(MIT Technology Review) – The next step in the youth quest is a technology called chemical reprogramming.

The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger.

Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. 

The foundation is offering cash awards to teams able to “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function. (Read More)

(Vox) – Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence.

Across the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. In 2023, the average number of births per woman worldwide fell beneath 2.1 — the minimum level necessary for averting population decline (also known as the “replacement rate”). And this collapse is not concentrated in just a handful of places; more than two-thirds of all nations now have below-replacement fertility.

While this crisis has been building for decades, its nature recently changed. In the 20th century, fertility fell primarily because couples started having fewer children. Now, it is falling mostly because fewer people are forming couples — or having sex at all. (Read More)

(Axios) – Rest, longevity and fitness are the new status symbols, and burnt-out Americans are spending big on all of the above.

Why it matters: The wellness economy is in its next phase, beyond fancy gym memberships and meditation apps. The money is going to sleep retreats, executive function coaches, and longevity doctors baked into premium urban real estate. Recovery is its own arms race, if you can afford it. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Diagnostic interviews seen as ‘gold standard’ vary in reliability from condition to condition, study says

Even though evidence on the reliability of these interviews has long been mixed, “they continue to be widely viewed as the best available approach, possibly due to the lack of better alternatives,” Duncan said. The review study brings together evidence from studies on “test-retest reliability” of diagnostic interviews reviewed from February 2024 to September 2025.

The study’s authors used Cohen’s kappa coefficient to estimate how reliable diagnostic interviews were for different mental health conditions; this allowed them to see how often patients would receive the same diagnosis when given the same diagnostic interview twice, while accounting for the fact that sometimes this can happen by luck. (Read More)

(NYT) – Researchers relied on a newer gene-editing technique that may make it possible to engineer embryos, a prospect that has long alarmed bioethicists.

Scientists at Columbia University have edited the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy, an achievement that could open the way to babies engineered with particular characteristics.

The prospect has fueled controversy for years. On the one hand, the technology might one day enable parents to safely repair disease-causing mutations in embryos. But it might also be used to select desired traits — a practice that some ethicists have argued is nothing short of eugenics. (Read More)

(BBC) – Canada’s government has released a much-anticipated national artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, mapping out how the country plans to adopt the new technology over the next decade.

It comes amid broader public concerns over trust of AI and its impact on privacy, safety and future job security. (Read More)

(Washington Post) – A new study suggests spending time in nature may boost body appreciation, self-compassion and overall life satisfaction.

Decades of research suggests there are many positive mental and physical health effects of spending time outdoors, from boosting mood to improving blood pressure. Now, a new study published in Environment International found a potential new benefit: Contact with the natural world seems to be linked to higher levels of life satisfaction, in part because it helps people develop a more positive body image. (Read More)

(WSJ) – The $1 trillion startup warns artificial-intelligence models are nearing capability to improve without human intervention

Anthropic is calling for top artificial intelligence labs to weigh slowing the pace of development, suggesting that AI systems are advancing so rapidly that they may soon be able to improve themselves without human intervention in ways that could pose significant societal risks.

The ability to slow global AI development would “likely be a good thing,” the company said Thursday in a blog post that disclosed internal data documenting how quickly its most advanced models are improving. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – As the AI boom has exploded, Silicon Valley has looked to philosophers to help the industry build what are, at least in theory, more virtuous machines. AI companies have to make all kinds of difficult decisions about how their bots should interact with humans—decisions that philosophers, experts in parsing such dilemmas, are uniquely well equipped to inform. Last fall, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Altman said that OpenAI consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers” and tech-ethics experts when designing rules for ChatGPT’s behavior. (An OpenAI spokesperson was unable to provide additional information about what this consulting involved.) (Read More)

(Wired) – Leading AI labs, executives, and scientists are sending a letter to lawmakers urging them to improve tracking of synthetic DNA sequences that could be used for bioweapons.

The CEOs of several major artificial intelligence companies are urging members of Congress to adopt new laws that would make it harder for bad actors to develop biological weapons using their technology.

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman are among the signatories on a public letter calling for laws requiring companies that sell synthetic DNA and RNA to screen customers and orders to prevent the misuse of genetic material. (Read More)

(404 Media) – Planning documents for “Scout” say the plan is to “make people addicted” to the tool before adding new features.

An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to agentic platform,” the documentation.

Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. (Read More)

(Wired) – With $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, Flourish wants to reinvent AI by putting real neurons under the microscope.

Here’s what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom:

Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.

A month later, I’m lunching with Reardon and Williams in the Flatiron neighborhood in New York City. Reardon gets right to the point. AI has dug itself into a hole, he says. Though increasingly powerful, large language models are greedy consumers of computer power and data. (Read More)

(New Things with Joanna Stern on Youtube) – People across the country are offering a service on Facebook Marketplace to disable the recording light on Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They call it “Stealth Mode.” Joanna paid $100 for the modification and went inside the growing business of turning smart glasses into covert cameras. She investigates who is doing it, whether it’s legal and what some are doing to try and stop it. (Watch Here)

(The Atlantic) – Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?

