jpedmd2026-06-24T17:19:35-05:00June 24th, 2026|

Ryan Moulton has a slightly technical, but a thoroughly entertaining review of how nature produces colors, how we perceive them, and how our screens don’t quite manage to exactly reproduce the real world on his WordPress Blog.  If you are interested in color , it’s highly recommended!

jpedmd2026-06-17T16:55:58-05:00June 17th, 2026|

Here are two medicine-relevant papers that I found very interesting.  The first discusses the work being done on the development of a fentanyl vaccine in the hope of decreasing the tragic death toll from its non-medical use.  The second is from Eric Topol’s terrific Ground Truths Substack where he talks about two recent papers, one from Germany and the other from Google in Cal, both looking at the performance of agentic AIs compared against clinicians.  Both were text based (not verbal) interactions, one with an agent presenting real world HPIs and the other with patient actors — and so decidedly not real world scenarios. Nevertheless, in both cases the AI agents outperformed real world physicians.  Read Topol’s post for his excellent summary, cautions, and analysis.

• Schweitzer K. Inside the Push for a Fentanyl Vaccine. JAMA. Published online June 12, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.6392

• Eric Topol’s Agentic AI Comes to Medicine here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2850522

• Alan Taylor has a wonderful photo essay in the Atlantic on the construction of what will be the world’s largest fusion reactor – ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France. It’s a fantastically complicated construction challenge.

ITER collaboration Members China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States will share in the cost of project construction, operation and decommissioning, and also share in the experimental results and any intellectual property generated by the project. Europe is responsible for the largest portion of construction costs (45.6 percent); the remainder is shared equally by China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States (9.1 percent each).

The target date for completion with plasma generation is 2033.

• This was a fun read from the NYT on how some farmers are integrating machine learning – From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I.

• Caveat emptor. From Matt Levine’s excellent Money Stuff, on Polymarket bots:

“Anyway Bloomberg’s Carolyn Silverman, Nathaniel Popper and Marie Patino report:

Over 100,000 accounts lost at least $1,000 on Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of every wallet active since the beginning of 2025. That is almost twice the number that made at least that much.

Among the winners, a majority of the profits were raked in by a tiny slice of what look to be automated bots, based on the Polymarket trade records compiled by the data firm Dune. Everyone else, in aggregate, lost $131 million. …

While prediction markets have been described as peer-to-peer, the Polymarket records suggest the role of the sportsbook is now largely being played by the sort of automated, high-frequency traders that have long dominated other financial markets. The most active accounts on the site were a small proportion of wallets, but accounted for most of the trading volume.“