Alcohols are among the most abundant building blocks in chemistry. Fluorinated compounds, meanwhile, are essential for many modern medicines, crop protection products and advanced materials. Converting one into the other, however, has traditionally relied on toxic, thermally unstable reagents such as DAST (diethylaminosulfur trifluoride) that make large-scale manufacturing operationally demanding.
Researchers are therefore seeking safer and more practical ways to carry out these fluorination reactions. One major goal is to use simple, inexpensive and widely available fluoride sources such as potassium fluoride in order to make the process safer, more scalable and more sustainable.
The study of tumour virology has traditionally focused on oncogenic viruses and their associated mechanisms of cancer initiation and promotion. Yet certain viral exposures can be beneficial by enhancing antitumour immunity. In this Review, Wang et al. explore the increasingly emerging evidence of protective roles of viruses in cancer immunity and how this knowledge could be harnessed to develop a virome-guided framework for cancer immunoprevention.
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_
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 \
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.
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.
