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Singularity Hub chronicles technological progress by highlighting the breakthroughs, players, and issues shaping the future as well as supporting a global community of smart, passionate, action-oriented people who want to change the world.

01/25/2025

How do cancer cells learn to dodge immune attacks? This has puzzled scientists for decades.

A study in Nature this week has a surprising answer: They steal healthy mitochondria—the cell’s energy powerhouses—from the immune cells that hunt them down. In turn, cancers pump their own damaged mitochondria into healthy immune cells, gradually destroying them from the inside.

This swapping “is a newly discovered mechanism that thwarts anticancer defenses,” wrote Jonathan Brestoff at Washington University School of Medicine

In a lab test, drugs that blocked mitochondrial transfer revitalized the exhausted cells and made treatment with a common cancer immunotherapy more effective.

Although “it remains to be determined how prevalent such mitochondrial exchange is” between other cell types, Brestoff wrote, the research raises new questions about its role in other diseases.

How cancer cells learn to dodge immune attacks has puzzled scientists for decades. A new study offers a surprising answer.

01/23/2025

Is this copyright infringement on a massive scale?

"We have to follow the data," said Times lawyer Jennifer Maisel in court Tuesday. "Similar to how in criminal cases you follow the money."

And if you follow the data, the publishers' legal team argued, ChatGPT and Microsoft are profiting from journalistic work that was scanned, processed and recreated without payment or consent. Microsoft has incorporated OpenAI technology into its Bing search engine.

"It's substitional," said Times attorney Ian Crosby, meaning that ChatGPT and Bing have become, for some people, a substitute for the publishers' original work. That point, if proven, is key to winning a copyright infringement case.

If the publishers win the case, and a federal judge orders the dataset destroyed, it could completely upend the company, since it would force OpenAI to recreate its dataset relying only on works it has been authorized to use.

Will this be the end of OpenAI?

In three consolidated suits, publishers allege that OpenAI broke copyright law by copying millions of articles without permission or payment. OpenAI counters that the fair use doctrine protects them.

01/22/2025

That was not the destruction of Alderaan you saw in the sky (or in a video on your phone) last week - thankfully there were no reports of injuries.

It has, however, been described as "the coolest sh*t I’ve ever seen in my life."

SpaceX launched an upgraded version of its massive Starship rocket from South Texas on Thursday, but the flight ended less than nine minutes later after engineers lost contact with the spacecraft.

The videos confirmed Starship—the rocket's upper stage—broke apart in space, or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in SpaceX-speak.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, wrote on X that early signs from data suggested there was a propellant leak in a cavity above Starship's engine firewall. The leak was large enough to build pressure in excess of the ship's vent capacity.

Coming into 2025, SpaceX officials hoped to launch as many as 25 Starship test flights this year to experiment with new designs, attempt a recovery of Starship from orbit, and demonstrate orbital refueling, a capability that is critical to NASA and SpaceX's plans to land astronauts on the Moon later this decade.

Read more ⬇️

The Federal Aviation Administration will likely require an investigation into the accident.

01/21/2025

How effective is hydropower in the pursuit of carbon neutrality?

China has pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, and it looks like they're planning on hydropower to get there.

Medog Hydropower Station, as it will be called, will blow other hydropower dams out of the water (pun intended), with an estimated annual generation capacity triple that of the world’s largest existing dam (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also in China).

The 60-gigawatt project will be able to generate up to 300,000 gigawatt-hours (or 300 terawatt-hours) of electricity per year. That’s equivalent to Greece’s annual energy consumption.

Other countries have raised concerns on the area’s geological stability, potential impact on water flow to other countries, disruption of ecosystems on the biodiverse Tibetan Plateau, and relocation needs.

Construction is slated to start in 2029. Read more ⬇️

It will not only be one of China's biggest infrastructure projects ever, it will be one of the most expensive infrastructure projects ever.

01/17/2025

Is AI going to take your job? If so, what's next?

"Half of employers plan to re-orient their business in response to AI," writes the WEF in the report. "Two-thirds plan to hire talent with specific AI skills, while 40% anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks."

