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Category: biotech/medical – Page 39

World’s #1 Brain Surgeon: The Truth About Protecting Your Brain After 40

Ask most people what a brain chip does and they will tell you it reads your mind. Dr. Michael Lawton implants these devices, and he says that is not what comes off them. He is President and CEO of Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the hospital where Neuralink’s first human implant was performed, and he has completed more than 10,000 brain operations and clipped around 5,500 aneurysms. Louisa sat down with him inside Barrow to find out what the electrodes actually pick up, how far the technology has come, and where it stops.

He walks through the surgery itself. The device goes into the hand knob, one small lobule of the motor cortex, where 64 electrodes have already become 108. The threads carrying them are about a tenth the thickness of a hair, so a robot inserts them while avoiding every arteriole on the surface. You’ll hear what Nolan Arbaugh, Neuralink’s first patient, can now do with a cursor at world record speed, and why Lawton can’t keep up with him in a head to head.

🤝 Sponsor The Neuro Experience:
https://neuroathletics.substack.com/p… your risk of Alzheimer’s with my science-backed protocol for women 30+: https://go.neuroathletics.com.au/yout… Subscribe to The Neuro Experience for evidence-based conversations at the intersection of brain science, longevity, and performance. _____ TOPICS DISCUSSED 00:00 Intro: The Brain Surgeon at Neuralink’s First Hospital 00:39 The Guy Who Does the Cases Nobody Else Wants 02:17 A Day in the Life: 5:30am Starts and Three Surgeries 03:20 “Game Tape”: Reviewing Every Operation Like an Athlete 04:24 The Surgeon Athlete and Why Surgery Is a Physical Skill 05:32 Fifty Years From Now: What Happens to Neurosurgery 06:11 The ROSA Robot and Mapping a Seizure Focus 08:16 Deep Brain Stimulation and Hitting an Exact Target 08:52 Will We All Be Operated On by Robots? 10:02 The Brain AVM: The One Case a Robot Can’t Take 11:18 Why Bleeding Breaks a Robot: The Waymo Problem 13:15 What a Brain-Computer Interface Actually Does 14:49 The Hand Knob: 108 Electrodes in One Small Spot 15:50 Cursor Control at World Record Speed 16:31 Inside the Implant: Threads a Tenth the Width of a Hair 17:27 “No, the Chip Cannot Read Your Thoughts” 17:58 What the Device Really Reads: A Train of Spikes 19:18 From Movement to Sensation: What Comes Next 19:48 Why Restoring Sight Is So Much Harder 20:58 The 1943 Paper That Predicted All of This 22:37 Elon, Telepathy, and What’s Actually Possible 23:00 Boosting Creativity and Intelligence in 50 Years 25:10 “When I Retire, We’ll Be Treating Depression and Addiction” 26:04 Alzheimer’s: Light Therapy and the Blood-Brain Barrier 27:11 Treating the Disease vs Preventing It 28:25 10,000 Operations: How He Feels About Robots Taking Over 29:54 Neuroplasticity: How Nolan’s Brain Learned the Device 31:34 What Actually Changes at the Neuron Level 32:04 Patient Two and the Robotic Arm 32:42 5,500 Aneurysms: The Cases That Stay With Him 33:16 Cardiac Standstill: Cooling a Brain to 15 Degrees 35:46 What Separates a Great Surgeon From an Average One 36:17 Traits of Greatness: The Formula Nobody Has Cracked 37:21 The Phone Call in the Middle of a 16-Hour Surgery 39:35 “I Must Have Been Born for This” 41:26 Can You Tell How Old a Brain Is Just by Looking? 43:12 Why Alzheimer’s Is Invisible in a Living Brain 44:14 What a Neurosurgeon Does to Protect His Own Brain 44:40 “Alcohol Will Be Viewed Like Cigarettes in the 60s” 45:13 Peptides, Injectables, and Zero Supplements 46:52 The Last Generation to Operate With Open Hands 48:10 How Louisa Found Him on Twitter in 2021 48:53 The Six Mysteries of the Mind 49:14 Which One Gets Solved First, and Which May Never 50:03 Is Consciousness in the Tissue? 51:39 Memory: The Circuitry We Still Can’t Explain 53:18 Why Consciousness Is Harder Than Memory 55:12 Louisa’s Father’s Stroke 56:02 Advice for Anyone Watching a Parent Decline 56:21 His Sister’s Brain Tumor and How He Carries It 57:38 A World Where Stroke Is an Outpatient Repair 58:40 Forty Years On, Finally at the Dawn _______ Thank you to our sponsors Timeline (Mitopure): https://timeline.com/neuro Mitopure now starts at $79 Ogee: https://ogee.com Use code NEURO for a discount on the Crystal Contour Collection Kion (Kion Aminos): https://getkion.com/neuro for a 20% discount Function Health: https://functionhealth.com/LouisaNicola Use code NEURO25 for a $25 credit _______ I’m Louisa Nicola — clinical neurophysiologist — Alzheimer’s prevention specialist Stay sharp. Stay informed. Join thousands who subscribe to the Neuro Athletics Newsletter → https://bit.ly/3ewI5P0 Instagram: / louisanicola_ Twitter : / louisanicola_

