Journalist Carole Cadwalladr’s famous TED Talk,“Facebook’s role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy,” delivered in 2019, exposed how data harvesting and targeted Facebook ads, similar to those used in the US election, influenced the UK’s EU referendum, questioning the future of fair elections and criticizing Silicon Valley’s unchecked power over democracy, though parts were later edited due to legal issues in a libel case, notes this Guardian article and the Irish Legal News article.
Key aspects of the talk:
Focus: The talk linked the same data-driven tactics used by Cambridge Analytica in the US election to the Brexit campaign.
Core Message: Cadwalladr argued that Facebook had become a “crime scene” for subverting democracy, allowing micro-targeted misinformation to sway voters.
Impact: It generated significant discussion and controversy, leading to a libel case by Brexit backer Arron Banks against Cadwalladr, which she ultimately won in the High Court, though parts of the talk were edited for legal reasons.
Warning:She warned that traditional electoral laws were inadequate for the digital age, posing a threat to free and fair elections globally.
To watch or learn more:
You can find the talk on the TED website or YouTube, though it may have edits.
“We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start,” says investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. In a searing talk, she decries the rise of the “broligarchy” — the powerful tech executives who are using their global digital platforms to amass unprecedented geopolitical power, dismantling democracy and enabling authoritarian control across the world. Her rallying cry: resist data harvesting and mass surveillance, and support others in a groundswell of digital disobedience. “You have more power than you think,” she says.
(Recorded at TED2025 on April 8, 2025) If you love watching TED Talks like this one, become a TED Member to support our mission of spreading ideas: https://ted.com/membership
A traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have lifelong and progressive effects, regardless of the age at which it is sustained. The effects of an injury in one’s 30s can persist and influence health outcomes in one’s 60s, with research indicating that TBI may accelerate the aging process and increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases later in life.
Long-Term and Age-Related Effects
Accelerated Aging: A history of TBI, even at a younger age, is associated with biological signs of faster aging, which can increase the risk of chronic diseases and disability in later decades.
Neurodegenerative Disease Risk: A TBI increases the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia, potentially with an earlier onset. A single moderate TBI can increase dementia risk by 24%.
Worse Outcomes with Older Age: Older adults with TBI, even mild cases, are more likely to have lasting symptoms and higher mortality rates compared to younger individuals with similar injuries. The aging brain has a decreased capacity for recovery or compensation after an injury.
Progressive Degeneration: Some studies suggest that the brain may not fully recover structurally, but rather experience a long, insidious degeneration process over decades, which can lead to late-emerging symptoms.
Chronic Condition Management: TBI is increasingly recognized as a chronic condition that requires lifelong management and monitoring for potential secondary health consequences.
Potential Persistent Symptoms
Symptoms from an injury in your 30s can linger or manifest years later in your 60s, affecting various aspects of life. These may include:
Category
Potential Effects
Cognitive
Memory problems (short- and long-term), difficulty concentrating or thinking clearly, slowed processing speed, problem-solving deficits, and executive dysfunction.
Personality changes, mood swings, irritability, depression, anxiety, lack of awareness of abilities, and difficulty managing emotions or social behaviors.
Proactive measures, including appropriate medical care, a healthy lifestyle (exercise, diet, sufficient sleep), and stress management, are crucial for potentially mitigating these long-term effects. It is important to inform healthcare providers about any history of TBI.
The NU-9 molecule may one day delay or even prevent the destruction of neurons that begins decades before the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease appear
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You think you’re fine. Your family and friends think you’re fine. But, just maybe, you’re not. Maybe you already have Alzheimer’s disease, but you just don’t know it yet, because it can begin destroying your brain decades before anyone even suspects.
According to Alzheimer’s Disease International, about 55 million people around the world were living with dementia in 2020, with 10 million new cases each year, meaning a new one arising about every three seconds. The disease’s economic impact is massive – about $US818 billion in 2015, and about $1.3 trillion today.
But the personal cost is beyond any economic price.
Seeing one’s spouse of decades, or one’s siblings or parents of a lifetime lose contact with all their yesterdays and even their todays, slowly being stripped of reason, self-control, personality, and even the ability to take care of basic physical needs, is a massive burden that disproportionately falls on the shoulders of women as caregivers, and which yields the “reward” ofdepression and anxiety. In other words, Alzheimer’s profoundly wounds not just the diagnosed individuals, but their families.
That’s why a new study from Northwestern University offers so much hope, because if researchers there are correct, their new small-molecule NU-9 drug may be able to stop Alzheimer’s disease long before it begins ruining lives.
“Alzheimer’s disease begins decades before its symptoms appear,” says Daniel Kranz, lead author of a paper that was recently published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. Long before diagnosis or even suspicion of the disease’s manifestation, Kranz says toxic amyloid beta oligomers have begun “accumulating inside neurons and glial cells becoming reactive long before memory loss is apparent.”
That long period in which Alzheimer’s disease is performing silent neurological sabotage in which “the underlying pathology is already advanced,” means that clinical trials likely fail because for most patients “they start far too late,” says Kranz, a recent PhD graduate in Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “In our study,” he says, “we administered NU-9 before symptom onset, modeling this early, pre-symptomatic window.”
Research into NU-9 isn’t new.