Companies ranked AI and big data expertise, networks and cybersecurity, and technological literacy as the three most in-demand skill sets.

The WEF report also identifies specific job categories facing decline. Postal service clerks, executive secretaries, and payroll staff top the list of shrinking roles, with changes driven by factors including (but not limited to) AI adoption. And for the first time, graphic designers and legal secretaries appear among the fastest-declining positions, which the WEF tentatively links to generative AI's expanding capabilities in creative and administrative work.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been a proponent of exploring solutions like universal basic income (UBI), which could provide a base level of money to every American citizen to supplement or replace job-related income.

What is your solution for the people whose careers will be eliminated by AI?

As AGI talk sparks job loss fears, new WEF report projects AI-driven net job growth by 2030.

01/14/2025

The space race has a new face!

Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin hopes to become a major rival to SpaceX in the private space industry.

Just like SpaceX’s rockets, the first stage is designed to fly up to 25 times. After detaching from the second stage, it will return to Earth and attempt to land on a barge in the ocean. The company is planning a landing attempt on this initial test launch.

Reusability has dramatically reduced SpaceX’s costs compared to competitors. Proving Blue Origin can reuse its rockets too will be crucial if it hopes to muscle in on a share of the launch market.

It is also likely to get a significant amount of business from Bezos’s other venture, Amazon, which is planning to deploy a constellation of internet satellites dubbed Project Kuiper to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink.

Blue Origin is hoping to break SpaceX's market stranglehold with its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket.

01/13/2025

Do you think CRISPR editing in humans should be illegal?

Germline editing is banned in most countries. A Chinese court sentenced He Jiankui, the disgraced scientist first to experiment with editing human embryos, to jail for three years. Now free again, He said in an interview with NPR last year that the CRISPRed twins, Lulu and Nana, are healthy and growing normally as toddlers, although he declined to answer more detailed questions about their wellbeing.

A new analysis took an unusual approach to analyzing the risks and benefits of germline editing. For one, it was completely inside a machine—no potential babies harmed. For another, the authors of the study focused especially on diseases with multiple potential genetic contributors—heart attack, stroke, cancer, depression, and diabetes—all of which haunt many families.

On average, adding only 10 protective gene variants slashed disease risk up to 60-fold. The mathematical model also predicted health benefits such as lowered levels of “bad” cholesterol in people prone to heart disease.

Naysayers say that Embryo editing for disease is unsafe and unproven. “In embryo editing, the stakes are extremely high,” wrote Carmi, Greely, and Mitchell. “Any errors will affect every cell and organ in the future child” (as well as their offspring for generations).

As scientists grapple with the implications of a CRISPR-baby world, a controversial new analysis simulates the risks and benefits of germline editing.

01/10/2025

Do you feel like time is speeding up as you get older?

You're probably used to time slowing down when you're bored and speeding up when you're absorbed in something like music or painting, but these variations in time perception are quite mild.

Time expansion experiences (or Tees) can occur in an accident or emergency situation, such as a car crash, a fall, or an attack. In time expansion experiences, time appears to expand by many orders of magnitude. In his research, he has has found that around 85 percent of people have had at least one Tee.

Why does this happen? Steve Taylor has 3 theories.

Have you experienced a Tee? What was it like?

In some situations, our sense of time expands. We slip outside our normal consciousness, and into a different time-world. Why does this happen?

01/09/2025

How much can you really control your longevity, and how much is up to your genes?

Compared to mice sipping normal water, those sipping on LCA had improved metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and control of blood sugar levels. They also ran further and for longer and could grab onto a bar with more strength, their muscles healing better from the tear-and-wear of physical workouts. Even their cells’ energy factories, or mitochondria, hummed along more efficiently and grew in numbers.

Surprisingly, LCA also boosted levels of GLP-1—the hormone that Ozempic and other blockbuster drugs are based on—without triggering any muscle loss. All these effects were based on AMPK. Mice without the protein didn’t reap any health benefits from LCA.

