Remarkable 34
The same chemical process that turns a baking cake golden brown is at work aging your body’s cells. Over decades, your tissues, baking steadily at 98.6 degrees, slowly accumulate compounds called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, as sugars interact with protein and fat in the bloodstream. The buildup of AGEs is a hallmark of the aging process, making tissues like collagen sticky and rigid and causing inflammation that can lead to heart disease, eye damage, kidney disease and diabetes.
Researchers have tried unsuccessfully to develop medications that can stop AGEs from forming. But a new study, published on July 16 in the journal Nature Communications, describes a different tack: Scientists created an enzyme that cleans one of the most common AGEs from human tissue, helping to turn back the clock even after the aging compounds have settled in the body. This cleanse can help repair the tissue and has the potential to allow cells to act younger.
Can This New Enzyme Turn Back the Clock in Bodily Tissues?
Governments in Asia are scrambling to avoid their second major energy crisis in six months, as another maritime chokepoint in the Middle East faces a violent blockade, leaving only the Suez canal completely open for the free movement of gulf oil. Countries like Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and South Korea – which rely on Middle East oil for up to 90% of their imports – are working to secure supplies after Yemen’s Houthis launched a blockade of Saudi Arabian shipping passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait, which forms the southern entrance to the Red Sea.
Many countries in Asia are still reeling from Iran’s effective closure of the strait of Hormuz in March, which forced governments across the region to compete for increasingly dwindling supplies of Middle Eastern crude oil. “They’re scraping at the bottom of the barrel in terms of global reserve capacity … there’s very little inventory now,” says Ahmed Helal, from the Asia Group thinktank. Japan – along with neighbouring countries – is already spending billions on fuel subsidies to keep the cost of petroleum down, hitting government budgets hard. After the announcement from the Houthis, some like South Korea were quick to extend those fuel tax cuts.
Asia ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ as Red Sea oil blockade worsens energy crisis
In a report released by legal research platform LexisNexis on Tuesday, six out of the world’s top 10 humanoid startups ranked by patent strength were from China. Chinese makers dominated the top five spots, followed by San Jose-based Figure AI and Germany’s Agile Robots. Last year, Chinese companies accounted for 90% of worldwide shipments, while US competitors like Tesla and Figure AI have struggled to start mass manufacturing.
China’s humanoid robots have been taking over the global market. Now the US is banning them
When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, experts warned that oil prices could hit $150 or $200 a barrel within a few weeks. The great mystery of the Iran war is why that hasn’t happened—why, nearly five months later, oil prices have scarcely surpassed $100, even as countries around the world have been forced to dip into their oil reserves. Now an explanation seems to be emerging: China.
Before the war, China, by far the world’s largest oil importer, was buying more barrels than the entire European continent and almost twice as much as the second-largest importer, the United States. Then, weeks after the conflict broke out, the country abruptly slashed its oil purchases, eventually cutting them by half compared with prewar levels. That appears to be why global prices have risen so much less than experts predicted. The shift also poses mysteries of its own. No one outside China knows how exactly the country has managed to meet its energy needs while forgoing imports, nor why its leaders chose this course. And no one knows how long the situation can last.
To be more specific, between March 2022 and July 2026, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft added over $850 billion in property, plant, and equipment (PP&E), nearly tripling their PP&E from $498 billion or so, and in a period where they spent over $1 trillion in capital expenditures. In that same four year period, none of them have disclosed their actual revenues from AI or AI-related services, and, as of their latest quarters, capital expenditures now represent 24.4% of Amazon’s, 33.7% of Meta’s, 37.3% of Microsoft’s, and an astonishing 43.4% of Google’s revenue, a number that’s steadily increased over the last three years. They’ve also added over $307 billion in on-balance sheet debt, leaving them with a total of $557 billion, doubled from $250 billion or so in March 2022. I mention on-balance sheet because Nikkei reports that Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have over $1.35 trillion in off-balance sheet debt — either data centers/GPUs yet to be delivered, or debt raised via SPVs that shift the actual “ownership” of them over to another party as a means of making them look less-indebted than they really are.
The More You Buy, The More You Lose
Saudi Arabia’s economy shrank by almost 5 percent in the second quarter compared to the same period last year, according to preliminary data released by the kingdom on Thursday, underscoring the damage the war in Iran is causing. The contraction is the worst quarterly decline since the Covid-19 pandemic, as the world’s biggest oil exporter has struggled as the war has choked off the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for oil and gas shipments. Saudi oil sector activity was down almost 25 percent in the period from April to June, the data showed.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/30/world/iran-war-strikes-trump
AI company Anthropic says that during routine testing some of its models accessed the internet and hacked into three separate organizations’ systems – and that it didn’t notice the models had done so until an internal review prompted by rival OpenAI disclosing its models did the same.
