We don’t really understand AI’s inner workings, so we’re effectively flying blind.
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Transhumanism 101 with Natasha Vita-More
In 2012, transhumanism was still being called “the most dangerous idea in the world.”
Fourteen years later, we’re casually debating brain-computer interfaces, radical life extension, and what it even means to stay “human” in an age of AI. The fringe became the headline.
So I went back into the Singularity. FM archive and pulled my conversation with Dr. Natasha Vita-More, often called the first female philosopher of transhumanism. We recorded “Transhumanism 101” to cut through the fear and the ideology and get to the actual ideas.
We covered a lot:
Why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still shapes how we react to enhancement technology, two centuries later. Where the panic comes from (Bill Joy, Fukuyama) and why most of it misses the point. The real differences between transhuman, posthuman, and cyborg. And critical thinking as a core tenet, not a footnote, of the whole project.
The line that stuck with me, and that lands even harder today: “Get creative about the future.”
Vagus nerve stimulation may quiet pain through newly mapped brainstem pathway
Physical pain is essential for survival, as it allows animals to detect when they are injured or unwell, seek shelter and address their ailments. Yet when it becomes chronic, pain can also become highly distressing and debilitating.
While there are now several therapeutic strategies for managing chronic pain, an emerging one that has been found to be particularly promising is vagus nerve stimulation (VNS). VNS entails the delivery of mild electrical pulses to the nerve that connects the brain to organs throughout the body.
Past studies suggest that VNS-based therapy can reduce the pain associated with various medical conditions, including chronic headaches, fibromyalgia and joint inflammation. The neural processes by which it can ease pain, however, are still poorly understood.
Watch this spider crawl like an ant to avoid being eaten
Unlike some other spiders that camouflage themselves with drab colors and sticklike appendages, the jumping spider Siler collingwoodi disguises itself by the way it moves. The bright blue and orange arachnid—a pea-size animal native to China and Japan—crawls like an ant, according to a new study.
In a side-by-side comparison, researchers found that S. collingwoodi spiders copied the movements of multiple spikey, aggressive species of ants. The spiders walked at a similar pace, bobbed their abdomens like the ants did, and elevated their first pair of legs when they walked, imitating antennae.
New lidar system maps location, speed and material properties in a single measurement
Researchers have developed a new kind of lidar system that simultaneously measures the location, speed and material properties of objects in a scene. This type of information could be useful for applications such as robotics, autonomous driving and remote sensing.
Lidar uses laser pulses to measure distances and create highly detailed 3D maps of objects and terrain. However, most commercial lidar systems, such as those used in autonomous cars, primarily measure distance.
“Although some emerging lidar technologies can also measure velocity, real-world perception often requires understanding an object’s surface as well,” said Dongyu Du from the University of Toronto in Canada. “Our new system uses a single measurement at each scanned point to capture millimeter-accurate distance, velocity and surface material while using eye-safe laser power.”
Linear-time prediction of proteome-scale microbial protein interactions
Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) underpin biological function, yet proteome-scale interaction prediction remains bottlenecked by the quadratic computational complexity of all-vs.-all pairwise comparisons. Here, we present FlashPPI, a contrastive learning framework, grounded in residue-level interactions, that enables linear-time prediction of physical protein interfaces across a microbial proteome. By leveraging a genomic language model that captures cross-protein coevolutionary signals from metagenomic sequences, FlashPPI aligns interacting partners in a shared latent space. We demonstrate a four-fold performance increase over existing sequence-based methods, while reducing proteome-wide screening time from days to minutes. Crucially, FlashPPI achieves comparable screening performance to state-of-the-art structure-folding models at a fraction of the computational cost. Finally, we integrate FlashPPI into an interactive web platform that combines predicted networks with functional annotations and genomic context, making proteome-wide network analysis rapid and accessible for microbial discovery.
Discovery of BIRC3 gene variants in Crohn’s disease yields a druggable pathway
Researchers from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto have found a previously unknown genetic cause of Crohn’s disease and uncovered how those changes trigger inflammation through a key immune pathway. The findings, published in Gastroenterology and involving teams from eight countries, will guide more precise treatments and improve the ability to match patients to therapies based on their unique biology.
“We’ve brought together genetics, RNA sequencing, proteomics and more to try for the first time to map the complete disease pathway, and it’s turned into a remarkable precision medicine story,” says lead author Dr. Aleixo Muise, senior scientist in the Cell & Systems Biology program, staff gastroenterologist and co-director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Centre at SickKids.
“In our SickKids clinic, we want to find the right drug for each person based on their body’s unique signature. That’s why this paper is so exciting: We have pinpointed a druggable pathway.”
MXene-polymer composite enables printed, eco-friendly device for energy harvesting and motion-sensing
Researchers at Boise State University have developed a novel, environmentally friendly triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that is fully printed and capable of harvesting biomechanical and environmental energy while also functioning as a real-time motion sensor. The innovation leverages a composite of Poly (vinyl butyral-co-vinyl alcohol-co-vinyl acetate) (PVBVA) and MXene (Ti3C2Tx) nanosheets, offering a sustainable alternative to conventional TENGs that often rely on fluorinated polymers and complex fabrication.
TENGs are innovative energy-harvesting devices that convert mechanical energy into electricity using the triboelectric effect. They were invented by Prof. Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology and generate power through contact and motion between materials, making them ideal for applications like wearable electronics, IoT sensors, and self-powered devices.
This work, published in the journal Nano Energy and led by Ph.D. student Ajay Pratap under the supervision of Prof. David Estrada of the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering at Boise State University, showcases how additive manufacturing can produce high-performance, skin-compatible, and flexible devices for real-world applications in energy harvesting, wearables electronics, and human-machine interaction.
3 Age-Reversal Therapies Being Tested Right Now
Most people still think Longevity Escape Velocity is a distant future. But what if some of the technologies that could make it possible are already being tested right now?
In this video, we look at three emerging longevity therapies: partial epigenetic reprogramming, senescent-cell removal, and stem-cell based repair. Some are already in human trials, while others are still early and experimental, but together they show how medicine may begin shifting from treating age-related disease to repairing parts of aging itself.
1:16 — THERAPY #1 — Partial epigenetic reprogramming.
3:34 — THERAPY #2 — SenoVax immune cleanup.
5:24 — THERAPY #3 — Lomecel — B — stem-cell therapy.
7:07 — CONCLUSION — From theory to repair.
📚 SOURCES AND STUDIES MENTIONED
ER-100 / partial epigenetic reprogramming: