by using transformer technology to…ChatGPT6 min readChatGPT6 min read
Published inPens & Particles·Mar 28In Praise of HumansI recognize and ‘feel’ how limited and small I am. But I embrace it. No matter how much I attempt to expand my mind through ectopic extensions of my brain — different apps and digital tools increasingly supplemented by machine learning and AI — at best I can only grasp…Creative Writing1 min readCreative Writing1 min read
Mar 22The ChatGPT Debate: Are We Intelligent Enough To Understand ‘Intelligence’In the 2016 science fiction drama Arrival about first contact with aliens, the movie’s two protagonists, a linguist and a physicist, meet in a military helicopter on their way to attempt to decipher and understand why the aliens came to earth and what they want. The physicist, Ian Donnelly, introduces…ChatGPT14 min readChatGPT14 min read
