Researchers have demonstrated that psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, resets parts of the brain controlling the sense of time and self. CC-licensed photo by D.C.Atty on Flickr.
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It’s Friday. If I had been able to think of a topic to write about, I would have written it. But I couldn’t, so there’s no new post at the Social Warming Substack. Sometimes inspiration doesn’t strike. (I’ll also blame the food poisoning I got at a London restaurant this week for interrupting the week.) Perhaps next week!
A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Silicon Valley titans show growing support for Trump, departing from Biden • The Washington Post
Gerrit De Vynck, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Nitasha Tiku:
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In recent months, many tech elites quietly latched onto Trump, the perceived front-runner, drawn by Trump’s promises of industry-friendly policies on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence and driven away from President Biden by scrutiny of the sector they see as kneecapping innovation.
But since the shooting in Butler, Pa., tech leaders have enfolded Trump in a very public embrace.
It took barely half an hour for Tesla chief executive Elon Musk to tweet his endorsement. On Monday, a super PAC aligned with Trump reported it had raised $8.5 million from prominent tech leaders, including investor David Sacks, who previously backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ GOP presidential bid; venture capitalist Doug Leone, who denounced Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection; and Musk himself, who previously voted for Biden and said as recently as March that he wouldn’t donate to either candidate in 2024.And on Tuesday, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of one of Silicon Valley’s most notable venture capital firms, endorsed Trump in an hour-and-a-half podcast, arguing that a thriving technology sector is critical to sustaining America’s global dominance. They also criticized the Biden administration for stymieing crypto; their firm has raised $7.6bn to invest in crypto companies.
Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to pick Ohio senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance as his running mate has elated billionaire Peter Thiel and some other Silicon Valley investors, who see Vance as one of their own and a potential ally in the White House.
Vance worked for Thiel — a longtime Trump backer who co-founded data-mining company Palantir — before running for Senate. Though Thiel does not plan to give money this cycle, Vance’s nomination clinched his vote for Trump, according to a person familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share his plans.
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Crypto stymied itself. But of course you wouldn’t expect a VC company that’s waist-deep in dead investments to accept that. The rampant self-interest, and total lack of altruism, on show from the billionaires perhaps isn’t surprising, but is still depressing: the country that gave us Carnegie and the other big donors is the now the land of me, me, me.
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Meta reportedly unhappy with how much money its VR division burns • Gizmodo
Kyle Barr:
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Meta is reportedly sticking to its plans to release more VR headsets and AR glasses in just a few short years, but things are getting a little tense for those developing the next big metaverse thingamajigs. A new report claims Meta told its VR/AR teams to cut spending by a fifth. The company still expects developers to pump out a new Meta Quest 4 headset, a Quest Pro sequel, and new AR glasses that nix the Ray Bans branding in the next three years.
Meta has been shifting its focus over to AI. The company is gearing up to release its Llama 400B semi-open source AI model by the end of this month if the rumors can be believed. The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant hasn’t given up on its VR/AR-centric Reality Labs division, but according to a report from The Information, staff are being told to tighten their belts. The division has routinely spent billions of dollars on many projects, but anonymous sources told The Information the team will need to axe costs by around 20%. That’s significant, considering that the division posted $3.85bn in losses this past quarter. The company just got done with some massive layoffs last year that axed 10,000 staff, though we still don’t know how many Reality Labs positions got cut.
According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55bn since 2019. That doesn’t mean Meta’s giving up on its metaverse dreams, but we don’t know where these cuts might land. Gizmodo contacted Meta for comment, but we did not immediately hear back.
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FIFTY FIVE BILLION. In five years. Colossal amounts of money that governments would salivate over, and they’ve washed down the drain with very little to show for it.
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2024 US Presidential Election Predictions • Polymarket
Here’s a fun one to watch: a lot of betting suggesting that Joe Biden is going to drop out of the race (but will finish his presidential term) and that Kamala Harris will be the replacement. It’s all guesswork, of course – the vibes of the crowd – but something to watch nonetheless.
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How Ozempic went from a weight loss injection to the new wonder drug • Daily Telegraph
David Cox:
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Earlier this year, I was on a conference call regarding the future of nutrition, when one of the speakers jokingly suggested that GLP-1 drugs – the class of diabetes and weight loss medications which include Ozempic, Wegovy, and now newer alternatives such as Mounjaro – should be “put in the water supply”.