Lots of questions remain. Many people have had their gallbladders—organs that store bile—removed. So far, there isn’t any evidence the procedure increases the chance of age-related diseases. LCA at high doses is also toxic to the liver and, when combined with DNA-damaging chemicals, could boost the risk of cancer.

Diet is only part of the picture when it comes to longevity. A recent study in genetically diverse mice undergoing caloric restriction suggests that genes may play a larger role. LCA may need to be tested in a larger genetic variety of mice and at different ages, potentially with longer duration.

Dramatically reducing calories for years is nearly impossible for most people. What if we could mimic the effects of dieting in a pill?

01/08/2025

Gains from training ever-larger models seem to be drying up. The new direction may give Nvidia's rivals a chance to compete.

At the end of last year, AMD unveiled its MI300 chips, which the company’s CEO claimed could go toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s chips on training but provide a 1.4x boost on inference. Industry leaders including Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft announced shortly afterwards they would use the chips for inference.

Amazon, Google, and a host of startups are working to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on the market as well.

However, software is a major barrier for those thinking of moving away from Nvidia’s chips.

Most AI researchers are comfortable in CUDA and reluctant to learn other companies’ software. To counter this, AMD, Intel, and Google joined the UXL Foundation, an industry group creating open-source alternatives to CUDA. Their efforts are still nascent, however.

A recent change in priorities at the biggest AI developers could shake up the industry.

01/07/2025

BEACON, launched a few years back, is testing whether base-edited blood stem cells can tackle severe sickle cell disease, with initial results expected in February 2025.

Pluvicto was initially okayed for treatment after chemotherapy for prostate cancer. Now an ongoing trial, PSMAddition, is asking if early treatment may yield better results.

A new clinical study called Stratification and Treatment in Early Psychosis (STEP) hopes CBD could also help people with psychosis from schizophrenia or other disorders. Researchers expect first results in 2025.

One trial, called My Personal Breast Cancer Screening, is looking to make breast cancer screening more personalized based on risk. The largest global study to date, the trial has launched in six countries with over 53,000 women.

These are just glimpses of medical therapies in the works. There’ll be plenty more to cover in 2025. Learn more ⬇️

What new medicines are poised to take the leap from breakthrough to approval in 2025? Here’s what to expect this year.

01/04/2025

Some companies stand by a pure end-to-end elf-driving system, but humans don't follow the rules 100% of the time... what happens when the AI learns to roll through stop signs as we do? What other driving habits might it pick up along the way?

And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, one which which might allow it to scale up far faster and roll out more widely than its rivals.

Proponents of end-to-end systems say that by removing the data “bottlenecks” caused by situation-specific instructions the cars ought to drive in a more fluent, human manner. By being smarter and more autonomous they ought to be able to cope better with the rare, unpredictable, “long-tail” or edge-case scenarios which might confuse the system into crashing, literally, and which have long put the fear into AV developers and the legislators who will licence them.

"...there's no prizes for having the right idea eight years ago. Now it's all down to ex*****on." -Alex Kendall, Co-founder & CEO

What's been your experience with autonomous vehicles so far?

Unlike Waymo’s hybrid system of AI training with hand-coded instructions, Wayve’s AI handles the entire self-driving process, learning unsupervised to cope with the unpredictable and drive more like we do.

01/03/2025

Tech companies are spending as if AI’s transformative uses are a foregone conclusion. But are they really?

Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs’s head of global equity research said, "If we’re going to justify a trillion or more dollars of investment, [AI] needs to solve complex problems and enable us to do things we haven’t been able to do before." Today’s flagship AI models, he said, largely cannot.

Do you think it will pay off? ⬇️

Tech companies are spending as if AI’s transformative uses are a foregone conclusion. They’re not.

01/02/2025

The real aliens might be waiting in the mirror...

If released, mirror bacteria could evade the immune system, potentially causing lethal infections in people, animals, and plants. With utterly “alien” genomes, they are also likely to dodge antibiotics and other treatments, allowing them to rapidly spread like an uncontrollable invasive species.

There’s reason to explore these “flipped” molecules. For one, they could make longer-lasting medication. Therapies are already being developed that use mirror proteins taking advantage of their reversed chirality to be very resistant to degradation which extends the life of a protein drug.

