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Hiring a Futurist? The Red Flag Most Leadership Teams Miss

When a leadership team hires a futurist to think about the future for them, the hire itself is the failure.

I say this as someone who gets booked to think about the future.

Executives increasingly hire futurists, consultants, and now AI tools to handle their thinking about what comes next. It feels like rigor. It looks like preparation. It is, in fact, an abdication.

Nobody can tell you what is coming with the precision your strategy deck assumes. Not a futurist. Not a consultant. Not an AI system trained on every word ever written. Plenty of people sell certainty about the future. Nobody can actually deliver it.

So how do you tell whether you are using a futurist well, or whether the booking itself is the warning sign?

I wrote a short piece arguing that the answer comes down to one question every executive should ask before signing the contract.

Full piece: [ https://www.singularityweblog.com/hiring-a-futurist/](https://www.singularityweblog.com/hiring-a-futurist/)

Continue reading “Hiring a Futurist? The Red Flag Most Leadership Teams Miss” | >

Metastatic cancer detection and management with artificial intelligence and augmented reality (Review)

Metastatic cancer remains a significant global health challenge, contributing to the majority of cancer-related mortality due to late detection, therapeutic resistance and the complexity of disseminated disease. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) are transforming the landscape of metastatic cancer detection and management. AI-driven tools, including radiomics, deep learning models, and predictive analytics, enhance early identification of metastatic lesions, improve diagnostic accuracy, and support personalized treatment strategies by integrating multimodal clinical, imaging and molecular data. At the same time, AR technologies are increasingly applied in image-guided surgery, real-time tumor visualization and patient education, enabling more precise interventions and improved clinical decision-making.

Common asthma drug may turn off tumor ‘switch’ tied to immunotherapy resistance

A drug widely used to treat asthma and allergies may also help fight aggressive cancers, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study that uncovered how tumors hijack common white blood cells to evade immunotherapy.

The findings in mice and human tissues point to a practical, new way to improve treatment for tough tumors, such as triple-negative breast cancer, where immunotherapy often fails.

The study is published in Nature Cancer.

Careful crystallization unlocks well-ordered perovskite layers for transistors

Perovskites are a class of materials with a unique crystal structure that suits applications such as fabricating solar cells, light-emitting diodes and transistors. However, molecules in thin layers often cannot arrange themselves properly because the process proceeds too quickly. Now, an international research team led by Tomasz Marszalek from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has developed a new approach to controlling low-cost solution processing, thereby improving the formation of well-ordered perovskite layers and enabling their broader application in optoelectronic devices. Their paper is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Electronics can be found in almost every device, from smartphones and televisions to washing machines. Field-effect transistors are the main building blocks of electronic circuits, and they ensure that these devices can be easily operated and fully controlled. Perovskites are a new class of semiconductor that could be suitable for transistor applications. They contain various chemical elements, such as organic cations, divalent metal cations, and halide anions. This combination of elements enables the properties of thin perovskite films to be tailored precisely for specific applications.

Currently, their use in transistors is often unsuccessful due to a lack of control over the formation of the thin film, known as nucleation and crystallization. Therefore, researchers are attempting to organize the materials into thin, two-dimensional layers and stabilize them with organic molecules between the inorganic layers in order to control their optoelectronic properties.

Transcriptional Profiling at Single‐Cell Resolution Reveals Diversity and Regulatory Networks of Primary and Secondary Senescent Cells

The research article “Transcriptional Profiling at Single-cell Resolution Reveals Diversity and Regulatory Networks of Primary and Secondary Senescent Cells” by Jang, Shim, et al. models primary sene…

How early brain activity may shape speech-linked circuits before babies ever speak

Communication begins long before children learn to speak. Researchers at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) in Taiwan have now uncovered how early brain activity helps build developing communication circuits via regulating FOXP2/Foxp2, a gene linked to human speech and communication disorders.

Published in EMBO Reports, the study presents an integrated framework linking neural activity, vocal circuit development, and activity-dependent regulation of Foxp2 in early life. The researchers studied neonatal mice, which emit ultrasonic vocalizations when separated from their mothers. These vocalizations are widely used to study early social communication and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Using advanced activity tagging, live neural recording, and circuit manipulation techniques, the NYCU team identified a previously underappreciated communication circuit linking the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the striatum.

3D epithelial cell topology tunes signaling range to promote precise patterning

Cell behaviors in multicellular organisms are coordinated via both diffusible molecules and by signals based on direct cell–cell contacts. The mode of cell communication used influences the signaling range. In many developing epithelia, contact-based Notch-Delta lateral inhibition signaling is used to pattern cell fates. While previous work revealed that cells can use protrusions to extend the range of Notch-Delta signaling to alter these patterns, this is not a general feature of epithelia. In addition, it is not known how the complex three-dimensional (3D) shapes of epithelial cells influence cell communication. In exploring this question, we show that epithelial cells at the Drosophila wing margin, which lack basal protrusions, contact different neighbors at different heights along their apico-basal axis, effectively increasing the number of neighbors each cell touches.

New lithium-plasma engine passes key Mars propulsion test

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.

This scenario is quite possibly a decade away, at minimum, but that’s not stopping the bright minds at NASA from building and testing next-generation propulsion systems designed to take humans to Mars one day and send spacecraft across the solar system. This is because NASA engineers recently tested a next-generation electric propulsion system that achieved new records while requiring lithium metal vapor for fuel and holds the potential to be a game changer in propulsion systems for the future of space exploration.

In a remarkable achievement, the tests successfully set a new record in the United States of 120 kilowatts of power, which is estimated to be 25 times greater than NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently en route to asteroid 16 Psyche and contains the most powerful electric thrusters ever built.

Dietary fats shape pancreatic cancer risk via ferroptosis

For decades, the relationship between fat and cancer has been treated as a question of quantity: Eat less fat, reduce your risk of developing cancer. But new research published April 29 in Cancer Discovery shows that for pancreatic cancer, the type of fat you consume matters more than the amount.

“It’s really the type of fat that you’re consuming, not just total fat content,” says Christian Felipe Ruiz, Ph.D., an associate research scientist in YSM’s Department of Genetics and lead author of the study. “Depending on the type of fat that you consume, it can go completely different ways. We found that some fats promote cancer, as we would expect, while other fats are really good at suppressing cancer.”

One fat in particular—oleic acid, the primary fatty acid in olive oil—may be accelerating tumor growth in ways scientists never anticipated. The result was surprising given oleic acid’s reputation in medicine. “It’s traditionally been considered a healthy type of fat for cardiovascular health,” Ruiz says.

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