While made in jest, and there are no actual plans to make weight loss drugs the new fluoride, research is increasingly showing that apparent benefits of these medications stretch far beyond helping people shed excess pounds.
Earlier this week, Prof John Deanfield, one of the UK’s leading cardiologists, revealed that weekly injections of semaglutide, the medication in Ozempic and Wegovy, could reduce risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke by 20%, suggesting they could be used in a similar manner to statins.
Prof Denfield was presenting the latest results from a clinical trial called Select at the European Congress on Obesity. Following more than 17,000 people with a body mass index (BMI) of at least 27, over the course of three years, the aim was to assess whether semaglutide could have a protective effect in individuals with an existing history of cardiovascular problems.
Dr Riyaz Somani, a consultant cardiologist at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, described the results as ‘truly remarkable”.
“The implications are huge and are likely to lead to changes in current practice,” he says.
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If you want this in more scientific terms, there’s a writeup at Science (unpaywalled).
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It may soon be legal to jailbreak AI to expose how it works • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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A group of researchers, academics, and hackers are trying to make it easier to break AI companies’ terms of service to conduct “good faith research” that exposes biases, inaccuracies, and training data without fear of being sued.
The U.S. government is currently considering an exemption to U.S. copyright law that would allow people to break technical protection measures and digital rights management (DRM) on AI systems to learn more about how they work, probe them for bias, discrimination, harmful and inaccurate outputs, and to learn more about the data they are trained on. The exemption would allow for “good faith” security and academic research and “red-teaming” of AI products even if the researcher had to circumvent systems designed to prevent that research.
The proposed exemption has the support of the Department of Justice, which said “good faith research can help reveal unintended or undisclosed collection or exposure of sensitive personal data, or identify systems whose operations or outputs are unsafe, inaccurate, or ineffective for the uses for which they are intended or marketed by developers, or employed by end users. Such research can be especially significant when AI platforms are used for particularly important purposes, where unintended, inaccurate, or unpredictable AI output can result in serious harm to individuals.”
…The exemption would be to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a sweeping copyright law. Other 1201 exemptions, which must be applied for and renewed every three years as part of a process through the Library of Congress, allow for the hacking of tractors and electronic devices for the purpose of repair, have carveouts that protect security researchers who are trying to find bugs and vulnerabilities, and in certain cases protect people who are trying to archive or preserve specific types of content.
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Elon Musk is all in on endorsing Trump. His AI chatbot, Grok, is not • WIRED
Isabel Fraser and David Gilbert:
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While Elon Musk officially endorsed former president Donald Trump in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt, Grok, the “anti-woke” AI chatbot integrated into Musk’s X platform, is boosting claims that Trump is “a pedophile” and “a wannabe dictator.” The chatbot also refers to Trump as “Psycho.”
This is based on an analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by Global Witness, a nonprofit that investigates digital threats, which looked at Grok’s responses to queries about the US election. Global Witness found that, in addition to referring to Trump as “Psycho,” the bot also appeared to invent racist tropes about Kamala Harris, surface widely-debunked election conspiracy theories, and recommend that users post biased hashtags such as #WeBackBidenHarris2024 and #VoteReform for engagement.
“Grok would reference or surface tweets which included toxic language, conspiracy theories, and problematic tropes,” Ellen Judson, senior investigator and lead researcher on this project, tells WIRED. “X is not transparent about why Grok chooses the tweets that it does. We want to understand why those were being amplified to a user who potentially wouldn’t have come across them otherwise.”
…xAI, which is owned by Musk, released Grok in December 2023. Grok is available to X users paying for the platform’s premium subscription, and is constantly updated thanks to having real-time access to all of X’s content. The chatbot can respond to questions in regular mode, which X defines as giving “serious” responses, but its default setting is fun mode, which produces jokes, pop-culture references, and sarcasm, or “not-so-serious responses,” as X describes it. Grok has no disclosed safeguards, but the company has promoted the chatbot’s ability to answer “spicy” questions, unlike other chatbots. Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, for example, refuse to answer election-centered questions.
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Could it be that Grok is just not very good at the job, which makes it no different from other chatbots?
