Anyone who has started taking an SSRI knows the cruel little paradox of the first few weeks. You swallow the pill meant to lift your mood, and at first your mood does the opposite. The anxiety sharpens. Sleep frays. And then, somewhere around week three or four, if you stick with it, the fog begins … Read more
The thing is narrower than a single human hair, and along its silicon length sit close to a thousand tiny recording points and twenty-eight microscopic windows that spit out light. Slide it into the brain of a mouse and it does two jobs that neuroscientists have, for years, been forced to do separately. It eavesdrops … Read more
Start with a skin cell. Bathe it in the right cocktail of chemical signals and it forgets what it is, regressing to a state of biological openness, capable of becoming almost anything. Over the next several months, coax it toward a neural fate. What you end up with, roughly a year after you started, is … Read more
Ask an AI image generator to picture Washington D.C. and it will probably give you the Mall, the monuments, the Potomac glinting in afternoon light. Ask it to picture Blacksburg, Virginia, a college town of roughly 45,000 people tucked into the Appalachian highlands, and something goes wrong. The mountains might be there, the green spaces … Read more
The chip is about the size of a thumbnail. Under a dark-field microscope it glows faintly, a grid of tiny crystalline specks arranged with the regularity of pixels on a screen. Each speck is a distinct material, a unique combination of atoms no chemist has ever made in bulk, and there are roughly 1.44 million … Read more
Somewhere inside a large manufacturing plant, a turbofan bearing is beginning to fail. It will not announce this clearly. One vibration sensor picks up a faint irregularity in the x-axis; another registers a slight temperature drift; a third is recording torque anomalies that might mean nothing at all. Each sensor, considered alone, tells only a … Read more
Type a question into an AI chatbot and hit send. Now watch the cursor blink. Two seconds feels fine, barely noticeable. Nine seconds and something shifts: you start to wonder if the system is really working through the problem. By the time you hit twenty seconds you have either concluded the AI is doing something … Read more
Inside every cell in your body, a chemical clock is running. Not ticking exactly, more like drifting: patterns of methyl groups latching onto DNA, accumulating and shifting in ways that reflect everything you’ve done, breathed, eaten, and been exposed to across a lifetime. Researchers have spent the better part of two decades trying to read … Read more
The brain scans look unambiguous. After 18 months of treatment, the amyloid plaques that riddle the brains of early Alzheimer’s patients are visibly reduced, sometimes dramatically so. The drug is doing exactly what it was designed to do: hunting down those sticky protein deposits and clearing them away. So why aren’t the patients getting better? … Read more
Slapping a label on AI-generated content is the regulatory world’s current favourite answer to the misinformation problem. Transparent, scalable, required by law in China and under the EU AI Act, endorsed by Meta and X. The logic seems obvious enough: tell people a machine wrote something and they’ll scrutinise it harder. They didn’t, as it … Read more
A data-driven look at neuroscience and AI, for investors, policymakers, and innovators.