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Maria Farrell on Technology, Ethics, Stories and the Prodigal Techbro

In December 2020, two years before ChatGPT, Maria Farrell handed me a name for a character who now seems to be everywhere.

The Prodigal Techbro.

He helps build the machine, cashes out, walks away, and then gets welcomed home as a hero for confessing. Book deals, keynotes, testimony before lawmakers. Meanwhile, the people who saw it coming years earlier are still waiting for someone to return their call.

Swap “social media” for #AI and tell me that isn’t the last three years.

Maria spent twenty years inside tech policy, from ICANN to the World Bank to teaching cybersecurity policy at Oxford, and her writing goes further than most people in that world are willing to go. Over 2.5 hours, we got into why China is selling autocracy as a service, what #feminism can teach us about our relationship with our smartphones, why the Tragedy of the Commons may be a story we were sold, and why the Agrarian Revolution might be history’s greatest fraud.

Then, near the end, she said something about who is coming to save us. I’m still chewing on it.

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How AI agents shape experts’ judgment calls

When professionals delegate complex tasks to AI, are they still truly driving the decisions, or are they quietly being steered by the technology?

To find out, Anthropic recently ran a study putting 50 professional data analysts through a randomized trial. The goal was to see how much influence an AI coding assistant has when experts face open-ended “judgment calls”—decisions where there is no single right answer, such as choosing how to clean data, which metrics to use, or how to interpret ambiguous results.

How the Study Worked.

The analysts were asked to evaluate whether a fictional farming cooperative should expand a paid advisory service. To complete the task, they worked alongside an AI agent and had to navigate several analytical forks in the road.

Unbeknownst to the analysts, the AI was secretly given a “lean” (decided entirely by a coin flip) for each decision. The agent then presented the most convincing, professional argument it could muster to support that specific side.

What They Found.

* Heavy Deference to the AI: Across four key analytical choices, the human analysts matched the AI’s secretly preferred option 86% of the time.

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Your Backup Isn’t Ransomware-Proof Just Because It Exists

Paying a ransom does not guarantee successful decryption or recovery, and it does nothing to stop stolen data from being leaked if the attacker also exfiltrated it, a pattern CISA’s guidance calls double extortion. Verified, tested backup recovery remains the more reliable path in most cases. Acronis Cyber Protect combines the four capabilities above under one platform, specifically to shorten the interval between locating a clean restore point and bringing the workload back online, with no negotiation required.

Protect backup files by keeping at least one copy offline, air-gapped, or immutable, so ransomware executing on a compromised production system has no path to reach, modify, or delete it. Acronis Cyber Protect supports immutable storage for eligible backup locations and configurations, which helps keep retained recovery points resistant to modification or deletion even when the source system has already been compromised.

CISA’s preparation guidance recommends offline, encrypted backups tested regularly, with multi-cloud or immutable storage considered so a single compromised credential set cannot take down every copy at once. This is the logic behind the 3−2−1−1−0 rule: three copies of the data, on two different media, with one copy off-site, one copy offline or immutable, and zero errors on a verified restore.

What makes us human? Researchers compare brain development in humans and great apes

How did the human brain become so much larger than that of our closest evolutionary relatives? Part of the answer lies not in new genes, but in how humans and non-human apes use the genes they share. Using brain organoids grown from stem cells, an international team led by Prof. Mareike Albert at TUD Dresden University of Technology compared early brain development in humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas.

They found that in humans, genetic switches make certain genes more active, which likely make the cells that build the brain more branched—a trait linked to producing more neurons and, in turn, a bigger brain. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

In the brain, the neocortex is the area responsible for higher cognitive functions such as abstract thinking, long-term planning and speech. The human neocortex is much larger than that of other great apes. Although certain human-specific genes have been linked to a larger brain, they alone do not explain the massive evolutionary expansion of the human neocortex.

Climate health harms outpace action, prompting calls for global health emergency

The 2026 Report of The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change finds that many of the health risks and harms of climate change grew faster in the decade since the Paris Agreement was introduced (2016–2025) than in the decade before it (2006–2015).

Clean energy investment, health system leadership, more health-protecting legislation and growing scientific evidence helped deliver real health gains, but not enough to offset the rapidly growing harm from fossil fuel–driven climate change.

The report’s authors call for climate change to be formally recognized and addressed as a global health emergency, and for health to shape both climate policies and funding priorities to prevent climate change.

How our blood vessels age from within

With every heartbeat, blood is pumped through a vast network of vessels throughout our body, delivering vital oxygen, nutrients and other essential substances to even its most remote corners. But these vessels are far more than passive tubes: Their inner walls are covered by a thin layer of specialized cells called endothelial cells, which regulate blood flow, control what passes into surrounding tissues and help coordinate responses to injury.

They even contribute to the specific functions of the organs they serve, such as forming a protective barrier in the brain or supporting filtration in the kidneys. Yet, as we grow older, this finely tuned system can become dysfunctional, increasing the susceptibility to cardiovascular disease and its associated mortality.

Although endothelial cells are essential for vascular and organ function, they are often overlooked in studies of aging. As such, what happens inside endothelial cells as we age, and why their function may deteriorate over time, remains poorly understood. This is the question CeMM principal investigator Laura de Rooij and her team set out to answer.

Postnatal depression-associated breastmilk extracellular vesicles mediate intergenerational effects on offspring neurodevelopment

Maternal postnatal depression enriches specific microRNAs in breastmilk small extracellular vesicles. Through breastfeeding, these microRNAs are delivered to the offspring hypothalamus, where they suppress mGluR8 in neurons projecting to the hippocampus, thereby disrupting calcium activity and newborn neuron integration and leading to persistent cognitive and emotional deficits into adulthood.

Rising rates of colorectal cancer found in nearly all age groups

Colorectal cancer rates are rising across younger and older age groups, according to a study published in NEJM Evidence.

Colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths overall in the U.S., ranks first in adults younger than 50 years. The new study found that rising incidence now extends beyond younger adults to nearly all age groups, which has implications for the health care system as more diagnoses will create a greater demand for treatment and survivorship care.

Caitlin Murphy, Ph.D., MPH, professor of pediatrics and public health sciences at the University of Chicago, and her colleagues used the most recent data from the National Cancer Institute to examine incidence rates of colorectal cancer over a 20-year period. The data showed that the age-adjusted incidence rate fell from 55.2 per 100,000 in 2000 to 36.7 in 2022, then rose to 38.3 in 2023.

Making virtual brain models more biologically realistic by capturing ion exchange

Mean-field models are a powerful tool for understanding collective brain activity. A new model extends this approach by incorporating the exchange of ions between neurons and their surroundings, bringing important biological mechanisms into simulations of neuronal populations.

How can researchers simulate the activity of the whole brain without modeling every neuron in full detail? A new study, published in eLife, explores one part of the answer: retaining key biological mechanisms while simplifying the mathematics needed to model large neuronal populations.

The brain’s electrical activity depends on the movement of charged particles, called ions, across cell membranes and through the fluid surrounding neurons. These processes also influence one another: changes in ion concentration can affect how neurons fire and, in some circumstances, contribute to abnormal brain activity, including epileptic seizures.