Scientists are making a major leap toward freezing organs for future use without damaging them. A new study reveals that one of the biggest obstacles—cracking during ultra-cold preservation—can be reduced by carefully tuning the temperature at which tissues enter a glass-like state. This breakthrough builds on recent successes in cryopreserved organ transplants and could bring the long-imagined idea of “banking” organs for later use much closer to reality.
Scientists at Stanford University have discovered that DRT3, a unique defense system found in bacteria, creates DNA to protect against viral infections. DRT3 is made up of two different enzymes called reverse transcriptases, Drt3a and Drt3b, and a piece of noncoding RNA (ncRNA). Together, this trio makes long, double-stranded DNA consisting of alternating repeats (GT/AC).
Follistatin is opening new questions around baseline muscle, fat distribution, and aging. The real shift: from chasing gains → to preserving capacity.
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Time is the one thing every human being experiences identically, or so we assume.
Physicist Jim Al-Khalili dismantles that assumption, explaining how velocity and gravity don’t just affect clocks but actually alter the rate at which time passes for the person experiencing it.
Preorder Jim Al-Khalili’s forthcoming book, On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe, here: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Physics-T?tag=lifeboatfound-20…
About Jim Al-Khalili: Jim is a multiple award-winning science communicator renowned for his public engagement around the world through writing and broadcasting and a leading academic making fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, particularly in nuclear reaction theory, quantum effects in biology, open quantum systems and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Jim is a theoretical physicist at the University of Surrey where he holds a Distinguished Chair in physics as well as a university chair in the public engagement in science. He received his PhD in nuclear reaction theory in 1989 and has published widely in the field. His current interest is in open quantum systems and the application of quantum mechanics in biology.
About Jim Al-Khalili:
A reader asked me a question this week that I have been thinking about ever since.
She did not ask whether AI could malfunction. She did not ask whether bad actors could misuse it. She asked something sharper:
Can a system produce bad outcomes systematically, even when intent is good, and nothing is broken?
The answer is yes. And it is the most dangerous category of bad outcome, because nobody is at fault and nothing is broken.
We have all the evidence we need. Amazon ran into it. YouTube ran into it. Hospitals are running into it now. AI labs are about to run into it at a planetary scale. And almost nobody is talking about why.
A 1975 economic principle explains it cleanly. A reader’s question forced me to refine an argument I have been making for years.
New essay: [ https://www.singularityweblog.com/goodharts-law-ai/](https://www.singularityweblog.com/goodharts-law-ai/)
UCLA scientists have developed a simple and cost-effective blood test that, in early studies, shows promise in detecting multiple cancers, various liver conditions and organ abnormalities simultaneously by analyzing DNA fragments circulating in the bloodstream. The test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could offer a powerful and more affordable approach to early disease detection and comprehensive health monitoring.
“Early detection is crucial,” said Dr. Jasmine Zhou, the study’s senior author, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Survival rates are far higher when cancers are caught before they spread. If you detect cancer at stage one, outcomes are dramatically better than at stage four.”
How the MethylScan blood test works The new method, called MethylScan, works by analyzing cell-free DNA (cfDNA), tiny fragments of genetic material released into the blood when cells die. Because cells from every organ shed DNA into the bloodstream, cfDNA carries molecular signals that reflect what is happening throughout the body.
Aggregated AI represents a fundamental rezoning of this digital landscape. It is the architectural foundation of the ultimate digital 15-minute city.
Modern urban planners are increasingly rallying around a transformational concept known as the “15-minute city.” The philosophy is simple but profound: a neighborhood should be designed so that everything a resident needs for daily life—work, groceries, healthcare, education, and leisure—is accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. It is a direct rejection of the sprawling, car-centric metropolis that forces people to spend large fractions of their lives commuting from one isolated zone to another.
When you look at the architecture of the modern internet, it becomes painfully obvious that we are living in the digital equivalent of urban sprawl.
For the past two decades, we have built a digital environment defined by vast distances and fragmented zones. We have distinct destinations for every conceivable task. You commute to one platform to analyze data, travel to another to manage client relationships, drive over to a different interface to write code, and navigate a maze of disparate chat windows to communicate. The modern knowledge worker spends an inordinate amount of their day stuck in digital traffic, constantly context-switching, moving data between incompatible silos, and navigating a sprawling ecosystem that was built for the benefit of the platforms, not the people who inhabit them.
Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/.…
The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a long way from the final answer. A big next step is understanding how neuronal circuits connect to and guide bodily behavior. Very recent work on mapping the fruit-fly connectome has brought us closer to that goal. I talk with neuroscientist Bing Brunton about the connectome, how we can study it to understand bodily motion in flies and other creatures, and where it’s all taking us.
Bing Wen Brunton received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton University… She is currently a Professor of Biology and the Richard & Joan Komen University Chair at the University of Washington, with affiliations at the eScience Institute for Data Science, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and the Department of Applied Mathematics.
Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
Sean Carroll channel: / seancarroll.