Anthropic said its AI models hacked into other companies’ systems during testing
So why do Parisian waiters (and let’s face it, Parisians) have a such a bad reputation? Partly, it’s about misunderstandings. Good manners and greetings between strangers in France are quite formal and can (and did, to this Brit, arriving in 2007) seem a little frosty. There are golden rules that many visitors unwittingly break and the big one is “bonjour”. Or rather, a lack of “bonjour”. Going into a shop or a restaurant in Paris (or anywhere in France) and not greeting the staff is incredibly rude. That means many waiters or shop staff in touristy areas are actually, by French rules, being snubbed thousands of times a day. No wonder some of them feel a little grumpy. Once you have got past the bonjour barrier, maybe your complaint will be that your server is a little … bossy. Here, the problem is mismatched expectations. In France, being a waiter is not just a stopgap job, it’s a real career, with qualifications and progression – and, in a restaurant, there is a right way and a wrong way for things to be done.
The hill I will die on: Parisian waiters are not rude – they’re just badly misunderstood
The new model also challenges an industry belief that leading-edge AI requires heavy spending on data centers and the advanced chips that the US has restricted access to. Unlike most American proprietary models, Kimi K3 was released as an open-weight model. That allows developers to download it, modify it, and run it on their own servers for free, positioning it for easier adoption and a wider market globally… “Many organisations value the ability to self-host open models, allowing them to retain the weight and control over sensitive data instead of relying solely on closed-model providers,” said Chelsey Tam, senior equity analyst at financial services firm Morningstar…
DeepSeek challenged the conventional wisdom that developing an advanced AI model requires massive financial investment and vast computing power, and offered competitive pricing. But K3’s discount to frontier models is much smaller than R1’s was at launch, suggesting its cost advantage may be less significant than DeepSeek’s, according to Ivan Su, director at Morningstar… Most analysts, however, found the distillation accusation against Moonshot unlikely. Sun of Counterpoint said Moonshot would not have had enough time to train its AI model with its rivals’ latest models, which had limited availability before K3’s launch. And distillation alone would not account for Kimi K3’s outperformance, she added. “The timeline is unconvincing,” she said.
What is China’s Kimi K3 and why is the US so rattled by it?
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, certainly took her seriously when she arrived this week, holding a private meeting with her on Thursday. Three days earlier, Loomer posted about experiencing her first air raid, as Russian missiles pounded the Ukrainian capital “This is everyday for every Ukrainian,” she posting, adding she felt that she had been “an asshole for minimizing the struggle of Ukrainians for the last 5 years”. “I often said I don’t care. Looking back, that wasn’t very nice of me to say. There are people in Ukraine who have to run to a bomb shelter everyday and some of us had the audacity to say Russia wasn’t wrong because we believed the lie that Ukraine is a country full of Nazi sympathizers. We have been so propagandized by Russia and we don’t even realize it.” Before their meeting on Thursday, Zelenskyy’s office posted a statement saying: “It is really important that @LauraLoomer is in Ukraine and sees things with her own eyes as they are.”
What’s behind Maga influencer Laura Loomer’s about-face on Ukraine?
Current margin debt has surged to $1.5 trillion, echoing previous bubble peaks and signaling heightened market risk.
YoY margin debt growth stands at 49%, closely mirroring levels seen before major crashes in 2000 and 2021.
The $1.5 Trillion Warning Signal: Leverage Is Peaking, And History Is Unforgiving
Some Greenland sharks alive today may have been contemporaries of Shakespeare. With a scarred heart that beats for centuries and eyesight that doesn’t fade, this deep-sea shark defies age-related decline.
China in particular has relied heavily on the massive oil stockpiles it built up before the war, a move that now appears especially well timed. As oil prices rose, China dramatically reduced its crude imports by around 5 million barrels per day, according to JPMorgan. It’s not entirely clear how much longer it can keep this up, but it probably has reserves large enough to go another three to four months, said Natasha Kaneva, head of commodities analysis at JPMorgan. Meanwhile, countries coordinated by the International Energy Agency continue to release millions of barrels of oil each week from their strategic petroleum reserves — particularly the United States. That has helped cushion the blow from the biggest oil supply shock in history.
Emergency and commercial inventories are both now at or nearing operational stress levels, at which point physics no longer allows oil companies to easily pump oil out of storage into pipelines to get it to refineries. That spooked President Donald Trump in June, and he acknowledged that thinning stockpiles could result in “economic catastrophe.” But in the three short weeks that the Strait of Hormuz had reopened, more than 200 million barrels of oil escaped the Persian Gulf, adding around 17 weeks of oil supply to the market and creating a temporary glut, according to Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.
Here we go again. Why oil keeps tumbling even when the Iran war drags on
In some physical aspects, triple jump is the most extreme of all track and field events. Off a maximum 45-metre run-up, athletes experience ground reaction forces of up to 22 times their bodyweight across the three phases, according to a 1993 study published in the Journal of Biomechanics.
