Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Technology

Health

THANKS, DARPA!:

COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could unlock the next revolution in cancer treatment – new research (Adam Grippin & Christiano Marconi, 10/22/25, The Conversation)

[W]e looked at clinical outcomes for more than 1,000 late-stage melanoma and lung cancer patients treated with a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. This treatment is a common approach doctors use to train the immune system to kill cancer. It does this by blocking a protein that tumor cells make to turn off immune cells, enabling the immune system to continue killing cancer.

Remarkably, patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were more than twice as likely to be alive after three years compared with those who didn’t receive either vaccine. Surprisingly, patients with tumors that don’t typically respond well to immunotherapy also saw very strong benefits, with nearly fivefold improvement in three-year overall survival. This link between improved survival and receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine remained strong even after we controlled for factors like disease severity and co-occurring conditions.

To understand the underlying mechanism, we turned to animal models. We found that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines act like an alarm, triggering the body’s immune system to recognize and kill tumor cells and overcome the cancer’s ability to turn off immune cells. When combined, vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors coordinate to unleash the full power of the immune system to kill cancer cells.

Health

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Lifetime of Friendships Slows Aging (Tyler Santora October 10, 2025, Nautilus)

For the new study, researchers compared social experiences across the lifespan of more than 2,100 middle-aged adults in the United States to the biological clock embedded in their DNA. The hands of these biological clocks consist of epigenetic changes to DNA—specifically, patterns in the addition of a chemical called a methyl group to certain genes. Such methylation doesn’t cause mutation; rather, the process turns the gene on or off in different cells of the body at different times. Over time, methylation patterns on certain genes change and can be used as markers of biological aging, a measure of how rapidly cells wear down that can be faster or slower than aging by the calendar. An older biological age is a strong predictor of chronic disease and early death.

The researchers measured social connection in a variety of settings over time to show that people with more social activity and sincere, long-lasting relationships aged more slowly. “We found that the depth and consistency of social connection, built across decades and different areas of life, matters profoundly,” says Anthony Ong, a psychologist at Cornell University. “Strong and sustained social networks appear to actually set back a person’s biological clock.”

Energy

LEARN, BABY, LEARN:

Renewables Are a Global Economic Engine, Not a Culture War Threat: Energy companies are learning this lesson faster than Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. (Mitch Andersonon, Sep 29, 2025, DeSmog)


While leaders like Premier Smith and President Trump may try to engage in a futile culture war in favour of fossil fuels, a more compelling force is simple economics. According to Ember, 91 percent of wind and solar installations deployed last year were cheaper than equivalent fossil fuel options. Even in the U.S. – currently riven by divisive politics – over 80 percent of new electrical capacity added in 2025 was solar with three quarters of those installations built in states that voted for Trump.

China also sees this transition as a way to reduce strategic vulnerabilities to foreign oil imports, a sentiment that could soon become contagious around the world. Four fifths of the global population lives in countries that import fossil fuels. Replacing oil, coal and LNG imports with locally produced clean energy is not only cheaper but avoids risky supply chains that are expensive and challenging to defend.

For years oil enthusiasts have predicted that the Global South would provide the engine of future demand. China is upending that agenda by providing cheap reliable renewable technologies to countries like Mexico, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Almost two thirds of developing countries now use a greater proportion of renewables than the U.S. Imports of Chinese solar panels in Africa soared by 60 percent in the last year.

Will political rhetoric overpower economics around a new bitumen pipeline from Alberta? B.C. Premier David Eby is betting not, stating he is not categorically opposed to a privately funded project through his province – apparently confident that it will not happen given the pace of the global energy transition.

“There’s no money for it,” Eby told the CBC, clarifying that his opposition is against public funds being shoveled at a money-losing oil pipeline when many renewable projects are good to go. “We have major projects with private proponents, cash on the table, ready to go to hire people and build — let’s focus on those.”

The authors of the Ember report concur with Eby’s dim assessment of oil pipeline economics, warning, “For petrostates and others committed to expanding fossil fuel extraction, China’s clean energy progress raises questions about the long-term viability of fossil fuel expansion-led development plans.”

Economics trumps ideology.

Health

HOW MUCH TO STOP WHINGEING?:

Pain gets a price tag: New method outshines standard pain assessments (Paul McClure, September 29, 2025, New Atlas)

Alongside these pain assessments using traditional methods, the researchers tested their “monetary equivalence” (ME) method. Participants were repeatedly asked whether they would accept a certain amount of money to experience the same painful stimulus again, or choose a smaller amount to avoid it. Example: “Would you rather get 15 Swiss francs and feel the pain again, or 10 Swiss francs and no pain?” The point where a participant switched from “no pain” to “pain” revealed how much the pain was “worth” to them in monetary terms. Two versions of the ME method were tested: ME1, where questions were listed in increasing order of money (enforcing consistency); and ME2, where the same questions were asked randomly (allowing for some inconsistency).

Across all three experiments, the monetary methods (ME1 and ME2) outperformed the traditional scales at distinguishing between high- and low-pain conditions. Effect sizes – that is, how strongly the measure distinguished between groups – were dramatically larger for ME1 and ME2 (“very large”) compared to standard pain scales (“small to medium”). Even in the analgesic study, where traditional scales often failed or even showed misleading results (for example, participants reporting more pain after receiving an analgesic), the monetary measures correctly and significantly detected differences. This likely happened because participants expected the anesthetic to eliminate the pain completely, and when it didn’t, they rated their pain higher. It’s a psychological effect the monetary method avoids.