About 15 years ago, key co-author Richard Silverman (who is also the Patrick G. Ryan/Aon Professor in Weinberg’s Department of Chemistry) invented the drug after having already invented pregabalin (Lyrica) to treat fibromyalgia, nerve pain, and epilepsy. With Kranz and corresponding author William Klein (an Alzheimer’s disease expert and a professor of neurobiology at Weinberg), Silverman and colleagues worked for years to find or create a small molecule to prevent the aggregation of neurodegenerative proteins.
By 2021, the team proved the efficacy of NU-9 (which Silverman’s company Akava Therapeutics now manufactures as AKV9) using animal models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). By removing the destructive SOD1 and TDP-43 proteins, the drug revitalized upper motor neurons, and in 2024 NU-9 received clinical trial approval to treat ALS from the US Food and Drug Administration.
Then, early in 2025, Silverman’s team proved that when applied to the hippocampus (a brain region that enables memory and thus learning), NU-9 could remove toxic amyloid beta oligomers in lab-grown brain cells.
“Cells have a mechanism to get rid of these proteins,” says Klein, cofounder of Acumen Pharmaceuticals, which is clinically testing its therapeutic monoclonal antibody against a highly toxic sub-species of amyloid beta oligomers that may cause neuronal dysfunction, inflammation, and activation of immune cells.While the cell mechanism that can fight these proteins “gets damaged in degenerative diseases like ALS and Alzheimer’s,” says Klein, “NU-9 is rescuing the pathway that saves the cell.”
Preventing dementia would ultimately liberate not only trillions of dollars from providing medical treatment and home care, but offer the opportunity to redirect trillions of person-hours of suffering, loneliness, anxiety, and depression into maintaining and improving quality of life for individuals, families, and communities.
HARDWARE Robots prepare for their ‘ChatGPT moment’
Jensen Huang has heart eyes for robots.
Physical AI was an Nvidia headliner at CES, with the CEO claiming in his Monday keynote that the industry is in a “ChatGPT moment for physical AI.” Huang reiterated his bullishness for AI’s real-world applications in a press briefing on Tuesday, noting that the speed of development could lead to robots with human-level capabilities as soon as “next year.” Robotics in particular face some significant challenges, Huang said, including locomotion, grasping and fine motor skills.However, a lot of developers have turned their attention to overcoming those issues, he said.
Meanwhile, “cognition,” or the models’ capabilities themselves, are improving rapidly. “I know how fast the technology is moving,” said Huang. “I think that the next several years [are] going to be really exciting.” And of course, Nvidia’s CES news was packed with physical AI-related announcements, including: The new Alpamayo autonomous vehicle reasoning model, several Cosmos reasoning world models, and a new Vision-Language-Action model from its GR00T humanoid robotics model family.
And physical AI was all over CES, from industrial manufacturing and healthcare to delivery robots and children’s toys. AI firms are eager to take their models from the digital domain to the real world. But actual adoption is going to depend largely on how tolerant users are to mistakes, Anuj Bahal, Global Lead Account Partner at KPMG, told The Deep View. The impacts of a chatbot hallucinating are constrained to screens, but physical AI can make physical mistakes. And though it’s easier for us to accept when a human drops a plate or gets into a fender bender, we have less tolerance for when a robot messes up in the same way, said Bahal. “[But] we all know the technology is not going to be perfect,” he added. People also must become comfortable with robots doing some things better than them. Huang, however, refuted the idea that robots would replace human workers: “Robots will create jobs … the robotics revolution is going to… replace the job loss, the labor loss, it’s going to therefore drive up the economy.”For most consumers, AI presents a looming, existential threat, with the “AI is going to take my job” or “the robots are going to take over” rhetoric permeating people’s psyches. But today, this threat is a phantom, since AI exists largely as chatbots and software. Physical AI, whether self-driving cars or delivery bots or humanoid robotics, gives that fear a body. This makes the threat of change more visceral, forcing people to confront the future. That could be an uncomfortable experience for many people.
The Rundown: Utah just became the first state to let an AI system legally approve prescription refills on its own, partnering with health-tech startup Doctronic to give patients with chronic conditions a faster path to routine medication renewals.
The details:
The system covers 191 drugs, including blood pressure meds, birth control, and SSRIs — with pain management, ADHD treatments, and injectables off-limits.When tested against 500 urgent care cases, the AI’s decisions aligned with doctors’ 99% of the time, with edge cases rerouted to human doctors.Doctronic will charge $4 / refill, and is fielding interest from Texas, Arizona, and Missouri — with leadership predicting a dozen states could follow in 2026.The timing aligns with a broader federal push, with the FDA also announcing relaxed rules for low-risk health wearables at CES 2026.
Why it matters: As we’ve seen with ChatGPT’s massive usage numbers for healthcare, a major transition is already underway in medicine — and giving AI the ability to handle prescriptions is the first step towards crossing an impactful line from providing information to actually making medical decisions and streamlining care.
He isn’t building an “empire.” He’s gathering a new Allied Powers against an Axis of China, Russia, Iran, and possibly – if they don’t CHANGE THEIR WAYS – a nuclear-armed Islamist caliphate called Europe.
For most consumers, AI presents a looming, existential threat, with the “AI is going to take my job” or “the robots are going to take over” rhetoric permeating people’s psyches. But today, this threat is a phantom, since AI exists largely as chatbots and software. Physical AI, whether self-driving cars or delivery bots or humanoid robotics, gives that fear a body. This makes the threat of change more visceral, forcing people to confront the future. That could be an uncomfortable experience for many people. 
Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown
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