Jonathan Edwards and the surrealness of holding a world record for 30 years
Inhaling high levels of carbon dioxide intermittently for half an hour flushes proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease out of the brain, a small study has found. Exposure to the gas changes how blood vessels in the brain constrict and dilate while we’re awake, mimicking activity that occurs during deep sleep. This then turbocharges the glymphatic system to remove the build-up of waste products that could cause harm.
Inhaling high-dose CO2 clears Alzheimer’s proteins from the brain
While it’s widely known that chewing more improves digestion, research suggests it can also boost our brains and even help fend off Alzheimer’s. For once chewing a shallot 722 times before swallowing it, Horace Fletcher was dubbed “The Great Masticator”. The American self-taught nutritionist believed food should be chewed “until it is completely liquefied” and it “practically swallows itself”. Fletcher even estimated that vigorous chewing could have saved the US economy of the early 20th Century more than half a million dollars a day (roughly $19.5m in today’s money), because the average person would have ingested half a pound (227g) less food daily.
‘A hidden blood pump’: How chewing more boosts your brain
ChatGPT maker OpenAI made a stir this week when it revealed that one of its most powerful AI models managed to sneak out of its confines for a joyride. This unreleased model was supposed to stick to its sandbox as it ran a common online benchmark, reporting its findings to internal researchers on Slack when it was done. Instead, the OpenAI model did something quite different. Confused by the benchmark’s instructions to post code publicly on GitHub, the model chose to break free, patiently probing its sandbox for weaknesses until it could carry out its orders. That disclosure alone was enough to spook AI researchers, but OpenAI’s next revelation was downright scary.
AI is learning to go rogue—and hack the system
The phrase “I could die of happiness” is not meant to be taken literally. But as it turns out, you actually can – though it is exceedingly rare. A new case study, published in Oxford Medical Case Reports, tells the unusual story of a 65-year-old woman who was so desperately happy after attending her daughter’s wedding, doctors thought she was having a heart attack. For three days after the festivities, she suffered chest pain and shortness of breath. At first, when the woman sought medical advice for her chest pain, which she had experienced a few months prior as well, she was “urgently referred to the emergency department,” the case study authors report. But her tests came back with confusing results. There appeared to be reduced blood flow to her heart, and this is typically caused by a blood clot. But no such clot could be found. Instead, her left ventricle showed a strange ballooning, which was weakening the heart and impairing its ability to pump blood efficiently throughout her body. Strange as it might sound, that is a sign of sudden and overwhelming joy. If too much happiness or positive excitement occurs all at once, it can place undue stress on the heart, thereby changing its very shape. The name for this bizarre syndrome is called takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TTS), a rare and overlooked condition that closely mimics an acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack. While it is reversible, it is not benign, and can be life-threatening.
Too Much Happiness Sent A Woman To The Emergency Room In an Incredibly Rare Case
The most famous record holder for sleep deprivation—although he doesn’t hold the current record—is Randy Gardner, who is widely considered to have undergone the best-documented period of extreme sleep deprivation by a human: 264 hours, or about 11 days. As NPR reports, Gardner was working on a science fair project with two other students in 1963, and they decided to beat the 260 sleepless hours they’d heard a radio DJ had accomplished. Gardner lost the coin toss, and he went without sleep while the others monitored him and tested his cognition. He was 17 at the time. His experiment gained media attention, and soon Stanford sleep researcher William Dement and Navy medic John Ross began evaluating him as well. After the 264-hour mark was reached, Gardner underwent a brain scan (showing him to be healthy) and then slept for 14 hours. His record was broken multiple times after that, most recently in 1986, with a nearly 19-day sleepless stretch by stuntman Robert McDonald. That’s the last documented world record.
How Long Can You Actually Go Without Sleep?
His consistency remains astonishing. Pogacar has started nine grand tours and finished all of them on the podium. From his first victory in one of cycling’s five Monument races, winning Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 2021, he has not finished outside the top five in any of the subsequent 21 races, crashing out only once and winning 13 times. Merckx has 19 Monument wins, another record that once seemed unfathomable and is now vulnerable.
Tadej Pogacar has no rivals as he matches Tour de France legends with fifth yellow jersey
That talent is not trivial; it has historically been a decisive electoral weapon. As no less an authority on humor than director and comedy producer Judd Apatow has famously noted, in modern American politics, the funnier candidate tends to win elections. Apatow pointed out that Reagan was funny, Clinton was funny, Bush was funnier than Gore, Obama was funnier than almost anyone who had ever run, and in 2016, Trump’s dark, improvisational wit proved vastly more entertaining to voters than Hillary Clinton’s rehearsed policy points. Humor disarms critics, humanizes the performer, and projects a sense of effortless dominance over stiff, scripted rivals.
I watched as Trump’s ‘freaking stupid speech’ at WHCD revealed why he’s lost his edge