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In the future, quantum computers could rapidly simulate new materials or help scientists develop faster machine‐learning models, opening the door to many new possibilities.

But these applications will only be possible if quantum computers can perform operations extremely quickly, so scientists can make measurements and perform corrections before compounding error rates reduce their accuracy and reliability.

The efficiency of this measurement process, known as readout, relies on the strength of the coupling between photons, which are particles of light that carry , and artificial atoms, units of matter that are often used to store information in a quantum computer.

Lately, there’s been growing pushback against the idea that AI will transform geroscience in the short term.
When Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis told 60 Minutes that AI could help cure every disease within 5–10 years, many in the longevity and biotech communities scoffed. Leading aging biologists called it wishful thinking — or outright fantasy.
They argue that we still lack crucial biological data to train AI models, and that experiments and clinical trials move too slowly to change the timeline.

Our guest in this episode, Professor Derya Unutmaz, knows these objections well. But he’s firmly on Team Hassabis.
In fact, Unutmaz goes even further. He says we won’t just cure diseases — we’ll solve aging itself within the next 20 years.

And best of all, he offers a surprisingly detailed, concrete explanation of how it will happen:
building virtual cells, modeling entire biological systems in silico, and dramatically accelerating drug discovery — powered by next-generation AI reasoning engines.

🧬 In this wide-ranging conversation, we also cover:

✅ Why biological complexity is no longer an unsolvable barrier.
✅ How digital twins could revolutionize diagnosis and treatment.
✅ Why clinical trials as we know them may soon collapse.
✅ The accelerating timeline toward longevity escape velocity.
✅ How reasoning AIs (like GPT-4o, o1, DeepSeek) are changing scientific research.
✅ Whether AI creativity challenges the idea that only biological minds can create.
✅ Why AI will force a new culture of leisure, curiosity, and human flourishing.
✅ The existential stress that will come as AI outperforms human expertise.
✅ Why “Don’t die” is no longer a joke — it’s real advice.

🎙️ Hosted — as always — by Peter Ottsjö (tech journalist and author of Evigt Ung) and Dr. Patrick Linden (philosopher and author of The Case Against Death).

Scientists have mapped an unprecedentedly large portion of the brain of a mouse. The cubic millimeter worth of brain tissue represents the largest piece of a brain we’ve ever understood to this degree, and the researchers behind this project say that the mouse brain is similar enough to the human brain that they can even extrapolate things about us. A cubic millimeter sounds tiny—to us, it is tiny—but a map of 200,000 brain cells represents just over a quarter of a percent of the mouse brain. In brain science terms, that’s extraordinarily high. A proportionate sample of the human brain would be 240 million cells.

Within the sciences, coding and computer science can sometimes overshadow the physical and life sciences. Rhetoric about artificial intelligence has raced ahead with terms like “human intelligence,” but the human brain is not well enough understood to truly give credence to that idea. Scientists have worked for decades to analyze the brain, and they’re making great progress despite the outsized rhetoric working against them.