Silent artery plaques may appear in one in 13 adults before age 30 showing a systemic, progressive disease process

Concerning, if not shocking!

"... “These data from multiple locations support the concept of silent atherosclerosis as a systemic, progressive disease process,” ..."

"Atherosclerosis, the process underlying most cardiovascular diseases, begins long before the first symptoms appear.

An international study shows that the disease can already be detected in apparently healthy young adults and is much more common than previously thought. ...

that 57.1% of the more than 16,000 participants included in the study had atherosclerotic plaques, despite having no symptoms or previous diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. ...

The data come from the first phase of REACT, one of the largest studies conducted to date to map the presence of silent atherosclerosis throughout adult life. ...

In the first phase, 16,808 people ages 18–70 were recruited in Denmark and Spain. None of the participants had a known history of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Each participant underwent advanced imaging to detect atherosclerotic plaques in the carotid, femoral and coronary arteries. Cardiovascular risk factors, blood biomarkers, samples for omics studies and retinal images were also analyzed, generating one of the most comprehensive databases on atherosclerosis developed to date.

The results show that the disease is already present in very young adults. Approximately 1 in 13 people ages 18–29 had atherosclerosis in at least one artery. This proportion increased progressively with age, reaching 9 in 10 people ages 60–70. ...

The study also reveals important differences between women and men.

In men, prevalence began to increase at younger ages, with an atherosclerotic profile five–10 years ahead of that observed in women.

In women, the sharpest increase was observed between the ages of 40 and 60, a period that broadly coincides with the menopausal transition. ...

Another of the study's most relevant findings is that the conventional methods currently used to estimate cardiovascular risk, including risk scores such as SCORE2, identify only a small proportion of people who already have silent atherosclerosis. ..."

Silent artery plaques may appear in one in 13 adults before age 30

Early imaging of atherosclerosis identifies silent disease not captured by conventional risk assessment

REACT: Use of Imaging to Detect Silent Atherosclerosis in Early Adulthood

Prevalence of Silent Atherosclerosis across Adult Life (no public access)

How European countries implement gender equality in their militaries, e.g. Denmark

Recommendable!

Yes, gender equality means e.g. conscription for women!

However, soon robots will do the fighting! Lucky women!

(392) Why Europe Is Preparing for a New Era of War | WSJ - YouTube

Texas Firm Prepares Greenland Oil Drilling Without Official Approval

Good news! Greenland is in the news again!

(1361) Texas Firm Prepares Greenland Oil Drilling Without Official Approval | WION News - YouTube

Denmark begins extended military conscription including women to protect Greenland

Good news! The government of Denmark does not want to sell Greenland to President Trump! 😊

At least one Western country that takes gender equality seriously when it comes to conscription!

"... Denmark said in 2024 it would extend conscription to include women for the first time and increase standard service time to 11 months from four, while the number of conscripts is set to increase to 7,500 annually by 2033 from 5,000. ...

The new intake arrives as Denmark prepares to deploy conscripts to Greenland for the first time later this month, with a company of more than 100 soldiers set to serve for one month, taking over operational tasks from professional troops. ..."

Denmark begins extended military conscription in response to Russia, Trump "Around 1,600 Danish military recruits on Monday began the country’s new extended conscription, embarking on an 11-month service period as Denmark accelerates its defense build-up driven by Arctic security pressures and the war in Ukraine."

Microsoft in the race to build the ultimate supercomputer, a quantum computer

Recommendable! Interesting that the quantum computer lab of Microsoft is located in Denmark of all places!

(819) Microsoft in the race to build the ultimate supercomputer | BBC News | BBC News - YouTube

President Trump in Turkey: Greenland 'should be controlled' by U.S.

President Trump can be very persistent! Is Greenland an obsession of him? Or what is the strategic value of Greenland to the US? I am afraid the value is high.

I bet President Trump and Denmark can work out something regarding Greenland! The Danes are reasonable people! Perhaps, an outright purchase of the island is not possible!

I suppose since the Vikings discovered Greenland around 9th century, this island has been part of Denmark.

To all the global warming/climate change hoax purveyors: Why was Greenland called greenland by the Vikings? Hint: Medieval warming period, Greenland was much less ice covered.

Trump in Turkey: Greenland 'should be controlled' by U.S. | Just The News "Trump, in both his first and second terms, has attempted to secure a deal to purchase Greenland from Denmark, though both parties have balked at the prospect and NATO members have fumed over Trump's territorial aspirations."

Specialized medical transcription speech-to-text model beats frontier AI in real time and accuracy

Good news! Impressive! Errors in translation could be deadly!

When will all and any patient doctor encounters be quickly transcribed? 

"Copenhagen-based Corti launched Symphony for Speech-to-Text, a clinical-grade recognition model that achieved a 1.4 percent word error rate on English medical terminology—versus OpenAI’s 17.7 percent, ElevenLabs’ 18.1 percent, Whisper’s 17.4 percent, and Parakeet’s 18.9 percent. The gap widens further on structured clinical entities like medication dosages: Corti hit 98.3 percent recall while the strongest generalist model managed 44.3 percent. That difference matters more now than it used to.

