Schizophrenia has a different med: “patients who took Cobenfy saw their symptom scores fall by about 20 points, compared with a 10-point drop in the placebo group” 🆓

Link. Nausea main problem so far. No weight gain and maybe some anhedonia relief.

The NYT article is solid except where they use word “rare”. I assume that was a fearful editor. The disease is not rare and it is terrible.

I appreciated the summary of how our genomic studies produced nothing.

🆓 link

“The slacker culture that prevailed from the late 1980s through the early 2000s was a glorious thing.”

Link. I did degrees in 78, 82, 86, 91, 94 and I’m doing a UMN class now. Undergrads now are way more keen, intense, and stressed.

I think students know we have too much worldwide talent for too little demand, that modern life is chaotic, technology is moving too fast, rural collapse is giving us Trump, and now AI is coming. Econ numbers miss this.

Lowe takes metformin primate results seriously.

Link. “Comparing RNA-seq and proteomics profiles of the two aged groups (treatment and control) with the two younger cohorts showed that metformin treatment rolled things back from 4 to 6 years”. 3 years of metformin for middle-aged cynomolgous monkeys.

I didn’t believe this result when I first read it. China has immense science fraud problems and the effect seems much too big. Published in Cell, but not, fwiw, in Nature or Science. I still think it’s too big an effect but if true it’s kind of Nobel gimme.

“certain brain networks, especially those involved in social and emotional processing, shrink during pregnancy”

Link. Similar to adolescent pruning of key neural networks. Suggests optimizing or locking-in some bonding behaviors that favor infant survival. (But may decrease maternal survival. )

“By the ninth week of gestation, 80 percent of 400 brain areas analyzed showed decreases in gray matter volume and cortical thickness that continued through pregnancy, with areas shrinking by 4 percent on average. Change was particularly pronounced in the default mode network, which is instrumental in perceiving other people’s feelings and perspectives.”