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"As awareness grows around the dangers of head trauma in sports, a small number of professional fighters and football players are turning to a psychedelic called ibogaine for treatment," reports the Los Angeles Times. They note that the drug's proponents "tout its ability to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. " Ibogaine, which is derived from a West African shrub, is a Schedule 1 drug in America with no legal medical uses, and experts urge caution because of the need for further studies. But the results, several athletes say, are "game-changing".... Although athletes are just discovering ibogaine, the drug is well known within the veteran community, which experiences high rates of brain injury and PTSD. In Stanford's study on the effects of ibogaine on special forces veterans, participants saw average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. They also exhibited improvements in concentration, information processing and memory. "No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury," Dr. Nolan Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement on the results. "The results are dramatic, and we intend to study this compound further...." States can work faster than the federal government by carving out exemptions for supervised ibogaine therapy programs, similar to what Oregon has done with psilocybin therapy. Many states have also opted to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use... In June, Texas approved a historic $50-million investment in state funding to support drug development trials for ibogaine, inspired by the results seen by veterans. Arizona legislators approved $5 million in state funding for a clinical study on ibogaine in March, and California legislators are pushing to fast-track the study of ibogaine and other psychedelics.

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The editors of the culture magazine n + 1 decry the "well-funded upheaval" caused by a large and powerful coalition of pro-AI forces. ("According to the logic of market share as social transformation, if you move fast and break enough things, nothing can contain you...") "An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny." The AI bubbleâS — âSand it is a bubble, as even OpenAI overlord Sam Altman has admittedâS — âSwill burst. The technology's dizzying pace of improvement, already slowing with the release of GPT-5, will stall... [P]rofessional readers and writers: We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere. Major terrains remain AI-proofable. For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tellâS — âSto read closely enough to tellâS — âSthe work of people from the work of bots... Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI's further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don't publish AI bullshit. Don't even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post's Ember, an "AI writing coach" designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that's cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that triesâS — âSas Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?"âS — âS"through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...." Punishing already overdisciplined and oversurveilled students for their AI use will help no one, but it's a long way from accepting that reality to Ohio State's new plan to mandate something called "AI fluency" for all graduates by 2029 (including workshops sponsored, naturally, by Google). Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring. Some are new, like developing curricula to teach the limits and flaws of generative AI while nurturing human intelligence... Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI. (The broad embrace of the term slop is a heartening sign of a nascent constituency for machine denial.) These systems haven't worked well for very long, and consensus about their use remains far from settled. That's why so much writing about AI writing sounds the way it doesâS — âSnervous, uneven, ambivalent about the new regime's utilityâS — âSand it means there's still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool... As we train our sights on what we oppose, let's recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts... A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a "stereotype"âS — âSa simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fakeâS — âSof real literature. It should be smashed, and can. The 3,800-word article also argues that "perhaps AI's ascent in knowledge-industry workplaces will give rise to new demands and new reasons to organize..."

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tThe internet is full of people claiming to uncover conspiracies in politics and business..." reports the Wall Street Journal. "Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists," they write, saygin resentment of scientific authority figures "is the major attraction of what might be called 'conspiracy physics'." In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory... Most fringe theories are too arcane for listeners to understand, but anyone can grasp the idea that academic physics is just one more corrupt and self-serving establishment... In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, "Anyone perceived as the 'mainstream establishment' faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as 'renegade' wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding... As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists' early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010. But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like "They Just Keep Lying" are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music... Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn't right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe. The bitter attacks on leading physicists get a succinct summary in the article from Chris Williamson, a "Love Island" contestant turned podcast host. "This is like 'The Kardashians' for physicists — I love it."

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"Swiss voters have backed plans for electronic identity cards by a wafer-thin margin," reports the Guardian, "in the second nationwide vote on the issue." In a referendum on Sunday, 50.4% of voters supported an electronic ID card, while 49.6% were against, confounding pollsters who had forecast stronger support for the "yes" vote. Turnout was 49.55%, higher than expected... [V]oters rejected an earlier version of the e-ID in 2021, largely over objections to the role of private companies in the system. In response to these concerns, the Swiss state will now provide the e-ID, which will be optional and free of charge... To ensure security the e-ID is linked to a single smartphone, users will have to get a new e-ID if they change their device... An ID card containing biometric data — fingerprints — will be available from the end of next year. Critics of the e-ID scheme raised data protection concerns and said it opened the door to mass surveillance. They also fear the voluntary scheme will become mandatory and disadvantage people without smartphones. The referendum was called after a coalition of rightwing and data-privacy parties collected more than 50,000 signatures against e-ID cards, triggering the vote. "To further ease privacy concerns, a particular authority seeking information on a person — such as proof of age or nationality, for example — will only be able to check for those specific details," notes the BBC: Supporters of the Swiss system say it will make life much easier for everyone, allowing a range of bureaucratic procedures — from getting a telephone contract to proving you are old enough to buy a bottle of wine — to happen quickly online. Opponents of digital ID cards, who gathered enough signatures to force another referendum on the issue, argue that the measure could still undermine individual privacy. They also fear that, despite the new restrictions on how data is collected and stored, it could still be used to track people and for marketing purposes. The BBC adds that the UK government also announced plans earlier this week to introduce its own digital ID, "which would be mandatory for employment. The proposed British digital ID would have fewer intended uses than the Swiss version, but has still raised concerns about privacy and data security." The Guardian reports: The referendum came soon after the UK government announced plans for a digital ID card, which would sit in the digital wallets of smartphones, using state-of-the-art encryption. More than 1.6 million people have signed a petition opposing e-ID cards, which would be mandatory for people working in the UK by 2029. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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