As healthcare shifts toward autonomous AI agents making real-time clinical decisions, transcription errors compound—if a model mishears “hyperthyroidism” as “hypothyroidism,” every downstream system operates on corrupted data. Corti also outperformed legacy incumbent Dragon Medical One in dictation accuracy and now serves over 100 million patients annually across health systems including the UK’s National Health Service. ..."

From the abstract:

"After decades of use in dictation and, more recently, ambient documentation, speech is emerging as a primary modality for interacting with technology and AI in healthcare.

Yet medical speech recognition remains difficult: systems must capture specialized terminology, resolve contextual ambiguity, and render measurements, abbreviations, and clinical shorthand precisely.

Existing solutions are typically optimized either for general-purpose transcription or narrow dictation workflows, limiting their reliability in safety-critical settings and their usefulness for broader clinical workflows.

We introduce Symphony for Speech-to-Text, a medical-grade speech recognition system for real-time streaming and batch file-based clinical use. Symphony decomposes the transcription process into specialized components for recognition, formatting, and contextual correction to optimize medical term recall while producing clinically structured text in real time and adapting across use cases. Evaluations on public benchmark and medical speech datasets show that Symphony substantially outperforms state-of-the-art systems in clinical settings while matching or exceeding them in general-domain settings, suggesting robust generalization rather than overfitting.

We release a clinical benchmark dataset to support reliable validation and further progress in medical speech recognition. Symphony is available through a production-grade API for live dictation, conversational transcription, and batch audio file processing."

Data Points: Cursor Composer undercuts competition

Corti's new Symphony for Speech-to-Text model beats OpenAI at medical terminology accuracy, highlighting the value of specialized AI

Symphony for Speech-to-Text: Behind the research supporting real-time medical voice interfaces (original news release)

Symphony for Speech-to-Text: Supporting Real-Time Medical Voice Interfaces (preprint, open access)

Chart of the day

Welch ein Gefälle! 

Quelle

One night of sleep vital signs may Predict Illness several years ahead and over 100 health conditions

Amazing stuff!

"Difficulty sleeping often precedes heart disease, psychiatric disorders, and many other illnesses. Researchers used data gathered during sleep studies to detect such conditions.

What’s new: SleepFM is a system that classifies Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, prostate cancer, stroke, congestive heart failure, and many other conditions based on a person’s vital signs while asleep — as much as 6 years before they show symptoms. ...

Input/output: Recordings of one night of sleep in, disease classifications out

Architecture: Convolutional neural network encoder, transformer, LSTM

Performance: Can accurately classify over 130 conditions ...

How it works: SleepFM comprises a convolutional neural network (CNN), transformer, and LSTM. The authors trained the system in two stages:

(i) to encode patterns in sleep data and

(ii) to classify diseases.

The training data comprised roughly 585,000 hours of sleep-study recordings that included, in addition to each patient’s age and sex, signals of activity in the brain, heart, respiratory system (airflow, snoring, and blood oxygen level), and leg muscles. The data was mostly proprietary but included public datasets.

The authors trained the CNN and transformer together.  ...

The authors added the LSTM and separately trained it, given 9 hours of sleep data as well as the subject’s age and sex, to classify more than 1,000 diseases.

Results: The authors compared SleepFM’s performance on a proprietary test set to the same system without pretraining and a vanilla neural network that was trained on only demographic information.

Across 14 general categories of disease ..."

From the abstract:

"Sleep is a fundamental biological process with broad implications for physical and mental health, yet its complex relationship with disease remains poorly understood. Polysomnography (PSG)—the gold standard for sleep analysis—captures rich physiological signals but is underutilized due to challenges in standardization, generalizability and multimodal integration.

To address these challenges, we developed SleepFM, a multimodal sleep foundation model trained with a new contrastive learning approach that accommodates multiple PSG configurations.

Trained on a curated dataset of over 585,000 hours of PSG recordings from approximately 65,000 participants across several cohorts, SleepFM produces latent sleep representations that capture the physiological and temporal structure of sleep and enable accurate prediction of future disease risk.

From one night of sleep, SleepFM accurately predicts 130 conditions with a C-Index of at least 0.75 (Bonferroni-corrected P < 0.01), including all-cause mortality (C-Index, 0.84), dementia (0.85), myocardial infarction (0.81), heart failure (0.80), chronic kidney disease (0.79), stroke (0.78) and atrial fibrillation (0.78).

Moreover, the model demonstrates strong transfer learning performance on a dataset from the Sleep Heart Health Study—a dataset that was excluded from pretraining—and performs competitively with specialized sleep-staging models such as U-Sleep and YASA on common sleep analysis tasks, achieving mean F1 scores of 0.70–0.78 for sleep staging and accuracies of 0.69 and 0.87 for classifying sleep apnea severity and presence.

This work shows that foundation models can learn the language of sleep from multimodal sleep recordings, enabling scalable, label-efficient analysis and disease prediction."

The New Open-Weights Leader, Big AI’s Political Influence, Predicting Illness, Faster Reasoning

New AI model predicts disease risk while you sleep "Stanford Medicine scientists and their colleagues created the first artificial intelligence model that can predict more than 100 health conditions from one night’s sleep."

