Walter Montes

science and technology - la/acc

[Kit Langton @kitlangton]

Dario implies the existence of Daluigi.

[Jarvis @jarvis_best]

Say what you want about Elon Musk but at least he killed Hitler by not saving him.

[Primera Línea Costa Rica @primeralineacr]

🧵 La falta de una ley de extinción de dominio se usa como excusa para no atacar los capitales del narco. 🚨 Mientras insisten en que el Estado necesita un poder casi absoluto sobre los ciudadanos, la realidad es que ya existen herramientas que ni siquiera usamos bien. 💰 (1/2)

[Walter Montes @tewar93]

Y luego salen con discursos de que el ciudadano está en el centro.

[Noticias Trivisión @trivision_cr]

🔴 #NoticiasTrivisión | Diputados del PLN, el CAC y el Frente Amplio firmaron este lunes el denominado “Pacto Patriótico Costarricense”, durante un encuentro realizado en la Asamblea Legislativa este lunes junto a la Red Nacional de Sectores Sociales.
Según la iniciativa, se busca fortalecer y defender las instituciones públicas del país.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Journalism at its dumbest: Someone hacks into the guest list of a "secret exclusive right-wing Thiel-associated cabal which plots 'navigating WWIII' with 'their sex lives on the agenda.'" Turns out the meeting is not secretive, not right-wing, has nothing to do with Thiel, has had hundreds of journalists, bloggers, academics, artists, musicians politicians, scientists, etc., from all over the political spectrum, discussing thousands of topics. But no matter - someone said there was a furor, therefore there must have been a furor, therefore let's make it a furor!

https://t.co/yggS5erVzF

[Cancillería Costa Rica 🇨🇷 @CRcancilleria]

Costa Rica 🇨🇷ingresa a Pax Silica, iniciativa liderada por el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos 🇺🇸 orientada al fortalecimiento de ecosistemas de innovación y al desarrollo de tecnologías críticas, incluyendo áreas como semiconductores e inteligencia artificial.

[Marcos Falcone @hiperfalcon]

La guerra contra el aire acondicionado en Europa es insólita para cualquiera de nosotros pero tiene mucho sentido dentro de una mentalidad que combina la negación del progreso con la culpa por existir. Es muy triste. Los liberales debemos atacar la narrativa pesimista del mundo.

[space cadet 🇪🇺🌐🇩🇪 @actsmaniac]

gambling is a net-good for society because it reallocates capital to people who understand math from people who dont

[Aidan Gold @MrGoldBro]

Pretty incredible that America asked for new nuclear reactors to be turned on by July 4th, 2026, backed in May 2025.

It looks like we'll have several companies achieve this.

The American people are amazing to heed the call.

A nuclear renaissance is upon us.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Remember:

People are dumb enough to believe this means sunscreen causes cancer.

They truly do not grasp that people who are more at risk of cancer are more likely to use sunscreen.

It just somehow never occurs to them! So they think there's some danger from inert substances.

[Abe Murray @abemurray]

Hot off the press, @valaratomics at 100% power

Congratulations @isaiah_p_taylor, @markmit

Incredible progress 🏭⚡️📈

[Noah Bergren @NbergWX]

Pretty rare earthquake activity tonight on Earth.

Both of these things happening within 2 hours of each other:

1 in 1,000 to 1,200 years

• A “doublet” earthquake in Venezuela (two quakes of similar magnitude in the exact same spot)
• A totally separate 6.9+ quake somewhere else (Japan)

[John Collison @collision]

We're launching Intercept, a new philanthropic initiative to fight respiratory viruses like colds and flus. https://t.co/ETkOVI9Xgh

[Quillette @Quillette]

Can Islam be reformed? Philosopher @BenedictBeckeld responds.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

How it feels in France right now.

[Walter Montes @tewar93]

@gunrightscr @barvak @elonmusk Cuáles estudios "demuestran" esos efectos? No solo correlación, demostrar o encontrar vínculos causales de la dimensión que justifique involucramiento legal

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

The Midjourney scanner is revolutionary. There’s a bullish case that exceeds the most optimistic takes.

I was at the unveiling and used the scanner myself. I personally want to experiment with a weekly whole body Midjourney scan to add to my 1.5 billion data points and let my AI and doctors start connecting the dots.

Most of the early commentary has focused on the wrong questions: “is it as good as MRI?” and “what about false positives?” These are legitimate concerns, but they miss the bigger shift.

The more important question is: what does fast, low cost, safe whole body imaging unlock?

Let’s start with measurement.

A speedometer tells you how fast you are going. A fuel/battery gauge tells you when to stop. A thermostat tells you what to wear. The stock price tells you how much money you’ve made or lost. We measure what we care about.

Except, oddly, for our bodies, which are among the least measured things in our lives. Most people have more data on their favorite sports team, bank account, and social media performance than their body. The future will think we were crazy for this.

The first law of medicine is to do no harm. Our current system has harm baked into it.

