If this works and becomes a common dental procedure I will be soooo happy. Every time I go to the dentist I ask them if anything like this is coming down the pipeline and they laugh...
"Learning to Be Me" is a masterpiece, one of the best short stories ever written. Not only is the phenomenology brilliant, but the literary skill is so good that, even though you suspect what's coming all throughout the tale, he still manages to shock you in the denouement.
You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.
It's the other side of passing the Turing test. Assuming that the machine passes, what's next?
What's next is a lot of people are fooled. Is it me or the machine that replaced me? Is it grandma, transmigrated into machineland afterlife, or is it just a fake? Does the fake get to vote and own property?
Worst possible scenario : Everybody is fooled. Everybody gets brainscraped. Everybody goes to immortal AI heaven. But actually nobody did. I won't give away what story goes with that spoiler (not Egan).
Your comment made me reminisce, I read the story a few years ago and its one of my favorite short stories by him. Such a simple concept. One beautiful piece of sci-fi horror.
> You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.
In my interpretation, Egan is trying to say that _this is already the case_.
I understood the story as a description of epiphenomenalism, only layered with sci fi concepts to make it more straightforward to digest.
From a cosmetic point of view, almost everybody exclusively focuses on the skin to counter aging, when they should be at least as concerned with bone density.
Lots of people have perfect skin, but they still look old. Why? Bone morphology. The zygomatic bone erodes, and the orbital gaps widen. The mandible degrades and pivots down and backwards (jaw rotation). Issues like resorption are currently very challenging. Skin is comparatively much easier. Also (and besides well-known interventions like collagen, retinoids, HA, and dermarolling), Epidermal and Keratinocyte Growth Factors are already very cheap, and showing much promise.
For anyone else wondering: your body is continually pulling calcium from your bones for metabolic processes. Usually it gets replaced when you consume something with calcium in it.
It makes sense to have somewhere to store extra nutrients so you can keep functioning for a long time between taking in those specific nutrients again.
Your body does this with a lot of your organs. Fat is obviously calorie storage, but muscles can also be resorbed for energy under starvation conditions (or just when they're under used). Your kidneys can resorb water from stored urine, and your intestines pull most water out of what you consume. Most neurotransmitters and hormones get recycled at various rates and turned into new molecules.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all I know of offhand.
> Animal and human studies suggest that high-frequency, low-magnitude vibration therapy improves bone strength by increasing bone formation and decreasing bone resorption.
So you could apply vibration to the head bones. Not sure about any side effects.
Indeed. Wasn't there an article just a few days ago about Navy Seals (?) suffering brain injury from being too close to artillery being fired or some such? The vibrations in the skull were thought to be the culprit.
I have been getting ads lately for an aerobic step with a vibrating motor built into it, for this very purpose. It might have been on Peacock, and if so it was during Tour de France footage.
It’s a small effect but real, and it’s passive from the patient’s standpoint and we always seem to find that to be a selling point. This research was, if I recall, originally done for NASA and studied sheep. Shake a Sheep for Science!
Bone density is definitely an adaption from resistance exercise.
I don't know any specific studies, but I would expect that the bone density improvements are in some sense systemic in that the metabolic changes that increase bone density will have spillover effects to bones not directly involved in some given movement.
With the third and last videos (space men, and man reading in the clouds), this is the first time I have found the resolution indistinguishable from real life. Even with SOTA stills from Midjourney and Stable Diffusion I was not entirely convinced. This is incredible.
I presume the subject must've been in pretty bad shape in terms of health, to assume the inherent risk of brain surgery at the micron scale. Best wishes to them, and I hope humanity can benefit from knowledge gathered with this breakthrough.
The first requirement for participating in the study:
"Have quadriplegia (limited function in all 4
limbs) due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis (ALS) and are at least 1-year
post-injury (without improvement)"
Ideally yes, but the liabilities are likely too great at this time. So better start with the "hopeless", where no harm can be done, then go up from there.
The only way to get approval to experiment on human subjects is by specifically intending the device to treat a condition, and then only testing on individuals with that condition. You can't just take volunteers off the street and start testing chemotherapy drugs on them for example - this is to avoid exploiting the poor and indigent as human lab rats.
They need to thread the needle of a condition so advanced that a brain link device would potentially restore a basic essential of life but also not so advanced that the patient can no longer give consent.
This is highly speculative, but minute 18:46 in the DevDay presentation [0] struck me as very awkward. Sam's AGI comment seemed off-script, and I don't think Satya liked it very much.
To say that artificial consciousness is (or "remains") impossible, is to imply that there is a ghost in the machine in conscious lifeforms. Maybe there is, I don't know. But if there isn't, there should be no reason for artificial consciousness to be impossible.
Not medical advice, but for folks looking to supplement with Mg, it's best to avoid Magnesium oxide, as it is very poorly absorbed. Magnesium chloride and Magnesium bisglycinate are much better absorbed.
There are charts out there showing the bioavailability of different compounds. As a rule of thumb, the oxide versions of a mineral (e.g. magnesium oxide, zinc oxide) are often the cheapest and least bioavailable versions.
https://www.engadget.com/the-worlds-first-tooth-regrowing-dr...