No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot. To appreciate the titanic magnitude of this error, we need to begin by understanding how LLMs work. (Read More)

(NYT) – A Chinese company has been trying to develop artificial intelligence-powered technology that would enable authoritarian governments to not just monitor dissidents but also potentially predict who could become one in the future.

The work, which appears to be in the research stage, is ripped out of dystopian science fiction, offering a glimpse of a world in which an authoritarian state is able to move against its citizens before they begin any public dissent. (Read More)

(AP) – Two scientists at a U.S. government lab were charged with smuggling vials of deactivated mpox virus into the country from Africa and lying about it during interviews with investigators at a Michigan airport, authorities said Tuesday.

A criminal complaint was unsealed in federal court in Detroit against Vincent Munster, who is chief of the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe, who works with him. (Read More)

(Wired) – Google, Microsoft, and other hyperscalers have come under scrutiny for their impact on water quality and availability.

On Monday, SpaceX amended its initial public offering to state that water conditions—including water scarcity, regulations around water, and drought—could constrain data center development.

It isn’t the only tech company trying to assess how water scarcity might impact its business. Water use is emerging as one of the most contentious data center issues. A recent Gallup poll found that seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to data center development, with water scarcity ranking as the top resource concern. Facing increasingly fierce resistance, some tech companies are scrambling to assure the public that they’re facing the issue head-on. (Read More)

(RNS) – “It’s a little surprising, but I don’t think it’s unexpected,” he told Religion News Service this week. “The Vatican has been cultivating relationships with the tech community for about 10 years.”

Green would know. As a leading tech ethics expert operating at a Catholic university in Silicon Valley, he has spent years urging tech companies to embrace more ethical processes and standards. And recently, that has included Anthropic: Green is one of several religious leaders, theologians and ethicists who have participated in a series of sometimes dayslong conversations with the company since January, including sessions with the programmers crafting the AI models themselves. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Solo agers must navigate complex financial, medical decisions without a built-in safety net

Kant had long cherished the freedom that came with being single. She prided herself on doing headstands in yoga and walking 5 miles a day. But lately being single has felt like a struggle, and not just because of the weighty financial decisions hanging over her head. Back surgery and a heart valve replacement in the past few years have turned her condominium outside Boston into a recovery ward.

She spends most of her time at home these days recovering from heart surgery complications, with friends stopping by. She finds solace painting in a spare bedroom she turned into a studio, but knows she will eventually have to move to a smaller place that’s easier to get around in. (Read More)

(NYT) – Mr. Epstein said that if he died, his sperm should be left in the control of his estate.

Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, but his genetic material may live on.

Emails and records in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department indicate that Mr. Epstein had been banking his sperm for at least several years before his death, and that he did not want the cryobank to discard it if he died. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Developers at a new New York luxury condo have leased its commercial space to a high-end longevity company that offers to lengthen the lives of its members

The newest luxury condominium amenity for wealthy New Yorkers isn’t a rooftop pool, private dining room or celebrity-chef restaurant. It is a whole-body MRI.

One High Line, the mixed-use development that emerged from one of New York real estate’s biggest blowups, has leased its five-story commercial space to Atria Health and Research Institute, a high-end longevity company. Atria offers advanced diagnostics—including MRIs, genetic screening and advanced heart imaging—to members paying roughly $20,000 to $75,000 a year. (Read More)

(Ars Technica) – The global health organization Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced Monday that it will “urgently accelerate development” of three vaccine candidates against Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV), pledging a little over $60 million in the effort to extinguish an outbreak currently raging out of control in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Under the plans, CEPI has committed up to $50 million to US-based Moderna for preclinical development and Phase 1 clinical testing of its mRNA-based BDBV vaccine candidate. (Read More)

(The Dispatch) – Screen time gets the blame, but the increase in diagnoses comes more from subjective criteria interacting with financial incentives.

The diagnostic category itself has been steadily widened by the institutions that define it and the financial structure that rewards every participant for applying the ADHD label. As we have argued in our Cato Institute analysis of how the American healthcare system rewards psychiatric overdiagnosis, subjective diagnostic criteria interact with a payment system that rewards diagnosis to produce predictable inflation across psychiatric categories. The result is labeling ordinary behavior as pathological. ADHD is among the cleanest case studies of that pattern. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damned

It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future.

Their dreams are not all perfectly aligned. But like the folk stories and superstitions that have for ever revolved around more established religious traditions, the collection of far-fetched scenarios valley oligarchs are writing into our future exhibits the hallmarks of a religion in the making, a body of belief to confer a sense of cosmic transcendence and inevitability to their hi-tech project. (Read More)

(404 Media) – A new study by the Center for Democracy & Technology shows how chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Replika and more can lead users down paths they didn’t intend.

Dark patterns have been used by subscription companies and in bait-and-switch campaigns for decades. As more chatbot companies push to keep users engaged at all costs, how do manipulative design choices show up in conversational AI built on large language models? Researchers at the Center for Democracy & Technology studied how chatbots prey on people’s emotions and desire for connection to keep people paying, offering up their data, and chatting to the point of vulnerability. (Read More)