AI is already integrated into our lives. Google adapts to your prior visits and habits. What ads you see is determined by AI. Google Maps and Waze offer routing options that include efforts to optimize all traffic in your area. More fully developed AIs will be here faster than we expect, and we need rules and regulation that plan for – rather than react to – AI tool development.

Swedish researchers have learned how to “grow” electrically conductive regions in tissue. The process involves injecting an enzyme-rich hydrogel into target tissues. The enzymes interact with molecules in the tissue and change the structure of the gel to make it conductive. The technique has potential application in areas as diverse as cardiac pacing to brain-computer interface development – all without the implanted electrodes that are used today and the physical limits they impose.

Aripiprazole supplementation of existing antidepressants in older adults with treatment-resistant depression significantly improved wellbeing over 10 weeks compared to switching to bupropion, and it was also associated with a numerically higher incidence of remission. Changes in wellbeing and the occurrence of remission with lithium augmentation or a switch to nortriptyline were comparable among patients in whom augmentation or a switch to bupropion failed.

Twelve-hundred (1,200) patients admitted for 48 hours or more for COVID were randomized to 2.5mg of apixaban or placebo twice daily for 30 days. The incidence of death or thromboembolism was low and similar in the two arms of this study. The study was terminated early and the authors say the results are imprecise.

In a study population of nearly 3.25 million adults receiving COVID boosters from November 2021 through February 2022, the 20-week risk per 1,000 for contracting COVID was 164.2 for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 159.9 for the Moderna vaccine.

According to the January 2023 Cochrane report, “…in the community studies, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness…” Were reviews delayed in publication to support a masking viewpoint? Read the summary and collected interviews here.