‘Earlier this month, the company behind the pioneering smart vacuum, iRobot, filed for bankruptcy. The remainder of the business will go to its primary manufacturing partner—the one it owes all that money to—Shenzhen Picea Robotics. It’s a stark reminder that the longevity of a connected smart device depends entirely on the financial health of the company that made it.
…Whether you have a Neato, a Roomba, or another robot vacuum approaching the end of its connected, you can mirror my steps to keep your device cleaning.…’ (Florence Ion via Lifehacker)
When Blaise Metreweli spoke recently, she didn’t issue the usual warnings about rising powers or looming catastrophe. Instead, she described something more unsettling: a world that has quietly slipped beyond the post–World War II order.
In this world, wars are rarely declared, borders are routinely ignored, and power no longer rests only with nation-states. Conflict now unfolds through AI-enabled drones, autonomous weapons, hyper-targeted psychological operations, and algorithms that rival states in influence. Information itself has become a weapon.
This isn’t a future scenario. It’s the terrain we’re already standing on.
The conflicts Metreweli outlined don’t begin with explosions. They begin with destabilization—confusion, economic pressure, disinformation, and the slow erosion of democratic trust. The front lines are no longer just physical; they are digital, cognitive, and economic. War now moves from sea to space, from battlefield to boardroom, and from social media feeds directly into our heads.
Perhaps most alarming is her core observation: power is becoming radically diffuse—shifting from governments to corporations, platforms, and even individuals. Private actors now control satellite networks essential to warfare, shape elections through information systems, and deploy AI faster than laws can meaningfully constrain them. This is conflict without uniforms and accountability without borders.
What gives this warning real weight is what’s happening quietly alongside it. Across Europe, democracies are preparing. Britain’s military leadership is calling for a “whole-of-nation” response. Germany and France have reintroduced forms of national service. Europe is rapidly restructuring defense production, supply chains, and industrial capacity.
These are not symbolic gestures. Democracies don’t mobilize like this unless multiple intelligence streams are telling the same story.
The unsettling implication is simple: the war Metreweli described isn’t coming. It’s already underway. (Via Dean Blundell)
‘From mudstones on Mars to strange gases in exoplanet atmospheres, tentative evidence for extraterrestrial life is starting to come thick and fast. But when we’ve found it, how will we know for sure?…’ (Miriam Frankel via New Scientist)
By examining both human Alzheimer's brain tissue and multiple preclinical mouse models, the team identified a key biological failure at the center of the disease. They found that the brain's inability to maintain normal levels of a critical cellular energy molecule called NAD+ plays a major role in driving Alzheimer's. Importantly, maintaining proper NAD+ balance was shown to not only prevent the disease but also reverse it in experimental models.
WARNING WARNING WARNING: Yes, there are OTC supplements for tinkering with your NAD+, but they are apparently/allegedly CARCINOGENIC (cause CANCER) at typical doses. DO NOT run out and do something stupid. Tinkering with your whole-body cellular metabolism has some gnarly failure modes. From this article:
Why This Approach Differs From Supplements
Dr. Pieper cautioned against confusing this strategy with over the counter NAD+-precursors. He noted that such supplements have been shown in animal studies to raise NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer. The method used in this research relies instead on P7C3-A20, a pharmacologic agent that helps cells maintain healthy NAD+ balance during extreme stress, without pushing levels beyond their normal range.
Continuing from the article:
NAD+ levels naturally decline throughout the body, including the brain, as people age. When NAD+ drops too low, cells lose the ability to carry out essential processes needed for normal function and survival. The researchers discovered that this decline is far more severe in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. The same pattern was seen in mouse models of the disease.
[...]
Amyloid and tau abnormalities are among the earliest and most significant features of Alzheimer's. In both mouse models, these mutations led to widespread brain damage that closely mirrors the human disease. This included breakdown of the blood-brain barrier, damage to nerve fibers, chronic inflammation, reduced formation of new neurons in the hippocampus, weakened communication between brain cells, and extensive oxidative damage. The mice also developed severe memory and cognitive problems similar to those seen in people with Alzheimer's.
[...]
This approach built on the group's earlier work published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences USA, which showed that restoring NAD+ balance led to both structural and functional recovery after severe, long-lasting traumatic brain injury. In the current study, the researchers used a well-characterized pharmacologic compound called P7C3-A20, developed in the Pieper laboratory, to restore NAD+ balance.
The results were striking. Preserving NAD+ balance protected mice from developing Alzheimer's, but even more surprising was what happened when treatment began after the disease was already advanced. In those cases, restoring NAD+ balance allowed the brain to repair the major pathological damage caused by the genetic mutations.
Both mouse models showed complete recovery of cognitive function. This recovery was also reflected in blood tests, which showed normalized levels of phosphorylated tau 217, a recently approved clinical biomarker used to diagnose Alzheimer's in people. These findings provided strong evidence of disease reversal and highlighted a potential biomarker for future human trials.
