No ho hum

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: AI can make you “boring” at work; A new approach to treating Alzheimer’s; and Metallica takes on The Sphere…🤘

Let’s get into it!

Biogen announced the results of a small clinical trial testing its experimental Alzheimer’s drug, which was found to slow cognitive decline.

Called diranersen, it could potentially be more effective than the two drugs currently on the market—lecanemab and donanemab—which target amyloid protein build-up and modestly slow cognitive decline.

Diranersen, however, is designed to target the lesser-known but equally dangerous tau protein that destroys axonal connections in the brain’s neurons.

Unlike other treatments, Biogen’s drug doesn’t attempt to directly remove the targeted protein from the brain. Instead, it’s designed to alter a tau-producing gene, causing it to produce less.

“If you lower tau production, you are lowering the amount of the abnormal tau that needs to be cleared by the microglia, by the clearance mechanism in the brain. And so you are enabling the normal clearance mechanism to have more capacity to clear the tau,” said Dr. Cath Mummery of University College London, who led the new study.

According to Biogen, the company is already in the early stages of planning a new and much larger study to prove the drug’s efficacy.

For decades, scientists were convinced that the planet was home to about 400 billion trees, based on statistics compiled from satellite data. However, satellites aren’t able to account for the density of a forest beneath its canopy, meaning previous estimates were just that—estimates.

Building on this data, an international team led by ecologist Thomas Crowther set out in 2015 to get it right by developing the most comprehensive global tree density map on the planet. They leveraged about 400,000 field measurements recorded by regional authorities on every continent except Antarctica.

The result? An updated count of 3.04 trillion trees, 40% of which lie in tropical regions of South America, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia. In fact, the Amazon Rainforest alone contains hundreds of billions of trees.

In terms of tree density, the most dense tree populations lie in Canada’s Boreal Forest, and other areas with similar climates, such as Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia.

Shockingly, despite estimates being off by trillions in the first place, what’s even more wild is the fact that Earth used to have about twice as many. 46% of all trees in the world have been destroyed since the beginning of human civilization. Logging, urban expansion, agriculture, mining, etc.—these activities led to the deforestation of nearly half the trees on the planet.

The Vegas Sphere is the Mecca of audiovisual entertainment these days. Its state-of-the-art sound system and thousands of ultra high-def screens are among the world-’s most incredible tools for artists to create with…if they can afford to.

U2 was famously the first band to take up residency at the Sphere in 2023, and on the very first of what became 40 shows, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich was in the audience and was inspired to take on what will soon be the Metallica residency at the Vegas Sphere.

“I was there [on the] opening night and was so just f***ing awestruck, inspired, energized, all of it,” Ulrich recently told the Edge on the U2 guitarist’s SiriusXM show.

Metallica will take that frontier by storm when it begins the Life Burns Faster residency on Oct. 1, still quite a way off.

“It’s gonna be challenging,” he said. “And obviously, like everybody else I’ve talked to about it, it’s overwhelming. But … that’s a place maybe we don’t end up in often enough, because we have a tendency to put ourselves in environments that we completely control and know.”

Gettin’ your kicks in ’86

We’re throwin’ it back to 1986, looking at the top of the charts and the top of the box office, with today’s trivia!