“I think, therefore I am,” René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, famously wrote in 1637. His idea was straightforward: even if your senses, the world, or your body deceives you, the very act of thinking proves you exist because there’s a thinker doing the thinking. Cogito, ergo sum, as the phrase goes in Latin, cemented the way the Western world would continue to define the self for the next 400 years—as a thinking mind, first and foremost.

But a growing body of neuroscience studies suggest the father of modern thought got it backward: the true foundation of consciousness isn’t thought, some scientists say—it’s feeling. A massive international study published in Nature late last month is further driving the theory forward. That means “I feel, therefore I am” may be the new maxim of consciousness. We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling bodies that think. And it’s more than a philosophical debate, too. Determining where consciousness resides could reshape life-or-death decisions and force society to rethink who, or what, truly counts as being self-aware.

The experiment used a rare “adversarial collaboration” model, bringing together scientists with opposing views to test two major theories of consciousness: integrated information theory (IIT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT). Put simply, IIT says consciousness arises when information in the brain is deeply connected, especially in the back of the brain. GNWT argues that consciousness arises when the front of the brain broadcasts important information across a wide network, like a brain-wide alert.

Beyond basic blood work: a systems approach to cardiac risk assessment

NASA scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Japan’s University of Toho, have used supercomputers to model the far future of Earth’s habitability. Their findings offer a clear—if distant—timeline for the end of life on our planet.

According to the study, the Sun will be the ultimate cause of the end of life on Earth. Over the next billion years, its output will continue to increase, gradually heating the planet beyond the threshold of life. The research estimates that life on Earth will end around the year 1,000,002,021, when surface conditions become too extreme to support even the most resilient organisms.

But the decline will begin much earlier. As the Sun grows hotter, Earth’s atmosphere will undergo significant changes. Oxygen levels will fall, temperatures will rise exponentially, and air quality will worsen. These shifts, projected through detailed climate change and solar radiation models, map out when life on Earth will end, not as a sudden collapse but as a slow and irreversible decline.

The researchers discovered that AP2A1 seemed to be responsible for switching cells between their “young” and “old” states—senescent cells were rejuvenated by the suppression of the protein, and younger cells aged by its overexpression.

The scientists also found that the AP2A1 was frequently in close proximity to another protein: integrin β1, which aids cells in binding to the collagen scaffold that envelops them. Both proteins, the researchers described, travel along stress fibers within cells.

A new species of bacteria that functions like electrical wiring has recently been discovered on a brackish beach in Oregon. The species was named Candidatus Electrothrix yaqonensis in honor of the Yaquina tribe of Native Americans that once lived in and around Yaquina Bay, where the bacteria were found.

This species is a type of cable bacteria: rod-shaped microbes that are connected at both ends to one another to create a chain and which share an outer membrane, forming filaments several centimeters long. Cable bacteria are found in marine and freshwater sediments and, unusually among bacteria, are electrically conductive. This is due to their special metabolism, in which electrons generated by oxidizing sulfides in their deeper layers are sent to their surface layer, where they are received by oxygen and nitric acid.

Chinese researchers have developed a wireless, paper-thin patch that attaches to an organ to create a highway for drug delivery.

To solve an important problem in drug delivery, a research team that includes Beihang University and Peking University developed an electronic patch that acts like a band-aid for organs.

Traditional drug delivery systems send a vague package through the body that requires higher doses than necessary and might harm organs in the process of trying to find their destination. Large-molecule drugs, or biopharmaceuticals based on proteins, face an even greater challenge as the cell membrane often blocks these drugs, according to CGTN.

In patients with T2D who had been hospitalized for poorly controlled blood glucose, SGLT2 inhibitors nearly doubled the risk for falls, and combined use with GLP-1 RAs nearly tripled the risk.

Most people’s experiences with polynomial equations don’t extend much further than high school algebra and the quadratic formula. Still, these numeric puzzles remain a foundational component of everything from calculating planetary orbits to computer programming. Although solving lower order polynomials—where the x in an equation is raised up to the fourth power—is often a simple task, things get complicated once you start seeing powers of five or greater. For centuries, mathematicians accepted this as simply an inherent challenge to their work, but not Norman Wildberger. According to his new approach detailed in The American Mathematical Monthly, there’s a much more elegant approach to high order polynomials—all you need to do is get rid of pesky notions like irrational numbers.

Babylonians first conceived of two-degree polynomials around 1800 BCE, but it took until the 16th century for mathematicians to evolve the concept to incorporate three-and four-degree variables using root numbers, also known as radicals. Polynomials remained there for another two centuries, with larger examples stumping experts until in 1832. That year, French mathematician Évariste Galois finally illustrated why this was such a problem—the underlying mathematical symmetry in the established methods for lower-order polynomials simply became too complicated for degree five or higher. For Galois, this meant there just wasn’t a general formula available for them.

Mathematicians have since developed approximate solutions, but they require integrating concepts like irrational numbers into the classical formula.

Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent calorie restriction leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and relative fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.

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).