A multimodal sleep foundation model for disease prediction (open access)

Fig. 1: Overview of SleepFM framework.

New study maps where wheat, barley and rye grew before the first farmers found them

Recommendable!

"Using advanced machine learning and climate models, researchers have shown that the ancestors of crops like wheat, barley, and rye probably were much less widespread in the Middle East 12,000 years ago than previously believed. This challenges traditional assumptions about the geography of early plant domestication and agriculture. ..."

From the abstract:

"This paper presents the first continuous, spatially-explicit reconstructions of the palaeodistributions of 65 plant species found regularly in association with early agricultural archaeological sites in West Asia [Middle East], including the progenitors of the first crops. We used machine learning to train an ecological niche model of each species based on its present-day distribution in relation to climate and environmental variables. Predictions of the potential niches of these species at key stages of the Pleistocene–Holocene transition could then be derived from these models using downsampled data from palaeoclimate simulations. Our models performed well against independent contemporary test data, but their ability to predict the occurrence of specific species at archaeological sites was much more variable, probably reflecting a tendency of the method to underestimate the species’ fundamental niche. Nevertheless, the majority of species are predicted to have had more restricted geographic distributions under past climate conditions compared to today. Crop progenitors and several wild food species are modelled to have been concentrated in the Levant and, to a lesser extent, Cyprus and Western Anatolia, suggesting these regions may have served as glacial refugia. The average size of species’ niche shrunk by an average of c. 25% from the terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene, indicating that economically significant plants were adapted to cryo-arid conditions and did not, as often assumed, initially respond positively to the ‘ameliorated’ climate of the Holocene."

New study maps where wheat, barley and rye grew before the first farmers found them

New study maps where wheat, barley and rye grew before the first farmers found them (original news release)

Biogeography of Crop Progenitors and Wild Plant Resources in the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene of West Asia, 14.7–8.3 ka (open access)

Figure 1 Map of the study region (West Asia, grey box) with locations of Late Epipalaeolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages.

5 myths about Vikings that everyone believes

Recommendable!

Danish veterans of US wars say they feel betrayed by Greenland threats

Bad news!

"Denmark has been a stalwart ally to America. Forty-four Danish troops were killed in Afghanistan, the highest per capita death toll among coalition forces."

"... Denmark’s prime minster has said it would mean the end of NATO.

For Danish veterans, it feels profoundly personal.

A NATO member since 1949, Denmark has been a stalwart ally to America. Forty-four Danish soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, the highest per capita death toll among coalition forces. Eight more died in Iraq. ..."

Danish veterans of US wars say they feel betrayed by Greenland threats

Image of the day

 Source

300 t Traglast, 600 Jahre alt: Größte Kogge der Welt im Öresund entdeckt

Sehr eindrucksvoll!

"... Meeresarchäologen haben im Öresund das bislang größte Exemplar einer mittelalterlichen Kogge entdeckt. Das Schiff mit dem Namen „Svælget 2“ stammt aus dem Jahr 1410 und markiert einen Wendepunkt in der maritimen Logistik. Mit einer Ladekapazität von 300 t ermöglichte dieser Schiffstyp erstmals den effizienten Transport von Massengütern. Der Fund liefert zudem erstmals archäologische Beweise für charakteristische Konstruktionsmerkmale wie die Bug- und Heckkastelle."

300 t Traglast, 600 Jahre alt: Größte Kogge der Welt im Öresund entdeckt "Archäologen entdecken im Öresund die weltgrößte Kogge von 1410. Mit 300 t Traglast zeigt der Fund die Logistik-Revolution des Mittelalters."

Seit über 600 Jahren lag die Svælget 2 am Grund des Öresund, nun haben Taucher sie eher zufällig entdeckt.

US President Trump Prepares Century-Long Lease for Greenland

Good news! A lease is probably one of the more realistic options! 

A long-term lease for the whole island or only parts of it?

Trump’s Arctic Sweetener: US Prepares ‘Puerto Rico Option’ and Century-Long Lease for Greenland, Sources Say

Germany has announced it will send troops to Greenland. Really!

More hot air about Greenland! One simple solution would be a long-term lease agreement between the US and Denmark covering some part of Greenland.

Female US soldiers are already occupying Greenland

JD and Usha Vance Greenland Visit in March 2025

Credits: Die Amerikaner sind längst da

Caution: satire!

Source

Source

Back to textbooks: Denmark rolls back digital learning. Really!

Banning smartphones etc. is no solution! It is backwards. One extreme (too much screen time) is chasing another extreme (no screen time) for children. Bad politics!

What can Denmark do about Greenland facing President Trump's overtures?

Wait until Trump's second term ends? What if the next US president does not change Trump's policy and also insists that it is a national security question?

Why not a major long-term lease agreement between the US and Denmark on Greenland or parts of Greenland?

If Greenland were a country, it would be about the 22nd largest country in the world.

Denmark Ends Letter Delivery After 400 Years of Postal Service with Palki Sharma

Good news! Bravo! Which country will follow next? The descendants of the Vikings are often very good at surprises.