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TOPICS DISCUSSED
00:00 Intro: The Brain Surgeon at Neuralink’s First Hospital.
00:39 The Guy Who Does the Cases Nobody Else Wants.
02:17 A Day in the Life: 5:30am Starts and Three Surgeries.
03:20 \

Abstract: Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

7Department of Radiation Oncology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA.

8Radiation Medicine Program, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Applying the CHEST Guidelines for Management of Central Airway Obstruction

Application of guidelines to the day-to-day clinical practice of clinicians is not always straightforward. Guidelines often provide a structure to the thought process demanded during clinical decision-making, which requires the application of evidence as best suited for each individual patient. These guidelines provide recommendations and suggestions, and the weight of these recommendations relies heavily on the quality of evidence and the vote of experts in the field, when evidence is lacking or insufficient.

JCI Perm1 enhances Nrf2driven antioxidant defense through Keap1 oxidation during myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury

Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, New Jersey, USA.

2Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.

3Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, National Yang-Ming Chiao-Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Academic Group Think and Peer Review Journals

The contemporary university system faces an unprecedented crisis of epistemic legitimacy. While empirical and vocational disciplines (such as clinical medicine, structural engineering, and applied physics) remain constrained by real-world falsifiability and physical safety, non-rigorous, non-vocational fields—predominantly spanning theoretical humanities and speculative social sciences—have descended into self-referential group-think. This paper argues that the legacy model of peer-reviewed, paywalled academic journals in these non-empirical fields is economically extractive, intellectually calcified, and functionally obsolete in the era of artificial intelligence. Through an examination of institutional incentive structures, the performative jargon of soft disciplines, and the democratizing force of generative AI, we show how legacy publishing cartels protect ideological conformity rather than academic rigor.

A New Kind of HIV Pill Just Passed Its First Test in Humans

Scientists have just announced the results from the first clinical trial in people with HIV-1 of a new antiretroviral drug, which suggests it could be a very useful new tool in treating the virus.

The drug is currently known as ‘VH-499’ (that’s short for VH4011499), and it works by inhibiting the virus’s capsid protein, without which HIV cannot proliferate to harmful or transmissible levels.

“Advancements in care and prevention have transformed HIV-1 into a manageable chronic condition and reduced transmission rates,” write clinical pharmacologist Rulan Griesel and team in a paper announcing the clinical trial results.

This amino acid may help the body fight tumors and viral infections

The amino acid arginine helps keep the human body humming, most notably by synthesizing proteins that carry out a range of cellular processes. It’s produced by our bodies and found in common high-protein foods. Low levels of arginine are associated with a number of diseases, including colon cancer.

Sohail Tavazoie, head of Rockefeller University’s Elizabeth and Vincent Meyer Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology, has been investigating that connection for years. In 2023, Tavazoie’s team found that starving colon cancer cells of arginine increases the number of mutations they accumulate. Now they’ve discovered that an arginine-deficient diet also affects the immune system by stalling the production of the MHC-I protein, which alerts the immune system to dangers such as a mutating cell or an invading virus.

Intriguingly, they also found that a moderate dose of arginine—about as much as is found in a couple of over-the-counter tablets—could potentially restore expression of the genes responsible for MHC-I production. They published the results in the journal Cell.

How the heart’s ‘little brain’ helps it function and protects it against stress

For years, scientists have known that the heart has its own network of nerves, the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICNS), sometimes called its “little brain.” Exactly how it functions has remained something of a mystery, but a new paper published in the journal Cell sheds light on how these heart nerves work to keep the heart beating steadily.

The heart’s nerve cells fine-tune signals coming from the brain to control heart function, including heart rate. But because they are so few, doctors have struggled to determine exactly what they do. To solve this, researchers from Yale University School of Medicine genetically engineered adult mice so their heart nerves would glow, making them much easier to study.

After locating the nerves, the team analyzed which genes were active in them. They discovered that the nerves fell into two categories, which they called Npy neurons and Ddah1 neurons.

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