Via VICE:

‘Longevity maxxing is having a moment. Biological age tests, NAD+ supplements, Bryan Johnson’s entire existence—the premise is that aging is a problem with a solution. A new study suggests the solution has a ceiling nobody’s talking about.

Researchers at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology ran a thought experiment with a deceptively direct premise: if every reversible aspect of aging could somehow be eliminated—every disease, every hormonal decline, every cellular dysfunction science might one day fix—what would actually kill us? Their answer, published in npj Aging, is random DNA mutations. The kind that accumulate in cells throughout a lifetime, mostly harmless, occasionally not, and ultimately unavoidable.

The team built a mathematical model to calculate how much damage these so-called somatic mutations would do to a population that had otherwise beaten aging. Their analysis found that even with all other reversible aging hallmarks removed, somatic mutations alone limit median human lifespan to somewhere between 146 and 194 years—about double current longevity. A theoretical ceiling, not a prediction….’

Helena Fitzgerald via Oakland Review of Books:

‘A phrase has become popular, recently, in certain corners of the internet, like a mantra or a code: Maybe it will happen today. The “it” usually refers to a particular possible-future event related to American politics, one that might be euphemistically described as the hope that the current administration will be ousted from power by the simple, inevitable force of time The phrase is used most frequently by, and is mostly contained to, a certain cringe-liberal demographic. On occasion, some likely inconsequential rumor or piece of news activates a certain part of the already-small group of people who pay attention to this sort of thing, and the phrase suddenly proliferates. If you were to log onto, say, Bluesky at the right time on the right day, when somebody’s picked up on some detail or morsel of gossip, you’d see posts iterating on the phrase, rearranging it grammatically, adding it to other quotations or references, posting that one song from Cabaret, and then making fun of how much people post about it, or telling people to stop posting about it.…’

Ali Rıza Taşkale via aeon.co:

‘Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future…’