March 25, 2025
(New York Times) – On June 24, 2022, the same day the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I received a call from the fertility clinic where I’d been undergoing in vitro fertilization, informing … Read More
March 24, 2025
(New York Times) – Three arguments for taking progress toward artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., more seriously — whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. I believe that whether you think A.G.I. will be great or terrible for humanity — … Read More
March 21, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was … Read More
March 19, 2025
(Undark) – Fertility clinics should provide easy access to mental health support for those undergoing IVF treatments. Although literature from my fertility clinic acknowledged that in vitro fertilization would be stressful on the body and mind, those words did not … Read More
March 14, 2025
(The Conversation) – There is much debate about whether AI can augment human creativity, but emerging data suggests that the technology can boost research and development where creativity typically plays an important role. A recent study by MIT economics doctoral … Read More
March 11, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – The term is everywhere this week, but its meaning is as vague as ever. Working on a definition matters. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as … Read More
March 10, 2025
(The Verge) – ChatGPT has a trolley problem problem. ChatGPT’s ethics framework, which is probably the most extensive outline of a commercial chatbot’s moral vantage point, was bad for my blood pressure. First of all, lip service to nuance aside, … Read More
March 6, 2025
(The Walrus) – Recently, a new kind of Magic Bag has found its way into the real world. For some years, I have taught philosophy, mostly ethics, at a university in California. I teach a mix of in-person and online … Read More
March 6, 2025
(New York Times) – A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy, out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death. And the greatest social and technological experiment of our time, artificial … Read More
March 5, 2025
(Aeon) – For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t Several years ago, I left my medical practice for a long vacation. On the morning of my first day back, my … Read More
March 4, 2025
(The Conversation) – Scientists already know that extreme heat increases the risk of heat stroke, cardiovascular disease, kidney dysfunction and even death. I see these effects often in my work as a researcher studying how environmental stressors influence the aging … Read More
March 3, 2025
(The Conversation) – Scientists have long suspected that gut bacteria may influence a person’s risk of developing multiple sclerosis. But studies so far have had inconsistent findings. To address these inconsistencies, my colleagues and I used what researchers call a … Read More
February 24, 2025
(New York Times) – The writing teachers I know struggle to persuade their students not to use these tools. They are everywhere now, impossible to swat away. Who could blame a young writer for wondering how using these “assistants” is … Read More
February 18, 2025
(JAMA) – In this issue of JAMA, 2 articles characterize the impact of recent state abortion restrictions. Applying observational causal inference methods, the authors estimate a 1.7% increase in birth rates from abortion restrictions in affected states (corresponding to about 22 000 excess … Read More
February 13, 2025
(Comment) – Medical students enter the anatomy lab dreaming about “the art of medicine” but graduate residency bewildered because they can’t make sense of themselves as technicians in a profession that once claimed to be a kind of art. As … Read More
February 11, 2025
(New York Times) – The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a multibillion-dollar global health initiative started under President George W. Bush, has brought hope to H.I.V.-positive mothers across Africa, and put the end of AIDS within reach. Through H.I.V./AIDS … Read More
February 4, 2025
(The Conversation) – Bioethics, a modern academic field that helps resolve such fraught dilemmas, evolved in its early decades through debates over several landmark cases in the 1970s to the 1990s. The early cases helped establish the right of patients … Read More
February 3, 2025
(NPR) – Wildman also wrote about the expert medical care Orli received — and the unwillingness of some doctors and nurses to speak openly and realistically about what she was facing. Wildman believes the medical establishment tends to view the … Read More
February 3, 2025
(New York Times) – Scientists were slow to recognize that Covid spreads through the air. Some are now trying to get ahead of the bird flu. “No one would listen,” Dr. Morawska said. It took more than two years for … Read More
February 3, 2025
(New York Times) – The rapid rise in artificial intelligence has created intense discussions in many industries over what kind of role these tools can and should play — and health care has been no exception. The medical community largely … Read More
February 3, 2025
(The Times) – A palliative care doctor is called to A&E to attend to an elderly man who has arrived in severe pain with metastasised prostate cancer. “I just want to die,” he tells her. Yet when she sits with … Read More
January 31, 2025
(The Hedgehog Review) – Surgical patients hate pain, but sometimes they need to feel it. They wake up too slowly from general anesthesia and forget to breathe. Shouting fails to rouse them. Putting an alcohol swab under their noses is … Read More
January 29, 2025
(The Telegraph) – DeepSeek’s Sputnik moment has debunked overblown projections of a data centre boom One of the abiding truths about technological innovation is that what starts off as clunky and barely worth the time and effort required to use … Read More
January 24, 2025
(New York Times) – Yet despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it. That dismal lack of progress is partly because of the infinite complexity of the human brain, which … Read More
January 20, 2025
(New York Times) – The allure of extreme longevity has beckoned for centuries. Research careers and marketing campaigns have been built on the idea that we can live longer, healthier lives by emulating long-lived people. It is a comforting thought, … Read More
