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The Great Progression: Peter Leyden on AI and the Next 25 Years

80 years, America tears itself down and rebuilds. 1776. 1865. 1945. And now, according to Peter Leyden, 2025.

A couple of months ago I sat down with Peter for SingularityFM. He’s the guy who co-wrote the 1997 “Long Boom” cover story for WIRED, and he’s spent three decades trying to map where this civilization is actually headed. His new book, The Great Progression (HarperCollins), makes an audacious claim:

AI, clean energy, and bioengineering are converging into a change on the scale of the Enlightenment. And Trump, in his framing, isn’t the future. He’s the wrecking ball that clears the ground for whatever comes next.

I didn’t let him off easy. I pushed him on the human cost every one of these reinventions has demanded in the past. I pushed him on the myth of golden ages, using Ada Palmer’s work on the Renaissance. I pushed him on Denmark and Norway ripping devices back out of classrooms after being early adopters. He had an answer for all three. Whether they hold up is for you to decide.

What we get into:

The email from Kevin Kelly that pulled Peter into WIRED’s founding years What the Long Boom thesis got right, and what it missed Why he calls Trump a wrecking ball, not a builder The coming “abundance politics” coalition The strange pessimism about AI unique to English-speaking countries How writing this book with AI made him 2 to 3x more productive.

Continue reading “The Great Progression: Peter Leyden on AI and the Next 25 Years” | >

A new drug that can potentially overcome cancer therapy resistance

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have developed a drug called CS18 that disrupts cancer cells’ ability to survive therapy. The findings, published in Science Advances, support exploring the possibility of using CS18 to treat human cancer in the future.

“Therapeutic resistance is a main obstacle to achieving effective and durable cancer treatments,” said corresponding author Dr. Weei-Chin Lin, professor of medicine—hematology and oncology—and molecular and cellular biology at Baylor. “While some therapies are effective at the beginning, many patients eventually relapse because cancer cells can activate compensatory and convergent biological pathways that allow them to overcome the toxic effects of therapy, promoting survival.”

In the current study, the researchers’ goal was to develop a drug that would target a “biological switchboard”—topoisomerase IIβ-binding protein 1 (TopBP1)—that controls several cancer-driving pathways at once and to determine whether this strategy could deliver durable responses and overcome resistance.

Astronomers catch massive galaxy assembling piece by piece 1.2 billion years after Big Bang

Astronomers have discovered a remarkably tiny group of six young galaxies just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This may be a rare glimpse of how some of the universe’s largest galaxies formed. The paper outlining the findings was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 13.

Chaotic patches The widely accepted cosmological model of the universe known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model suggests that galaxies primarily form hierarchically through mergers. That means they grow piece by piece, as smaller galaxies merge over billions of years. In this context, dense regions in the early universe serve as natural laboratories to test this idea.

These dense patches, known as protoclusters and proto-groups, are young clusters of galaxies packed into a region just tens of thousands of light-years across and represent an especially brief and extreme stage in galaxy evolution. Spotting them requires telescopes sensitive enough to detect faint, low-mass galaxies at extreme distances, and precise enough to confirm that the galaxies are truly bound together.

Injectable biomaterial harnesses the immune system to promote brain repair after a stroke

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed an injectable biomaterial that helps transform the cavity left behind after a stroke caused by a blood clot into an environment more supportive of repair. By recruiting the body’s own immune cells, the treatment promoted the growth of new blood vessels, supported neural remodeling and improved motor performance in mice. The work appears in Cell Biomaterials.

Every year, millions of people experience strokes caused by blood clots, called ischemic strokes. Immediate treatments, including clot-dissolving drugs and mechanical removal of the clot, can restore blood flow and preserve threatened brain tissue. But these treatments cannot replace tissue that has already been lost.

Large strokes can result in substantial tissue loss and leave behind a cavity at the site of the injury. After the clot is removed, recovery relies largely on rehabilitation, which helps surviving brain circuits adapt but does not directly repair the damaged area.

Telomere-to-telomere brown rat genome could sharpen disease research models

Researchers have created the most complete genetic profile of the brown rat to date, according to a UTHealth Houston-led team, paving the way for scientists to more accurately investigate genetic links to conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure and stroke.

The research, published in Cell Genomics, was led by corresponding author Peter Doris, Ph.D., director of the Center for Human Genetics at The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine within McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.

The assembly of the brown rat’s genome provides a complete genetic fingerprint and reveals that the brown rat’s DNA is more complex than scientists previously understood. In addition to uncovering more than 60 new genes, many of which were previously difficult to sequence and are thought to play a role in immunity and other biological processes, the team discovered that brown rat sex chromosomes differ significantly from those in humans.

What if The Brain Doesn’t Create Consciousness? Scientist Proposes It Might Be The Fabric of Reality Itself

For decades, neuroscientists have searched the brain for the biological basis of consciousness, assuming our thoughts, emotions, and subjective experiences emerge from networks of neurons.

But what if that assumption is incomplete?

That’s the provocative question explored by neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute in Seattle.

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