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We thought we knew the human body — but a new organ has been officially discovered.

In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers have officially classified the mesentery—a structure in the digestive system—as a distinct human organ.

Previously thought to be a fragmented and insignificant part of the abdominal cavity, new research reveals that the mesentery is actually a continuous structure that plays a crucial role in holding the intestines in place.

This reclassification, led by J Calvin Coffey from the University Hospital Limerick in Ireland, has been recognized in medical textbooks like Gray’s Anatomy and is now being taught to medical students. While its precise function remains unclear, studying this newly recognized organ could lead to breakthroughs in understanding and treating abdominal and digestive diseases.

The mesentery’s discovery marks the beginning of a new medical field—mesenteric science—which aims to uncover its role in human health. Researchers believe that a deeper understanding of its functions will help identify diseases linked to abnormal mesenteric activity. This revelation reminds us that, despite advances in science, there is still much to learn about our own bodies. With further research, the mesentery could hold key insights into improving gastrointestinal health and developing innovative treatments for abdominal disorders.

Continue reading “The mesentery: structure, function, and role in disease” | >

A new structural blueprint paves the way for improved targeting of cancer cells, particularly those with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. DNA repair proteins function as the body’s molecular editors, continuously identifying and correcting damage to our genetic code. A longstanding challenge in cancer research has been understanding how cancer cells exploit one such protein—polymerase theta (Pol-theta)—to support their survival. Now, scientists at Scripps Research have captured the first high-resolution images of Pol-theta in action, shedding light on its role in cancer development.

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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.

Continue reading “Inside the scientific quest to reverse human aging” | >

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.

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–… Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa… 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… Facebook Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord 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, “Unfoldment, Revealment”, “A New Day in a New Sector”, “Oxygen Garden”, “Wonder Cycle” Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Billions and Billions“
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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