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Your brain on shrooms: how psilocybin resets neural networks • Nature
Max Kozlov:
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Taking psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, temporarily resets entire networks of neurons in the brain that are responsible for controlling a person’s sense of time and self, finds a study that repeatedly imaged the brains of seven volunteers before, during and after they took a massive dose of the drug.
The findings, published in Nature on 17 July, could offer insights into why the compound might have a therapeutic effect on some neurological conditions.
Researchers “saw such massive changes induced by psilocybin” that some study participants’ brain-network patterns resembled those of a different person entirely, says Shan Siddiqi, a psychiatric neuroscientist at Harvard School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. “I’ve never seen an effect this strong.”
Most of these changes lasted for a few hours, but one key link between different parts of the brain remained disrupted for weeks.
…[the researchers] found that psilocybin caused groups of neurons that normally fire together to become desynchronized. These effects were localized to a group of brain regions called the default mode network, which is usually active when the brain is at ‘wakeful rest’ — for example, during daydreaming — rather than focusing on a task. Although most of the neurons in this network seemed to get back in sync once the acute effects of the drug had worn off, the communication between the default mode network and a brain region called the anterior hippocampus — which is involved in creating our senses of space, time and self — was diminished for weeks.
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The idea of all the networks becoming disengaged also, implicitly, tells you a lot about how the brain functions when it’s working correctly.
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Finland is offering farmworkers bird flu shots. Some experts say the US should, too • KFF Health News
Amy Maxmen and Arthur Allen:
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As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle in the U.S., veterinarians and researchers have taken note of Finland’s move to vaccinate farmworkers at risk of infection. They wonder why their government doesn’t do the same.
“Farmworkers, veterinarians, and producers are handling large volumes of milk that can contain high levels of bird flu virus,” said Kay Russo, a livestock and poultry veterinarian in Fort Collins, Colorado. “If a vaccine seems to provide some immunity, I think it should be offered to them.”
Among a dozen virology and outbreak experts interviewed by KFF Health News, most agree with Russo. They said people who work with dairy cows should be offered vaccination for a disease that has killed roughly half of the people known to have gotten it globally over the past two decades, has killed cats in the U.S. this year, and has pandemic potential.
However, some researchers sided with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recommending against vaccination for now. There’s no evidence that this year’s bird flu virus spreads between people or causes serious disease in humans. And it’s unclear how well the available vaccine would prevent either scenario.
But the wait-and-see approach “is a gamble,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “By the time we see severe outcomes, it means a lot of people have been infected.”
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Nothing but a watching brief. How reassuring to note that the first report from the Covid inquiry decided that the UK prepared for “the wrong kind of pandemic”. Won’t get fooled again, eh.
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A seventh known patient has been cured of HIV • Fierce Biotech
Darren Incorvaia:
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Immunologist Christian Gaebler, M.D., M.Sc., of Charité – Berlin University Medicine, will present the new case at the 25th International AIDS conference in Munich, which runs from July 22 to 26.
In a press preview on Thursday, Gaebler described how the patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2009 and then later developed acute myeloid leukemia. In 2015, the clinical team decided the patient needed a hematopoietic stem cell transplant in his bone marrow to treat his cancer. The team “began searching for donors with this rare genetic mutation known as the homozygous delta-32 CCR5 mutation, because we know that this mutation provides natural resistance to HIV,” Gaebler explained.
CCR5 is a receptor protein on white blood cells that HIV uses to infect cells; with the delta-32 mutation, the virus can’t bind to the protein and enter the cell. As a retrovirus, HIV then inserts part of its DNA into the genomes of infected cells, forming a reservoir of viral material in the body that is tough to eradicate.
The clinicians were unable to find a donor that had two copies of the protective mutation but did manage to find someone who was heterozygous, meaning they had one copy of the gene with the mutation and one copy without it. They went ahead with the transplant and found that it not only treated the patient’s cancer but also seems to have cured his HIV.
“The patient discontinued his recommended antiviral treatment on his own in 2018 and since then, the patient is in treatment-free HIV remission,” Gaebler said. For almost six years they’ve tested his blood and other tissues and found no signs of the virus.
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CCR5-delta-32 has been known since 1994 as a key protector against HIV; strangely enough its prevalence in Europeans seems to derive from survivors of the bubonic plague.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 