This month, dozens of scientists penned a warning against making mirror bacteria in Science. To be clear, they are not advocating a ban on research into individual therapeutic mirror molecules, which could benefit medicine. The problem comes from moving this technology to living bacteria with the potential to reproduce.

How far should intellectual curiosity be explored without limitations?

Scientists have been engineering “mirror life” by changing the chirality of life’s building blocks. Now, it's time to set some boundaries.

01/01/2025

And just like that, the 2024 season comes to an end. Check out the highlights:

This year, readers were again fascinated by stories about artificial intelligence. One algorithm learned to make short, playable video games from video footage; another cloned real people’s personalities; and yet another took on the role of your future self—ready and willing to impart wisdom.

Other popular pieces dug into the rise of robotaxis, tantalizing hints about how we might one day stave off aging, and a unified theory of consciousness.

We hope you enjoy a second look or discovering these for the first time.

As always, thanks for reading!

This year's top stories included AI learning to make video games, chatbots cloning real people, and a unified theory of consciousness.

12/31/2024

The 3 people who won Nobel Prizes in chemistry this year for their work in protein design may surprise you... would you have guessed they were computer scientists?

They’re novel, but do any AI-designed proteins actually work? Yes, according to several studies.

One used AI to dream up a universe of potential CRISPR gene editors. Inspired by large language models—like those that gave birth to ChatGPT—the AI model in the study eventually designed a gene editing system as accurate as existing CRISPR-based tools when tested on cells.

Outside of medicine, AI designed mineral-forming proteins that, if integrated into aquatic microbes, could potentially soak up excess carbon and transform it into limestone.

For AI to truly “understand” proteins, researchers will have to train models on the changing structures as proteins shapeshift. Biophysics can help model a protein’s twists and turns, but it’s extremely difficult. Scientists are now generating libraries of synthetic and natural proteins and gradually mutating each to see how simple changes alter their structures and flexibility.

Regardless, there’s no doubt AI is speeding protein design. Let’s see what next year has to offer.

Happy New Year! 🎉

It seems imagination is the only limit to AI-based protein design. But there's room for even more progress in 2025.

12/30/2024

Just 26% of companies who have experimented with AI have moved past proof of concept to get real value out of the technology... but is that about to change?

Current iterations of the technology are, at best, a kind of copilot. They can help users accomplish some tasks more efficiently, but only with close supervision and the ever-present risk of mistakes. Leading voices in the AI industry are saying that autonomous AI agents are poised to have a breakout year in 2025.

With the advent of models like OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1, which are specialist reasoning models, there’s hope that agents could soon become much more capable, and major players are investing heavily in that promise.

According to Pitchbook, the number of funding deals for agent-focused ventures was up more than 80 percent by September compared to the previous year. The median deal value was also up nearly 50 percent.

There is some skepticism around how quickly agents are likely to burst onto the scene. As The Verge notes, AI companies have been ploughing billions into research and development with little revenue to show for it and are still searching for a killer app that justifies their sky-high valuations. Practical considerations could mean progress is slower than they hope.

Do you think these independent reasoning agents will be ready by the end of 2025?

Industry experts say AI will begin to live up to the hype next year as AI agents force their way into all aspects of our lives.

12/29/2024

Unapproved exosome therapy is on the rise with tragic consequences.

The rogue clinics have already led to tragedies. In one case, “a well-known private cosmetic surgery clinic administered exosomes to at least four patients, including relatives of staff members with stage IV lung cancer, and found that the cancer rapidly worsened after administration,” wrote the authors.

The worry isn’t that exosomes are harmful by themselves. How they’re obtained plays a huge role in safety. In unregulated settings, there’s a large chance of the bubbles being contaminated by endotoxins—which trigger dangerous inflammatory responses—or bacteria that lingers and grows.

Unregulated clinics don’t just harm patients. They could also set a promising field back.

Some tout exosomes as the latest "cure-all"—but alarmed scientists warn we're nowhere near the point when we might responsibly use them as therapies.

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