Health

THE LEAST EFFICIENT SOCIALISTS:

U.S. Health Care: The Free-market Myth (Michael F. Cannon, Fall 2025, National Affairs)

Many critiques of U.S. health care begin with the assumption that, as The Economist put it, the United States is “one of the only developed countries where health care is mostly left to the free market.” Dr. David Blumenthal, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, told the New York Times in 2013 that in the United States, “we like to consider health care a free market.” That assumption gets the situation backward: In truth, among wealthy nations, the United States may have one of the least-free health-care markets.

In a free market, government would control 0% of health spending. Yet the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that in the United States, government controls 84% of health spending. In fact, government controls a larger share of health spending in the United States than in 27 out of 38 OECD-member nations, including the United Kingdom (83%) and Canada (73%), each of which has an explicitly socialized health-care system. When it comes to government control of health spending, the United States is closer to communist Cuba (89%) than the average OECD nation (75%).

Either a nationalized scheme or universal HSAs would yield a less expensive system with better outcomes.

Robotics/AI

ONE APOCALYPSE AFTER ANOTHER:

dive bar ai slop! decline of the novel! david copperfield! (Tara Isabella Burton, Aug 29, 2025, The Lost Word)

Here’s what I’ve been wrestling with. Whenever I want to smash a subway screen displaying advertisements for full-body deodorant, I remember that the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of any technology that allows for the faster dissemination of information from one person’s brain to another, must also have felt apocalyptic. How can I defend myself as a novelist, as any kind of writer – how can I understand the purpose of what I love – while simultaneously decrying the creative potential of a different epoch-shift. How can I devote my life to one form of imaginative technology while worrying that another will erode our fundamental humanness?

If humanness even can be eroded. Even the most apocalyptic concerns about technology seem to me predicated that there are elements of our fundamental humanness that technology can take away from us, that there is a point beyond which the beings that we become no longer count as meaningfully human in the same way, and thus that we need a new theological anthropology to account for it. At which technological horizon does history end and the eschaton begin?

This means something for me as a Christian, too. My entire theological worldview, after all, is predicated on this idea that the word made flesh is a foundationally true way of understanding God’s existence in the world. The incarnate Christ is also a paradigm of the relationship between human language – and with it, human technological expansion of our imaginations – and the reality it either represents, or alters. We are, after all, in the imago dei, and that seems to mean something about our creative capacities. To say anything about God, from a Christian perspective, is also to say something about human language and, yes, technology. And if we grant that we are on the cusp of, if we have not already surpassed, an era-defining shift (be it the Internet, more broadly; smartphones more specifically; generative AI more specifically), we do, I think, need to ask ourselves what all this means vis a vis the wider cosmic story.

Technology

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

AI has passed the aesthetic Turing Test − and it’s changing our relationship with art (Tamilla Triantoro, 20, 2025, The Conversation)

In 1950, British scientist Alan Turing wondered how and when the outputs of a computer would be indistinguishable from those of humans. Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
For decades, this remained a theoretical benchmark. But with the recent explosion of powerful chatbots, the original Turing Test for conversation has arguably been passed. This breakthrough raises a new question: If AI can master conversation, can it master art?

The evidence suggests it has already passed what might be called an “aesthetic Turing Test.”

AI can generate music, images and movies so convincingly that people struggle to distinguish them from human creations.

In music, platforms like Suno and Udio can produce original songs, complete with vocals and lyrics, in any imaginable genre in seconds. Some are so good they’ve gone viral. Meanwhile, photo-realistic images are equally deceptive. In 2023, millions believed that the fabricated photo of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket was real, a stunning example of AI’s power to create convincing fiction.

Robotics/AI

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

AI Is Radically Democratizing Legal Services (Jack Nicastro and Samuel Crombie, 8/05/25, Fusion)


Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to leave no corner of American society unaltered, and the legal system is no exception. Dr. Bateman believes AI will birth an inequitable and disorderly justice system. On the contrary, we believe AI is positioned to be an ultimate equalizer of justice.

AI is cheap and fast intelligence; intelligence facilitates truth-seeking, and it is truth-seeking that is the primary function of our courts. Bateman fears that AI adoption will be an ultimatum for the rule of law, or an epistemic weapon of mass destruction. We believe it is functionally identical to previous technologies adopted by courts to improve the truth-seeking process.

AI is a broad term for a broad set of technologies. U.S. courts are similarly decentralized in structure and diverse in function. Through his piece, Bateman conflates distinct parts of the justice system (impact statements, evidence rules, representation) and distinct AI technologies (chatbots, deepfakes, audio cloning) with one another. In our response, we clarify the different forms of courtroom AI and consider the unique operating procedures and rules of different parts of the legal system.

In explaining how AI could be used and in what contexts, we challenge his assertions that it will weaken the foundations of our justice system. Bateman envisages a world where legal criterion and judicial precedent evaporates, while agents of the court cease to operate rationally. Through the examples he offers, Bateman fundamentally misinterprets the court’s present frustrations, e.g., a victim impact statement made with prejudice, an unlicensed attorney practicing law, the introduction of falsified evidence, &c., as essential to AI. They are not. 

We confront his conclusion that AI is outpacing prudence and reach the conclusion that it is luddism that is imprudent. AI is nothing more than a tool. An auditable, increasingly interpretable, unprecedentedly powerful tool for ascertaining and evaluating the truth. Judges, juries, public defenders, court clerks, self-representing defendants, expert witnesses, and mediators all stand to benefit from AI.

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