Yes that's what I was referring to as speculation.

I'm talking about what they said in their summary and the body of their paper rather than the linked news article.

This is essentially creative botany for producing known biological chemicals in bulk via plants instead of transgenic yeast like would normally be used. These aren't the same scientists working on de novo drugs for the conditions you're talking about.

Hard to say, if you read the linked full paper there's 50% increases over 8 years in the samples, and you'd see older people accumulate more if the exposure had been linear for each cohort over time, which may not have been the case, either. They remain speculative if there's uncharacterized clearance mechanisms or equilibrium to exposure in the same paragraph.

The smallest (and only) open weight model that gets Opus or Sonnet level coding performance is MiniMax M2.5, and you need about 512GB of VRAM for that model (with enough room for input tokens). At 128GB you are looking at Opus 4.0 / Haiku 4.5 level models like Qwen 3.5 122B-A1 at Q4 or Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B-A3B at Q8.

I think it's likely we will have small language models that specifically target coding that are at Opus 4.6 quality on 128-256GB of VRAM in the next couple years, I don't think we are there yet.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates are married.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates have children.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates live with their parents.

* In America.

The other confounding factor is that the microplastics build up over time, whereas something like a sublethal salt dose will make you feel bloated and thirsty for an afternoon until you have a good piss. The rate of bioaccumulation may vary.

It is the crux of how MAGA and MAHA are interacting. They'll make pronouncements about health while ensuring that regulatory agencies are incapable of doing anything but requesting voluntary action.

Because it is a lot more interesting than "baseline background on an assay needed adjusted up because of gloves" and also makes it easier to dismiss that the total load of microplastics in everything is slightly lower than we thought. Which is the sort of thing that happens regularly in any basic research and assay development without breathless news about it, because Limit of Background studies are even boring for the technicians running them.

Cult of Personality / Great Man type folks aren't usually right vs left, although they do have a tendency to approve of authoritarianism.

It'd also be a matter of degrees and likely vary by the types of microplastics one is exposed to (some kinds are better for some kinds of science than others for these reasons, as well. Sometimes you can get very different results if your samples were in polycarbonate vs polyethelene). Some are going to be more inert, just kinda gross physical pollution like sand in your gears. Others would likely affect hormone regulation. Others might just be a suitable substrate for biofilm and make you more susceptible to bacterial illness once your immune system declines.

If the effect is consistent then you're just moving the baseline up, it is like looking for protein and using buffers with protein in it like milk or FBS... you can do it just fine but you have to account for it in the math.

You can cancel out background if the effect can be determined to be uniform to your controls as well, depending on the assay

AI-generated code is just this generation's version of copying code from the web or from another part of the codebase. Sometimes that person understood the code fully, and sometimes they just checked to see if the output matched what they expected.

The only uniquely dangerous thing about this recent iteration of that problem is the massive scale.

No, CEOs are trying to show their board, investors, and activist investors that they have a plan for how to take advantage of AI and can at least keep up with their competitors use of AI, if not surpass them. I work at a large enterprise (close to 50k employees) and VPs are being told that they need to find ways for AI to have an impact on their department or their leaders will find someone who can. If it isn't happening fast enough consultants are brought in to take over their department's transformative roadmap and leaders who can't keep up are relegated to being SMEs until they are eventually replaced. I'm not in the room when that message is given, but I've seen the rapid shift of VPs who were raising alarms nearly immediately turn into AI cheerleaders.

If you work for a publicly traded or VC backed company I assure you your CEO does not have a choice on whether to jump on the AI bandwagon. That's not how hype driven bubbles work.