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Medicine

Non-Invasive Stimulation of the Brain Ended Opioid Addiction, Cigarette Craving (jpost.com) 37

Posted by FirehoseFavorites from the second-chance dept.
The Jerusalem Post reports that doctors at Haifa's Rambam Health Care Campus "have successfully treated their first Israeli opioid addiction patient using an experimental noninvasive brain technology, easing him through withdrawal in just 20 minutes..." [T]he team of specialists at the Haifa medical center intervened in the electrical activity of an area of the patient's brain called the nucleus accumbens, the core of the brain system responsible for feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, and reward. The treatment, based on technology from the Israeli company Insightec, is similar to the one used to treat symptoms of essential tremor and Parkinsonian tremor, under MRI control. In this case, the treatment was carried out with the help of a new technology that performs noninvasive neuromodulation, without heating or burning tissue, and allows stimulation in the same area of the brain to increase or suppress activity...

"Tests carried out a week later produced negative results for opioids and other substances," [said Dr. Lior Lev-Tov, director of the functional neurosurgery unit in Rambam's neurosurgery division and the one leading the new study at the medical center.] "The patient himself reported a craving score of zero out of 10 for using the drug, and even another side effect, a drastic drop in the desire for cigarettes, from three packs a day to just a few cigarettes, and with no urge to use alcohol. In other words, in a treatment that lasted about 20 minutes net, our patient was completely freed from an extreme dependence that had accompanied him every day for years. This is nothing less than a medical and therapeutic revolution."
Dr. Lev-Tov added that "This experience opens doors for us to treat a wide range of very serious illnesses such as PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, other addictions, severe depression, severe pain disorders, and I hope we will also be able to reach cognitive areas and treat attention deficit disorders, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

Comment Re:Everything we know about physics (Score 1) 102

If the rest of our existence as a race, for the next however many years until we go extinct, is entirely based on what we know currently about physics, and there is nothing left to learn, no short cuts, no loop holes, no new approaches, then.... fucking hell, the future is going to be boring.

I refuse to believe that our future abilities have been set in stone by scientists who barely knew atoms existed when they came up with their rules about how the universe operates - I fully expect future generations to get around those rules, otherwise we had better get used to living in the 2020s for pretty much the rest of humanities existence.

I remain eternally hopefully that there are different ways of doing things that Einstein et al could never conceive.
Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Posted by EditorDavid from the space-is-hard dept.
Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]
Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment They lost me on this shit ages ago (Score 4, Interesting) 87

I watched The Mandalorian season 1 and enjoyed it.

I watched The Mandalorian season 2 and ... yeah, it was good but I was mildly disappointed in the whole "you should know these characters from other Star Wars media, otherwise they are mildly uninteresting side characters that everyone else is raving about for some reason" thing.

Then .... The Mandalorian season 3 - holy fuck. You had to actually watch an entirely different season of something else first in order to pick this one up, otherwise the ending to season 2 and the start of season 3 do not join up at all. Im out. Im not bouncing between different things just to maintain a hope in hell of understanding whats going on.

Comment Re:Teams harms civilisation..... (Score 4, Informative) 58

Oh seriously?

I use both Slack and Teams day to day (we use Slack internally, client uses Teams, so we are on both as a result).

Slack we never have any issues with, and can find information from previous conversations easily.

Teams? Fuck teams. Fuck it and then fuck it some more. Its slow, clunky, constantly has issues, very hard to find information unless you still have the chat open somewhere, and chats are spread all over the place (chats, teams, channels...). Teams also requires you to have access to the workspaces OneDrive and SharePoint as well if you want to share files, so if you dont have access to those things then ... you are limited to text only.

Its video call system is sorely limited, and even doing things like zooming in to the presenters shared screen is clunky and shit.

Teams is the worst collaboration system I have ever used, so dont try making out that its better than Slack or Zoom. It is by far the worst of the three.

Comment Re: Pare down the bloat (Score 1) 91

A stock kernel on an MRI machine?

No, I don't want that level of DIY on any equipment that is critical to anything.

Almost nobody runs stock kernels. Stock kernels are used by distributions to build their own kernels.

That MRI machine is running on a 1.2 kernel. Maybe 2.0. It's separated from the hospital network by a firewall.

If the MRI machine is getting attacked then a LOT has gone wrong already.

Comment Re:Ban Phones at Lunch and Between Classes (Score 1) 95

I dont see an issue with that, as UK schools also ban a lot of other things during "free time" (its not actually time without restriction), for example leaving the school grounds for most of the school body (when you get into sixth form, you gain more freedoms as you are deemed to be there voluntarily).

Comment Costco has no excuses (Score 1, Interesting) 169

by alispguru (#66103752) Attached to: Trump Administration Begins Refunding $166 Billion In Tariffs

They know exactly what I've bought from them and when, so computing the tariffs I've paid through them is a matter of database queries.

They know how to give the money back to me - they send me a credit based on my executive membership every year, and that would be an acceptable and minimally painful way to refund the tariff windfall. They could give Costco store credit cards to non-executive members.

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