DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: November 16, 2025
Big Tech Wants Your Brain. Meaning, yes, Elon Musk wants your brain:
Advances in optogenetics, a scientific technique that uses light to stimulate or suppress individual, genetically modified neurons, could allow scientists to “write” the brain as well, potentially altering human understanding and behavior. Optogenetic implants are already able to partially restore vision to patients with genetic eye disorders; lab experiments have shown that the same technique can be used to implant false memories in mammal brains, as well as to silence existing recollections and to recover lost ones.
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s neural technology company, has so far implanted 12 people with its rechargeable devices. “You are your brain, and your experiences are these neurons firing,” Musk said at a Neuralink presentation in June. “We don’t know what consciousness is, but with Neuralink and the progress that the company is making, we’ll begin to understand a lot more.”
Musk’s company aims to eventually connect the neural networks inside our brains to artificially intelligent ones on the outside, creating a two-way path between mind and machine. Neuroethicists have criticized the company for ethical violations in animal experiments, for a lack of transparency and for moving too quickly to introduce the technology to human subjects, allegations the company dismisses. “In some sense, we’re really extending the fundamental substrate of the brain,” a Neuralink engineer said in the presentation. “For the first time we are able to do this in a mass market product.”
The neurotechnology industry already generates billions of dollars of revenue annually. It is expected to double or triple in size over the next decade. Today, B.C.I.s range from neural implants to wearable devices like headbands, caps and glasses that are freely available for purchase online, where they are marketed as tools for meditation, focus and stress relief. Sam Altman founded his own B.C.I. start-up, Merge Labs, this year, as part of his effort to bring about the day when humans will “merge” with machines. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are investors in Synchron, a Neuralink competitor.
When The Penny Was Real Money. Written in 1933:
ONCE upon a time, a penny was money. I know, because my mother, scandalized, said, ‘Oh, but you mustn’t accept money from little boys.’
This was soon after my entrance into the world, as the world is represented by the first grade. The little boys were blond and angelic, with wide frilled collars over their woolen jackets, or they were shaggy-headed and bare of foot. They slipped their pennies into the hands of pigtailed little girls in white pinafores, or laid them, more or less anonymously, on their desks. How this custom was discovered at home I have forgotten, — certainly the penny’s worth was always devoured at the first recess, — but I can imagine that perhaps an attack of indigestion was inquired into. ‘What have you been eating?’ ‘Well, I had some stick candy.’ ‘And where did you get it?’ . . . There could have been no question of a penny bestowed at home and not mentioned : any such largesse was received with whoops of joy, and the coin rubbed up, on the carpet, until it shone like gold. . . .
For our first teaching we went to the same building where our parents had learned to read and write. In their day the West End had not been exclusively Irish and Catholic; in ours, the children who lived in the neighborhood attended the parochial school, and the boys and girls of the public school walked there from streets some blocks to the east. For this reason its environs were strange to us, and the funny little shops, the cottages, the Catholic church, had no real existence in our minds: they were merely a painted back drop to our stage.
The one notable exception was Mrs. Feeney’s store, just beyond the old-rag-iron-and-bottle yard next to the school. Built on a corner where two slanting streets came together at an acute angle, the store was shaped rather like a triangle with the apex cut off, with the door where the point should have been. Inside this door, the walls sloped away on either hand into a shadowed obscurity where a confusion of burlap sacks and large barrels loomed through the dusk. The crowded room was called a ‘grocery,’ and no doubt there were purchasers for the staples of life that were kept back there in the musty-smelling dark, but we never saw an adult in the place. For us it was an Aladdin’s cave of delights. The candy counters were close to the door, where there was hardly room on one side of the glass cases for two or three small eager children, and on the other for buxom, black-haired Mrs. Feeney.
We had a store like this in Arden called ‘The Pig And Whistle’. Not sure if the candy was a penny, but it wasn’t much more than that. A little nostalgia never hurt anyone.
A lone man walks across an expanse of ice; a mottled tundra; desert badlands. The single human figure becomes a focal point as images from Earth’s diverse ecosystems change underfoot.
In this visual lies a metaphor: Human footprints have made their way across the entire planet, but how have they actually shaped the land?
That question drives Earth in 100 Seconds, a short film by geography educator and National Geographic Explorer Daniel Raven-Ellison. The project translates hard data on global land use into a storytelling device: a walk across the world, where each second represents one percent of Earth’s land surface. The result reveals how more space is taken up by activities like ranching and farming than the parks and wild places that provide ample habitat for wildlife.
Around halfway through the video, a blink-and-you-miss-it image of a city street appears to show how urban areas occupy only one to two percent of Earth’s surface. Despite taking up only a fraction of land, these cities cast a long shadow. Just over half the world’s people live in urban areas, but studies suggest they’re responsible for about 70 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
“I think we need to reimagine cities as not just being houses, roads, and factories, but all of the environments that they consume around them,” says Raven-Ellison.
In contrast to the brief city scene, the video spends 53 seconds on farmland, pastures, and forests grown for timber production. In total, we use around 71 percent of Earth’s land. Only eight seconds of the video comprises intact and truly wild forests. And many of the other wild places seen in the video are difficult to access and minimally used by people.
The Antidote To Peanut Allergies–Eating Peanuts?:
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, parents were urged not to introduce their children to peanuts – one of the most common food allergens – until the child was at least three years old.
But in 2015, a blockbuster paper in the New England Journal of Medicine known as the Leap (Learning Early About Peanut allergy) study found that introducing the food to babies when they were just a few months old could reduce a child’s risk of developing the allergy by over 80%. Public health guidelines shifted and in 2017 the Prevention of Peanut Allergy Guidelines recommended introducing peanut protein to infants.
“A common misconception about food allergies is that delaying the introduction of allergenic foods may help prevent them,” says Dr Stanislaw Gabryszewski, an attending physician at the Children’s hospital of Philadelphia and one of the paper’s co-authors. “We now have strong evidence showing the opposite – that introducing peanuts and other common allergens early in infancy can actually reduce the risk of developing an anaphylactic food allergy.”
Cue the 4 Seasons (Trivia question: Which Sopranos mobster was killed while this song played on a car radio?):
