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Superlongevity via epigenetic reprogramming. 🏆

Life Biosciences:

“If the FDA approves its application, the company will repeat the methods from the mouse and monkey experiments, Rosenzweig-Lipson said. Scientists will inject volunteers’ eyes with Yamanaka factors that can be turned off or on with the antibiotic doxycycline, Rosenzweig-Lipson said. The hope is that the cells in people’s damaged optic nerves will grow more youthful at an epigenetic level, and their vision will improve.”

Can reprogramming our genes make us young again? A breakthrough in longevity research may be nearing its first human trials.

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In today’s AI news, Crunchbase, long known as a go-to platform for company data, has relaunched as an AI-powered solution, revolutionizing how investors, founders, and innovators gain insights into private companies. Moving beyond historical data, the new Crunchbase introduces live, predictive intelligence, providing a real-time, forward-looking view of the market. Users can now anticipate funding rounds, acquisitions, and even IPO’s.

In other advancements, EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand. The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be used to continue developing new technologies for more “green” data centers.

Meanwhile, we still didn’t get a straight-up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to sidestep CNN moderator Anna Stewart’s question asking how “agentic AI” is “any different to a GenAI chatbot” by suggesting everyone hates the former but is delighted by the “empathetic” responses AI agents can serve up.

And, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks said that the U.S. should not pursue a Manhattan Project-style push to develop AI systems with “superhuman” intelligence, also known as AGI. The paper, titled “Superintelligence Strategy,” asserts that an aggressive bid by the U.S. to exclusively control superintelligent AI systems could prompt fierce retaliation from China.

In videos, as we join this episode of the Lightcone podcast we find CEO, Garry Tan and the team talking about how Andrej Karpathy recently coined the term “vibe coding” to describe how LLMs are getting so good that devs can simply “give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” They dive into this new way of programming and what it means for builders in the age of AI.

S Matthew Miller at Bloomberg Invest.” + And, “there are no authorities in science,” says A.M. Turing Award winner Richard S. Sutton. In this exclusive conversation, Amii Chief Scientific Advisor Richard S. Sutton and Amii CEO Cam Linke discuss the breakthroughs that shaped Reinforcement Learning, the journey to this moment, and what’s next for the future of artificial intelligence.

We close out with, learning to use LangGraph, JavaScript, and tools like Next.js and wxflows, from IBM’s Roy Derks, to automate transcription. Discover how to integrate open-source models like Ollama to power your AI agent.

Continue reading “How Crunchbase AI Is Forecasting Unicorns With 95% Accuracy” | >

If civilizations can endure for eons and people can live indefinitely, what drives progress, ambition, and purpose in a world where time has no limit? Would an ageless society be a utopia of infinite wisdom, or a stagnating empire struggling to keep ambition alive across the centuries?

Watch my exclusive video The End of Science https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–
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 Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30. Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a
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Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur.
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Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30.

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Credits:
Methuselah Civilizations: A Society of the Ageless.
Episode 489; March 6, 2025
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Edited by: Ludwig Luska.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Chris Zabriskie, \

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Periodic structures known as metamaterials can interact with electromagnetic waves in unusual ways. In one counterintuitive example, standing waves remain trapped in a volume even though they’re surrounded by radiating waves that should carry their energy away. These standing waves, called bound states in the continuum (BICs), can provide a boost to resonant systems—such as lasers, filters, or sensors—by mitigating radiative losses. Researchers have recently demonstrated a promising design that produces high-quality BICs; however, it works only at microwave frequencies. Simulations by Pietro Brugnolo and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark now suggest that a straightforward change could allow the design to be adapted to optical wavelengths [1].

The previous design involves thin metamaterials, or metasurfaces, made of metallic bars arranged around cylindrical cavities. In such a configuration, BICs emerge when characteristic metasurface resonances match the cavity resonance. The metallic elements, however, result in resistive losses when used at wavelengths shorter than those of microwaves. Brugnolo’s team thus set out to investigate an all-dielectric version of the scheme.

The researchers simulated devices in which the metallic elements were replaced with silicon particles distributed on a cylindric surface. Their results showed that the structure displayed both an electrical and an effective magnetic response, which could be tailored to create the standing-wave patterns characteristic of BICs. For a wave at telecommunication wavelengths (1550 nm), their simulations predicted a cavity quality factor of 1.7 × 104, on par with the microwave version of the same scheme.

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Temporal measurements in conditions similar to those in the Sun rebut a leading hypothesis for why models and experiments disagree on how much light iron absorbs.

Understanding how light interacts with matter inside stars is crucial for predicting stars’ evolution, structure, and energy output. A key factor in this process is opacity—the degree to which a material absorbs radiation. Recent experimental findings have challenged long-standing models, showing that iron, a major contributor to stellar opacity, absorbs more light than expected. This discrepancy has profound implications for our understanding of the Sun and of other stars. Over the past two decades, three groundbreaking studies [1–3] have taken major steps toward resolving this mystery, using advanced laboratory experiments to measure iron’s opacity under extreme conditions similar to those of the Sun’s interior. However, the discrepancy remained, with researchers hypothesizing that it came from systematic errors from temporal gradients in plasma properties.

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In a new Physical Review Letters study, researchers propose an experimental approach that could finally determine whether gravity is fundamentally classical or quantum in nature.

The nature of gravity has puzzled physicists for decades. Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces, but it has resisted integration into the quantum framework, unlike the electromagnetic, strong, and weak nuclear forces.

Rather than directly tackling the challenging problem of constructing a complete quantum theory of gravity or trying to detect individual gravitons—the hypothetical mediator of gravity—the researchers take a different approach.

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Iron oxide minerals are found in rocks around the globe. Some are magnetic, and some of them rust—especially when exposed to water and oxygen. These characteristics provide clues about the history of these minerals.

Utah State University geoscientists describe a new forensic tool for determining the timing of geochemical oxidation reactions in minerals occurring in the Earth’s crust, which could shed light on how and when large, unexplained gaps in the rock record—known as “unconformities”—developed.

“A challenge for geoscientists is accurately constraining when rocks resided in the near-surface environment,” says Alexis Ault, associate professor in USU’s Department of Geosciences. “It’s tricky to pinpoint the timing of such processes, because the has often been erased.”

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