Astrocytes: neuroscience and AI implications

Quanta published yesterday a very good summary of the state of our understanding how the brain signaling and modulation works, mentioning 1989 foundational astrocyte research, a pivotal research paper published in 2016 about astrocytes, a few revelatory 2025 astrocyte papers and the summary is damning:

“Neuroscience has only cared about neurons for a century now, and we don’t yet have a cure for a single brain disorder,” Papouin said. The way to change that, he said, is to accept the existence and influence of non-neuronal cells such as astrocytes, and to include them in models and experiments.

Most neuroscientists haven’t received that memo, Freeman said. “Ninety-nine percent of people who are out there doing experiments on circuits don’t even think about what the astrocyte might be doing. And it could have really profound effects on how that circuit functions.”

More interestingly is how our current AI revolution is including astrocytes into its models (see ANGNs): none of the publicly available models make use of these more accurate models.

We Have Never Been Woke

About one month ago, CBC Ideas covered one anti-woke crusader’s opinion. The interviewee, Musa al-Ghabri wrote a book on the topic: We Have Never Been Woke. While he might be partially correct in his diagnosis, his understanding of economics is quite unidimensional and myopic at best and malicious and grossly and hypocritically self-serving at worst:

As my sociology colleague Matthew Desmond showed in his book, Poverty, by America, of every dollar that's earmarked for the poor, only 25 cents of it actually gets to the poor. Symbolic capitalists eat 75 cents out of every dollar."

This amazon 1-star review summarizes the book:

Do not be fooled (as I was). While this book takes the form of a scholarly work, it is actually a long form opinion piece with all the intellectual rigor you would expect from... let's say, David Brooks. Its 315 pages of text are divorced from its 47 pages of end notes that are themselves separated from 55 pages of references to hide the fact that most of the sources are opinion pieces and soft news articles from various online publications. I finally reached my tipping point at Chapter 3, end note 150(!) where I was dubious enough about the concept of "woke fishing" that I pushed through the citation "Serena Smith 2020; Petrarca 2021" to discover that these were just articles from the The Verge and The Cut. That sparked a deeper look at the references and well... let's just say that there's a lot of hot garbage hidden behind the blasé format of scholarly citations. If this book had been written in good faith, I would have plenty to say about the shifting definitions, contradictory complaints, lack of understanding of economics, etc. (I will, however, still heap special shame on the argument that the increased self-reporting of bisexuality among women can be attributed to them not being able to find a man.) But, whatever other ends are being served by this book, it's not an honest, objective reporting of social trends. It's a pity—I was finding some of the stuff in the first 2 chapters to be interesting, but now that's all going in the trash along with this book. Will not be fooled (by Al-Gharbi, at least) again.

PS: After reading his own mini-autobiography, I found it quite hypocritical for him to say “do as I say, not as I do” about directly helping others while also making coin as a talking head full of performative actions and claiming some sort of new-found faith. If he is not an excellent example of a vacuous two-faced prosperity gospel exponent (of the Islamic variety for a change), I am stupider than I thought.

Israel to reintroduce death penalty for Palestinians only

This takes the cake and is frankly callous and deeply racist. Excerpts from the BBC article:

Israel has only twice used the death penalty against a convicted prisoner. The last time was more than sixty years ago, to hang the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

But in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel's deadliest ever day, there is a political push to pass a highly controversial new capital punishment law, targeting Palestinians convicted by Israeli courts of fatal terrorist attacks.

"It's another brick in the wall of our defence," the far-right chair of the parliamentary national security committee, Zvika Fogel tells me. "To bring in the death penalty is the most moral, the most Jewish and the most decent thing."