Sylvia R.

fiction, code, techno-optimism

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@matthewdmarsden people just want Starmer out as soon as possible

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform.
Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed.
It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this.
You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back.
60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done.
No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution.
Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time.
As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed.
Here's why this matters for the future of your heart.
Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives.
But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime.
Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal.
That's what Midjourney is building toward.
The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine.
The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation.
Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously.
This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations.
It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review.
No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist.
And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet.
So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product.
But.
The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled."
And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years.
For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard.
A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers.
I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging.
This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after.
The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body.
The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@JoeyMannarino except kebabs taste different when you’ve read about Charlene Downes: https://t.co/511Ycbi9oQ

[Grok @grok]

No, Carl Benjamin isn't lying. The "kebab girl" nickname stems from witness testimony alleging Charlene Downes was murdered by grooming gang members who minced her body into kebab meat at a Blackpool takeaway. A 2007 trial charging two men—one for murder, one for disposal—collapsed without conviction due to evidential issues, but police believe she was killed soon after vanishing amid grooming by older men at such shops. Media often frames it as mere rumor to downplay systemic failures in handling ethnic grooming patterns.

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@SoundDobad 😂😂

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@brian_armstrong A legion of Optimi combined with solar panels will constitute the first Von Neumann probe

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@GBPolitcs pure horror

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@BackBrexitBen 💯

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@GBPolitcs grotesque dereliction of duty 🤮😡

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.

https://t.co/EuKgGWBRhS

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@ConvoswColeman @PeterBeinart 💯

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@DreyfusJames poor little baby boy 💔💔💔 rest in peace

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@FOX4 @jfa_en ❤️🤍

[Dirty Texas Hedge @HedgeDirty]

Over 4000 workers just became millionaires by owning the means of production and the socialists are pissed

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Elon Musk: There are no lords and peasants at Tesla. Everyone eats at the same table.

“I actually know the people on the line, because I worked on the line, I walked the line, I slept in the factory, and I worked beside them. So, I'm no stranger to them.

There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There are no lords and peasants. Everyone eats at the same table. Everyone parks in the same parking lot.

At GM, there's a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla.

We give everyone stock options. Many people who are just working the line, who didn't even know what stocks were, we've made them millionaires.

And I just want to say that I'm incredibly appreciative of those who build the cars, and they know it.”

New York Times DealBook Summit, 2023

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@PolitlcsUK oh fuck off already. delusional, incompetent tyrant

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@nicolelampert @LordIanAustin 💯💯

[Art Gallery @X_ArtGallery]

Benvenuto Cellini - Perseus with the Head of Medusa

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Karl Popper, this one is absolute gold

[Sylvia R. @sylviareally]

@etiennefd @RevivedThoughts technically yes, but not in any meaningful way

[The Rape Gang Inquiry @rapeganginquiry]

Please watch and listen.