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Sheila L. Macrine and Jennifer M.B. Fugate

Embodied Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Systems (MIT Press, 2026) explores a radical transformation taking place in intelligence research. Rather than focusing exclusively on brains and computer code, the book examines the important role that embodiment plays in producing intelligent, goal-directed behavior.

The book brings together experts from a range of disciplines to create conversations across fields that are often studied separately. Through these diverse perspectives, the contributors investigate how intelligence may develop and operate across different scales, physical forms and systems.

The book moves beyond the traditional divide between biological and artificial intelligence. It considers how intelligent behavior can emerge in humans, other living organisms, technological systems and unexpected forms that may not fit conventional definitions of intelligence.

​The Future Has Arrived: Living amid Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Intelligence

The future has arrived, and it contains many forms of intelligence, some very old and some quite new: the biological intelligence of animals, plants, and living cells; the artificial intelligence of large language models and robots; and hybrid forms that combine biological and technological capacities, such as robotic systems powered by living muscle tissue and people using AI-assisted prosthetic limbs that respond to muscle signals and adjust to movement or terrain. Already we live and move and have our being amid these different forms of intelligence.

The intelligence of animals, plants, and living cells is awe-inspiring in its own right. That awe is only intensified by the emergence of artificial and hybrid forms, which reveal possibilities for intelligence we are only beginning to imagine.

Many people believe that only biological beings can have sentience or consciousness; others—and I am among them—think we do best to wait and see. What is clear is that we participate in an ensemble of cognitive agents, many of which, including animals and plants, have capacities we lack. The idea that we stand at the top of a single “intelligence pyramid” is misleading. Whatever uniqueness we possess may be found in our capacities for wisdom and compassion rather than our degree of smartness—and perhaps in our capacity to serve as stewards within, rather than above, the ensemble.

A Cardiologist’s Case for Cryonics

In this episode, Daniel Walters sits down with Dr. Cristina LePort, a cardiologist with 45 years in medicine, co-founder of the biotech company Genescient, and author of the new medical and political thriller Defrosted. This past June, AARP ran her essay “I’m a Cardiologist and I Plan to Be Cryogenically Frozen,” putting cryonics in front of one of the largest readerships in America. Cristina talks about arriving in New York with almost no English, switching specialties in her late 40s, the fruit flies in her garage that live six times longer than normal, and why after decades of keeping patients alive, she decided cryonics was the only rational response to death.

Exclusive-Google extends voluntary buyout offers to employees in several countries

ZURICH, Nov 4 : Alphabet’s Google has expanded employee buyout offers to several countries this year as it looks to rein in rising costs amid heavy spending on artificial intelligence.

The search engine company confirmed to Reuters that it began offering voluntary exit packages in June to some employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

Reuters could not determine how many employees have accepted the latest round of offers, which had not previously been reported.

How a gut virus hijacks mucus production to slip past the body’s protective barrier

Among the various viruses that sicken your gut, some at least leave behind a tiny path of cellular destruction as they replicate, implicating the guilty pathogen. Both rotavirus and norovirus invade the small intestine, multiply there and can break through the organ’s outer lining as one way of proliferating in the body.

Astroviruses, which infect the same organ and cause pediatric diarrhea worldwide, have a slicker strategy that avoids tissue damage. In a recent study published in the PLOS Pathogens, a team of cell biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reports the astrovirus’s exit strategy. In a few words, it can be summed up as “follow the mucus.”

The team discovered that astrovirus relies on mucus secretion from goblet cells as the coordinated path to completing its replication cycle. The finding reveals potentially new targets for strategies to treat pediatric diarrhea, according to the paper’s senior author, Valerie Cortez, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz.