Future Mars crews could grow their own cancer-fighting treatments.
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Doug Wolens on the Singularity: It’s Ultimately Up To You
13 years ago, I sat down with Doug Wolens to talk about a word almost no one was using: the singularity.
Doug was a lawyer who walked away from the courtroom to make films. His documentary, The Singularity, did something rare. It refused to cheerlead. It asked questions instead.
One thing he said has stayed with me ever since. Science is a means, not an end. It does not deliver a scientific destination. It delivers a humanistic one.
That distinction matters more now than it did in 2013.
Back then, machine intelligence surpassing human intelligence was a thought experiment. Today, it is a product roadmap. We used to argue about whether it would happen. Now we argue about what to do while it does.
But the sharpest question in Doug’s film was never about the machines. It was about us.
AI repurposes routine chest X-rays to catch silent bone loss before fracture
Osteoporosis is a silent disease where bone loss develops gradually before fractures occur. Current clinical screening recommendations mainly focus on older women and selected high-risk groups, leaving some men, younger adults, and individuals with normal body weight completely outside routine screening pathways.
To close this care gap, researchers from St. Paul’s Hospital and National Taiwan University have demonstrated how AI can leverage routine chest X-rays to detect asymptomatic bone loss, closing critical gaps in screening healthy Asian populations. Their paper is published in the journal npj Digital Medicine.
Strikingly, the study found that more than half of the confirmed abnormal bone-density cases occurred in people with a normal body mass index (BMI). This reveals a severe diagnostic blind spot in conventional, guideline-based screening. By relying strictly on traditional criteria, health care systems routinely overlook healthy-weight individuals, younger adults, and men who are secretly losing bone density but remain completely off the clinical radar.
AI Cyber Threats Drive Zero Trust Security Shift
By Chuck Brooks, president of Brooks Consulting International and one of Executive Mosaic’s GovCon Experts
We have now transitioned from the age of digital dangers to an era of complete systemic vulnerability. The data clearly demonstrates that cyber threats are no longer sporadic; they represent a persistent, sophisticated phenomenon. Hackers are now utilizing autonomous adversaries rather than merely sophisticated tools.
Recent industry data obtained in early 2026 indicates a vertical trajectory, revealing that global AI-driven cyber incidents have surged by an astonishing 72 percent year-over-year. A 72 percent surge is not just growth; it’s systemic acceleration.
The Quantum Frontier: How Quantum Computing Is Reshaping Our Future
Quantum computing was once considered a distant scientific project that could revolutionize computing. That discussion has shifted drastically today. Quantum technologies have progressed beyond lab trials and theory. Emerging quantum capabilities include commercial quantum platforms, quantum networking projects, quantum sensor advancements, and powerful quantum processors.
Advances in recent years suggest we are entering the Quantum Frontier Era. National security, science, economic competitiveness, and cybersecurity will all feel the impact. The quantum age has begun. It’s started.
Popular joint supplement glucosamine linked to faster Alzheimer’s progression
Because glucosamine is widely available and frequently used by older adults to support joint health, the researchers wanted to determine whether it could influence Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD).
Working with collaborators Yi Guo, Ph.D., and Jiang Bian, Ph.D., the team used artificial intelligence to analyze deidentified UF Health records collected between 2012 and 2024. They focused on patients diagnosed with either ADRD or mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
Among those patients, researchers found that glucosamine use was relatively common. A total of 1,896 patients with ADRD and 2,750 patients with MCI reported taking the supplement, representing about 8% of each group.
Simplifying complex ideas in sketches
What would you see if you tried to travel alongside a light wave at the speed of light? And suppose you held a mirror in front of you as you zipped along. What would you see in the mirror? This and similar thought experiments were posed by the young Albert Einstein to himself in his teens. It’s come to be known as Einstein’s Mirror and is also the title of a popular book on relativity. It would at first seem that light, reflected off your face, could never reach the mirror to, in turn, reflect back into your eyes to see it. So what would you see? It was only years later that Einstein developed a theory that answered this puzzle. And it required some fundamental adjustments to how we understood the world, which still bend my mind to think about them. These include: You can’t travel at the speed of light. Time is not fixed; it is relative. The speed of light is a universal constant—it is the same, independent of the motion of the source. Einstein wrote: “After ten years of reflection, such a principle resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c [the velocity of light in a vacuum], I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing…” — Autobiographical notes, 1949 I’ll try to explain a little as I understand it. Our usual experience is that velocities are additive. Suppose I am on a moving train carriage and I throw a ball from the back of the carriage to the front. For an observer outside the train, that ball moves at the speed of the train plus the speed of the ball relative to me. But light behaves differently. As you approach the speed of light, the energy required to keep accelerating approaches infinity. In effect, you can’t reach the speed of light. So an observer of a flying Einstein wouldn’t see light travelling from him to the mirror at twice the speed of light. What changes is time. For the high-speed Einstein, the light would appear to travel away from him to the mirror and back at its usual immense speed. However, for an observer, what would only seem a moment for the high-speed Einstein might take years for the rest of us—the experience of time changes with velocity. It’s a remarkable turn for a simple and fascinating question. It’s amazing to me that the young Einstein would both pose this question, continue work on it, and then think to question some of the most self-evident facts of our world as we experience it: that time is not fixed, that a speed cannot be reached, and of course, ultimately, that energy is matter. The book Einstein’s Mirror is co-authored by my Dad (respect!). It’s full of photographs, fascinating stories, and the characters that moved physics forward. It includes the people, events and science central to another of Christopher Nolan’s films, Oppenheimer. Perhaps Christopher read it 🤔 Related Ideas to Einstein’s Mirror Also see: Laplace’s Demon Redshift Looking back in time The Doppler Effect Sonic Boom The most beautiful equation — Earlier this year, we attended a showing of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar at the Royal Albert Hall in London with Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack played by a live orchestra. It was a fantastic way to experience a remarkable film—a film that manages to make black holes, wormholes, and time slippage both understandable (largely) and part of the plot. It strikes me as an astonishing achievement for a mainstream film.