But can also “imagine,” “simulate,” and eventually “act” within it.
Omnimodal world models for physical AI.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 63
Longevity Scientist: Aging Will Soon Be Treatable But Immortality Is Not the Goal
Can we really slow aging or even reverse it?
Aging is no longer viewed as an untouchable part of life. According to Eric Verdin, scientists are beginning to treat aging itself as a biological process that can be slowed and potentially reversed.
In this episode, Eric explains why longevity research is entering a new era. He discusses how AI, women’s health, metabolic therapies, and partial reprogramming are reshaping medicine. He highlights GLP-1 drugs as one of the most promising tools today and explains how resetting cells to a younger state may one day restore function in aging tissues.
He also shares the most effective strategies available right now: exercise, sleep, nutrition, mental stimulation, and social connection. While supplements like Creatine may help, Eric stresses that lifestyle remains the foundation of long-term health.
Eric Verdin is a physician-scientist and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, where he leads research focused on extending human healthspan.
What You’ll Learn.
AI generates full battery electrolyte recipes, matching top lithium metal battery performance
Battery electrolytes aren’t just one chemical, but a complex mixture of salts, solvents, and additives interacting and reacting with each other. Artificial intelligence has made great headway in helping select ideal materials to go into that chemical soup. But a team from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) is using AI to generate the entire formulation, balancing the complicated tradeoffs and interactions that go into the electrolytes that make batteries possible.
The research is published in JACS Au. It is the next step in the Amanchukwu Lab’s ongoing development of an AI for battery work, ElectrolyteGPT.
“Next-generation battery electrolytes must meet multiple, often conflicting property requirements,” said first author Jaemin Kim. “With the model’s capability of generating outputs under diverse conditions, ElectrolyteGPT is able to generate novel candidates satisfying the desired properties simultaneously.”
Chris Hables Gray on AI and the Singularity: We Need Strong Citizenship!
In 2013, I interviewed a man who studies cyborgs and war for a living.
Somewhere in that conversation, Prof. Chris Hables Gray predicted a global pandemic. I chimed in that it would most likely stem from a bird flu outbreak.
We were both right. Neither of us wanted to be.
That was six years before COVID. And here we are in 2026, watching H5N1 headlines pile up again.
The point was never the prediction. The point was what he said we should do about it.
Chris did not pitch a gadget. He did not sell a forecast. He argued that surviving the century is not a technology problem; it is a citizenship problem.
How swarms of tiny light-controlled robots could revolutionize wound care
Having a swarm of microbots moving across your body may sound like the stuff of a horror movie, but it could actually be the future of targeted drug delivery and advanced wound healing. Scientists have developed a way to use blue and red light as a remote control to assemble and disperse swarms of biohybrid microrobots that could one day transform how we treat injuries.
Details of the research are in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
The microrobots come in two parts. The first is a living green microalga called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (CR), which uses two tail-like structures (flagella) to swim through aquatic environments and respond to light.
Photon-driven synapse advances low-power neuromorphic systems
Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on moving large amounts of data between memory and processors, a design that limits speed and increases energy use. The human brain works differently: it combines memory and computation within synapses, allowing fast, efficient learning and perception. Replicating this approach in hardware is a central goal of neuromorphic computing, especially for tasks like vision, where most real-world information is gathered and processed.
In that context, researchers have developed a new type of artificial synapse that operates entirely with light. Unlike most existing devices, which still depend on electrical signals at some stage, this system uses optical signals both to receive information and to update its internal state. Removing electrical conversion steps could lower energy use, reduce noise, and enable faster processing, particularly in vision systems that already rely on light.
As reported in Advanced Photonics, the device is built from a rare-earth-doped crystal that emits a persistent afterglow after being illuminated. This material can store optical information in the form of trapped charge carriers. When light excites the crystal, some of these carriers emit light immediately, while others remain trapped and are released later. The balance between these pathways depends on the history of illumination, allowing the material to mimic how biological synapses change strength based on past activity.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Talks Scaling Laws, AI Arms Races, and Radical Abundance
This video features a conversation with Dario Amadei, CEO of Anthropic, discussing the intersection of AI and economics. Viewers will gain insights into how technological innovation impacts business processes and models, the future landscape of AI companies, and the potential societal ramifications of advancements in AI technology. The main theme emphasizes the evolving dynamics between innovation and established business strategies in the AI sector, as well as the importance of understanding how these changes affect both markets and society.
Superintelligence: are we all doomed? With Nate Soares
Freddy Gray is joined by Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, to discuss the risks posed to humanity by AI. Warning that sufficiently intelligent AI may stop following human instructions entirely, Soares tells Freddy what, if anything, could keep AI from spiralling out of control.
AI maps brain waste-clearing flow, revealing two speeds tied to deep sleep
When a person goes into deep sleep, waterlike fluid circulates around the brain, washing away metabolic waste that is linked to diseases such as Alzheimer’s. This process, known as the glymphatic system, was first described in 2012 by Maiken Nedergaard, a pioneering neuroscientist and co-director of the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine.
But questions remain about the system’s mechanics—notably, how quickly the fluid circulates around the brain. Studying the circulation within a living brain is difficult to do without causing irreparable harm to a subject.
“You can put a microscope on a small patch of the brain and watch what’s happening there with a lot of detail, and we’ve worked with that type of data in the past, but it’s only a tiny view of the overall process,” says Professor Douglas Kelley from the University of Rochester’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.