This is today’s edition download, Our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s happening in the world of technology.
First human trials of Kayakalp method to begin “soon”
Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup founded by Harvard professor and life-extension evangelist David Sinclair, has won FDA approval to move forward with the first targeted effort to reverse aging in human volunteers.
The company plans to treat eye disease with a revolutionary rejuvenation concept called “reprogramming,” which has recently attracted multimillion-dollar investments from Silicon Valley firms such as Altos Labs, New Limits and Retro Biosciences, backed by many of the biggest names in tech. Read the full story.
-Antonio Regalado
Stratospheric Internet could finally launch this year
Today, an estimated 2.2 billion people still have either limited access to the Internet or no access at all, mainly because they live in remote locations. But that number may be lower this year, thanks to tests of stratospheric airships, unmanned aerial vehicles and other high-altitude platforms for Internet delivery.
Although Google shut down its high-profile internet balloon Project Loon in 2021, work continues behind the scenes on other types of high-altitude platform stations. Now, several companies claim they have solved Loon’s problems – and are getting ready to prove the technology’s Internet beaming potential starting this year. Read the full story.
-Tereza Pultarova
OpenAI’s latest product gives you a code science experience
OpenAI has just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, is doing. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT into a text editor for writing scientific papers.
The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center in the software that scientists use to write their work in the same way that chatbots are now embedded in popular programming editors. It’s vibe coding, but for science. Read the full story.
-Will Douglas Haven
MIT Technology Review Described: This Nobel Prize-winning chemist dreams of creating water out of thin air
Most of the Earth is covered with water, but only 3% of it is fresh, with no salt – the kind of water that all terrestrial living things need. Today, desalination plants that extract salt from seawater provide large quantities of potable water in technologically advanced desert countries such as Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but at a high cost.
Omar Yaghi is one of three scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October 2025 for identifying metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs—metal ions, which are attached to organic molecules that form repeating structural landscapes. Today that work is the basis of a new project that sounds like science fiction or a miracle: extracting water from thin air.
This is our latest story being adapted into the MIT Technology Review Narrated Podcast, which we’re publishing every week spotify And apple podcasts. Simply navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on any platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
Must read
I’ve scoured the internet to find you today’s funniest/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 TikTok has settled its social media addiction lawsuit
Just before appearing before a jury in California. (NYT $)
+ But similar claims being made against Meta and YouTube will continue. (bloomberg $)
2 AI CEOs Have Started Condemning ICE Violence
Also praised Trump. (techcrunch)
+ Apple’s Tim Cook says he asked the US president to “tone things down”. (bloomberg $)
+ ICE appears to have a laissez-faire approach to preserving surveillance footage. (404 media)
3 dozen CDC vaccination databases have been frozen
He is no longer being updated with important health information under RFK Jr.Ars Technica)
+ This is why we don’t have a cold vaccine. As yet. (MIT Technology Review)
4 China has approved the first wave of Nvidia H200 chips
Following CEO Jensen Huang’s strategic visit to the country. (reuters)
5 Inside the Rise of AI “NeoLab”
They are prioritizing long-term research successes over immediate profits. (WSJ $)
6 How Anthropic scanned and disposed of millions of books
In an effort to train your AI model to write high quality text. (WP $)
7 India’s tech workforce is going bankrupt
They are under immense pressure as AI is taking away more jobs. (rest of the world)
+ But the country’s largest IT company denies that AI will lead to mass layoffs. (foot $)
+ There is a race in India for AI freedom. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Google has forced a UK group to stop comparing YouTube to TV viewing figures
Maybe fewer people are getting involved than they want to admit? (foot $)
9 RIP Amazon Grocery Store 
The retail giant is closing all its brick-and-mortar shops. (cnn)
+ Amazon employees are worried about layoffs. (insider $)
10 This computing technology could help reduce AI’s energy demands
Enter thermodynamic computing. (ieee spectrum)
+ Three big things we still don’t know about AI’s energy burden. (MIT Technology Review)
today’s thought
“Oh my God, IG is a drug.”
-An anonymous Meta employee has commented on the addictive qualities of Instagram in an internal document that has been made public as part of the social media addiction trial facing Meta, Ars Technica Report.
one more thing
How AI and Wikipedia have left vulnerable languages in a disastrous state
Wikipedia is the most ambitious multilingual project since the Bible: it has versions in more than 340 languages, and more than 400 obscure versions are under development. But many of these smaller versions are being filled with AI-translated content. For example, volunteers working on four African languages estimated, according to MIT Technology Review, that 40% to 60% of the articles in their Wikipedia editions were uncorrected machine translations.
This is starting to create a wicked problem. AI systems learn new languages by extracting huge amounts of text from the Internet. Wikipedia is sometimes the largest source of linguistic data online for less-spoken languages – so any errors on those pages could poison the wells from which AI is expected to draw. Volunteers are being forced to make extreme efforts to fix the problem, even removing some languages from Wikipedia entirely. Read the full story.
-Jacob Judah
we can still have good things
A place of relaxation, fun and distractions to brighten your day. (Any ideas? drop me a line Or make them sneak up on me.)
+ this singing group This is extremely heartwarming for people experiencing cognitive decline in Amsterdam ($)
+ I enjoyed this passionate defense movie sex scene.
+ Here’s how to dress steve mcqueen (Built-in cool is not included, sorry)
+ Trans women looking for homes in beautiful Italian city Torvajanica 