+ an undiagnosed condition progressing silently is harm
+ a doctor who can’t easily get a patient screened preventively is harm
+ having no baseline to compare against when something shows up is harm

Our preventive net is narrow and inconsistent. Late stage diagnoses that could have been caught earlier remain common. Midjourney’s technology won’t eliminate that overnight, but it points toward a future where routine wholebody baselines become normal rather than exceptional.

Midjourney can help flip harm-by-default into a new expectation for our health infrastructure: almost no one will ever again be blindsided by a late-stage, life-threatening diagnosis that could have been caught earlier reasonably and cost-effectively.

Some examples of what earlier structural visibility enables:

+ breast cancer caught while localized has a ~99% five year survival rate. Once it has spread distantly, that drops to around 32%.

+ an abdominal aortic aneurysm kills more than 8 in 10 people when it ruptures. A single ultrasound finds the aorta in 99 percent of people, and screening cuts aneurysm deaths by a third to a half.

Midjourney’s technology will not do it all on its own. Its full angle, water immersion approach works around bone rather than seeing through it, and routes bowel gas to image the full abdominal cross section. Yet two real limits remain: air filled lungs stay a blind spot even here, and the brain is out of reach behind the skull, beyond the torso and legs this scanner covers.

That is fine, and they may improve these areas over time. Midjourney doesn’t need to do it all in order for it to be one of the biggest things to hit medicine in a long time.

Let’s look at where specifically Midjourney may be useful to each of us. We’ll start with where we get data today:

1) Blood draws tell us what is happening chemically.
2) Wearables tell us how the body is functioning.
3) Imaging tells us what is happening structurally.

The third layer, soft tissue, is the one we have never been able to access easily. MRI is great, but it is expensive, intimidating, and slow.

Midjourney's technology excels with soft tissue. Here are three places it could be game changing. There are many more.

1. Metabolic health - fatty liver is one of the earliest structural signs of metabolic dysfunction. It’s strongly linked to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular risk. Being able to track visceral fat, muscle fat infiltration, and liver fat over time could give a much clearer picture than blood markers alone. Over 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy.

2. Endocrine tissue - the same metabolic patterns often cluster with thyroid issues, PCOS, and hypogonadism. Ultrasound can directly image the thyroid and ovarian structures. Fat tissue itself is an endocrine organ, so tracking it structurally adds another useful data layer.

3. Soft tissue + multiomics - new proteomic aging clocks can already predict risk for many chronic diseases from blood proteins. These molecular models could become significantly more powerful when combined with actual structural imaging data. The two are complementary, not competitive.

The real advantage: baseline + longitudinal tracking

The biggest unlock isn’t a single scan. It’s having a baseline followed by regular follow-ups. A one off scan in a moment of concern turns every finding into a potential crisis. Without context, you have no idea whether something is new, stable, or changing. With baseline + repeated measurement, the question changes from “what is this?” to “is this changing?” Most incidental findings stay stable. The dangerous ones tend to grow or evolve. Trajectory is often more informative than any single image or timepoint.This is why false positives become more manageable with frequent, low-friction imaging.

Midjourney has a difficult road ahead. Building robust, clinically validated medical hardware and software is extremely hard. Regulatory, technical, and adoption challenges shouldn’t be understated. Also, David is doing this for the right reasons and he’s well positioned financially to push through the difficulty.

On the horizon

We are moving quickly into a future where we will have continuous biological measurement. It will be all around us, a lot of it invisible and autonomous. Measurement will be in our gyms, beds, homes, clothing, offices, cars, glasses, and wearables. It will also be inside of us, in tissue and circulating in our blood vessels. This moves us from managing crises to preventing them. But this future will not just show up. We need bold builders like David and his team, willing to do the hard work.

[Walter Montes @tewar93]

@HarryStebbings @typesfast Such a good episode

[Arnaud T @sceniuslatam]

Colombian startups collectively raised US$46.6 million this week alone 🇨🇴

Major rounds include:

> Telepatía AI (@Nicobot01 ): US$33 million Series A round
> El Dorado (@eldoradoio , @stablecoing ): US$9 million Series A round
> Braven: US$4.6 million Seed round

Congratulations to the founding teams for putting Colombia in the global startup spotlight and building such cool companies.

Two interesting facts stand out to me.

a) Early-stage is not dead. Since the beginning of the year, many have complained that funding was going only toward later stages.

This trend has reversed this quarter, and the Colombian ecosystem is now leading the charge.

b) There's a healthy diversification of sectors being funded, with the biggest round going to a HealthTech, followed by a FinTech and an InsurTech.

A pretty clear picture of the hot sectors right now in the region.

A special mention to neighboring startup Karta (US-Ecuador @Freddyjuez ) for its US$15 million Series A round and $125M warehouse facility as well!

[Memorias de Pez @MemoriasPez]

Es muy fuerte que ya veamos esto como algo normal.