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Longevity Day

LONGEVITY DAY — a science-fiction trailer for the Future Vision XPRIZE.

In 2035, an eighty-eight-year-old biologist with cancer and failing memory fights to restart the AI-assisted rejuvenation research that may be her last chance — three years after a catastrophic AI failure nearly convinced the world to abandon frontier research altogether.

A story about making aging optional.

Written, directed and produced by Sergio M.L. Tarrero.
Alianza Futurista • https://alianzafuturista.org.

Submitted to the Future Vision XPRIZE, presented by the XPRIZE Foundation, Google and Range Media Partners.
https://futurevisionxprize.com.

#FutureVisionXPRIZE

Continue reading “Longevity Day” | >

SLEEPER: SLEEPER — a science-fiction trailer for the Future Vision XPRIZE

In 2029, a terminally ill woman chooses cryopreservation rather than accept the finality of death. She wakes forty-four years later, into a world she does not recognise — and to a promise someone kept across four decades.

A story about coming back, and about whether the future is worth coming back for.

Written, directed and produced by Sergio M.L. Tarrero.
Alianza Futurista • https://alianzafuturista.org.

Submitted to the Future Vision XPRIZE, presented by the XPRIZE Foundation, Google and Range Media Partners.
https://futurevisionxprize.com.

#FutureVisionXPRIZE

Panama canal to reduce shipping as El Niño strikes vital route

Nine of 10 ships using the canal do so with a reservation, and the remaining slots are auctioned off.

Before the Iran war the average winning bid in these auctions was $135,000. But in April one shipping company eager to use the canal paid a whopping $4m.

The operator said it does not rule out further restrictions on shipping depending on how much it rains in the coming weeks.

This frozen fiber makes light and sound interact 1,000x more strongly

Freezing the liquid core of an optical fiber produced an extreme environment where light and sound interact more than 1,000 times more strongly than in ordinary fibers. Researchers used the effect to create optoacoustic memory, potentially paving the way for lower-energy photonic computers and advanced quantum technologies.

Researchers turned data from roughly 1,200 Starlink satellites into a giant scanner for Earth’s upper atmosphere, mapping a hardtoobserve region around 500 kilometres above the planet

A network of Starlink satellites designed primarily for internet connectivity is giving scientists a new way to study one of the hardest-to-observe regions of Earth’s atmosphere. According to a study by researchers at Kyoto University, publicly available orbital data from roughly 1,200 Starlink satellites were used to estimate the density of the thermosphere at an altitude of about 482 kilometres.

Cloudflare Just Wired 20% Of The Web For AI Agent Payments

Cloudflare, which routes roughly 20% of global web traffic, launched Cloudflare Wallets and the x402 protocol on August 4, 2026, giving AI agents a funded, capped way to pay for APIs and data without a human clicking checkout. More than 20 companies are already participating in these agent-initiated payment flows. The infrastructure isn’t fully live yet, but the spend-governance policy question is already overdue.

AI agent payments just moved from a theoretical problem to live infrastructure at internet scale. During a release cycle it called Agents Week, Cloudflare shipped Cloudflare Wallets alongside the x402 protocol, reviving HTTP status code 402, Payment Required, a code that has sat unused in the web standard for roughly thirty years, according to an August 2026 technical breakdown. A server that wants payment now returns a 402 response with machine-readable terms; an AI agent attaches proof of payment in stablecoins and the transaction settles without a checkout page, a login, or a human in the loop.

Cloudflare processes approximately 20% of all web traffic, so when the company builds a payment primitive directly into that infrastructure, it isn’t a startup experiment, it’s plumbing, according to Forkast’s coverage of the launch. The design splits custody from spending: an Account Wallet belongs to a person or company and holds real funds, while Virtual Wallets are capped, delegated allowances handed to individual AI agents, functioning like a corporate checking account issuing restricted debit cards to employees, except the employees are software. AI agent payments under this model inherit spend limits set by a human owner, not by the agent itself.

New brain cell formation stalls in adults with depression, study shows

Findings from a new study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggest that the trickle of neurons created in the adult hippocampus could be instrumental in preventing depression. Most of the brain’s 100 billion neurons are created before birth.

Published in the journal Nature Medicine, the study shows for the first time that neurogenesis stalls in the brains of adults with major depressive disorder and identifies the molecular programs that control neurogenesis, which may help researchers develop new therapies.

“Historically, depression was thought to be a disease of neurotransmitter deficiency, especially serotonin, but we now think that depression stems from multiple issues that affect our neurons’ ability to adapt to stress and changing environments,” says Maura Dupont, a professor of psychiatry who led the research.

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