Note, potential conflict of interest: the head of the lab, Dr Pieper, above, has a serious commercial interest in this proving out:
The technology is currently being commercialized by Glengary Brain Health, a Cleveland-based company co-founded by Dr. Pieper.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is traditionally considered irreversible. Here, however, we provide proof of principle for therapeutic reversibility of advanced AD. In advanced disease amyloid-driven 5xFAD mice, treatment with P7C3-A20, which restores nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) homeostasis, reverses tau phosphorylation, blood-brain barrier deterioration, oxidative stress, DNA damage, and neuroinflammation and enhances hippocampal neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity, resulting in full cognitive recovery and reduction of plasma levels of the clinical AD biomarker p-tau217. P7C3-A20 also reverses advanced disease in tau-driven PS19 mice and protects human brain microvascular endothelial cells from oxidative stress. In humans and mice, pathology severity correlates with disruption of brain NAD+ homeostasis, and the brains of nondemented people with Alzheimer's neuropathology exhibit gene expression patterns suggestive of preserved NAD+ homeostasis. Forty-six proteins aberrantly expressed in advanced 5xFAD mouse brain and normalized by P7C3-A20 show similar alterations in human AD brain, revealing targets with potential for optimizing translation to patient care.
‘Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second).
That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home galaxy at 3,000 times the speed of sound at sea level here on Earth. If that isn’t astounding enough, the black hole is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized “bow-shock” of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it, within which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation. …’ (Robert Lea via Space)
Capsule summary: comparing brain scans of individuals at different ages doesn't tell you very much about aging. For that, you need brain scans of the same individuals at different ages. also, "convenience samples" of people who just happen to have been scanned are unlikely to tell you as much as you think about the general population.
The study cited was published in something call Nature Communications, which is presumably unrelated to the well-regarded scientific journal Nature.
‘The speech was a jumble of his usual false or even impossible claims — like a promise to reduce prescription drug costs by an impossible 400 percent — smashed together in no particular order. The speech began with a discussion of the cost of living, a subject he would drop and then return to as if just remembering that it was the number one reason his polls were low. Even the delivery was weird: Seemingly under network time constraints, the president read off the teleprompter angrily and quickly, speaking with the motormouth intensity of a 20-something banker who just discovered cocaine and now has a really great idea for a new restaurant.
So why am I writing about it at all?
Because the fact that it happened at all tells us something much more important: that the Trump administration is sinking, and his White House has no idea what to do about it.…’ (Zack Beauchamp via Vox)
‘Trump went to North Carolina to talk about the economy and ended up explaining how Melania organizes her underwear drawer.
President Trump traveled to Rocky Mount, North Carolina on Friday to deliver what the White House billed as an economic message. Ninety minutes later, he had covered his wife’s lingerie organization system, the proper arm shape for furniture, and why beating Hillary Clinton was more fun than he expected.…’ (Ellsworth Toohey via Boing Boing)
‘”Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book: Look at this, it’s just not that hard to do.”
Other books considered and then eviscerated are the first novel by comedian Louis C.K., a memoir by former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and a posthumously published collection of short stories by Harper Lee.…’ (John Farrier via Neatorama)
I recorded one consumed medium every two and a half days (2.3), where the media are movies, documentaries, TV series, articles, short stories (thanks to Amazon's proliferation of single shorts under one cover), novellas, and novels. There does seem to be a growing pattern of shorter serials rather than large epics, so i've plowed through them when available. That's about 77% more entries than i recorded last year. I would have thought it was a greater fraction more, as i felt like i spent much of my time off in books this year, and the short stories would inflate counts. I guess the fatigue over the summer of 2024 had its impact.
I will admit that much of the reading is shaped by what is at my library's Overdrive instance and then by Kindle Unlimited. I've recorded 37 purchases.
I think Robert Jackson Bennett and Victoria Goddard are the new to me authors that most engaged me. I look forward to more Ana and Din mysteries.
We continue our tradition of Sunday night British mysteries, Monday night NCIS (including as of this year, NCIS: Origins - we have caught up with the network release), and Wednesday night science fiction. On other nights we frequently end up watching NCIS: New Orleans. Sunday mornings we frequently watch art documentaries or Landscape Artist of the Year. Today we will likely watch the final episode of the 2020 season 6.
‘Ryan Coogler’s bloodsucker blockbuster is all about Black creative freedom. No wonder the industry saw it as a threat.…’ (A.A. Dowd via American Prospect)
‘1. Enact a statutory right to vote for every eligible citizen.
This may surprise you, but there is no general federal constitutional right to vote. …’ ( via Democracy Docket)
Maybe, i thought, after listening to Mary Oliver read "Wild Geese", maybe i should write psalms. So i opened Robert Alter's translation of "The Book of Psalms" and began reading the introduction in which he notes (in discussing how Hebrew poets new psalms to other gods and those lines can be found in their psalms)
a comparison with the proposed originals suggests rather that what the psalmists did was to adapt, briefly cite, or even polemically transform the polytheistic poems, which is, after all, what poets everywhere do with their predecessors—both building on them and emphatically making something new out of them.
It's not just poets, life, i think, builds on what came before -- ferns in the remains of their predecessors taking the remains of the star into their heart, birds with the song of their parents nesting in the same forest, i in my home haunted by the memory of my mother's housekeeping. Maybe the choice is how emphatically we focus on the newness: a gardener's choice different from a parent's, different from a poet's, different from a politician.
I think i ache for us all to be surrounded by humans making choices -- where perhaps the choices themselves are not emphatically new -- but what a new world if we all made compassionate thoughtful choices. We would still have pain and suffering, friction and loss, but so ever much less.
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followmehere_feed Dec. 26th, 2025 02:02 am)
