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Two people can be the same age and be aging at completely different rates. Scientists have known this for decades. Measuring it precisely is a different problem.

Harvard researchers just published a new biological clock in Nature — one built not from DNA tags, but from gene activity. Using over 11,000 gene expression profiles across humans, monkeys, rats, and mice, the clock estimates biological age, predicts mortality risk, and responds to known anti-aging interventions.

That last part is what makes it useful to researchers. When aging animals received blood transfusions from young donors, the clock rewound. When exposed to radiation or chronic disease, it ticked forward. It appears to be capturing something real about the pace of aging — not just reflecting it.

The practical application isn't clinical yet. But for longevity researchers who spend years waiting for mice to die before evaluating whether a treatment worked, a clock that predicts biological age and lifespan early could fundamentally change how experiments are run.

Important caveats remain — the researchers are clear that not every age-related genetic change is harmful, and different clocks don't always agree with each other. But the direction of the field is coming into focus.

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In 2024, three countries — China, Australia, and Chile — produced 74 percent of the world's lithium. The clean energy transition runs through that bottleneck whether anyone likes it or not.

An MIT researcher renovating his bathroom noticed something. The chemical in glass etching cream — the kind sold at home improvement stores — dissolves silica. Lithium-rich rock is full of silica. The connection took root.

His team developed a process that extracts lithium from hard rock at temperatures below the boiling point of water, without toxic fumes, and with chemicals that can be reused. They've since spun it into a startup called Rock Zero.

The implications stretch beyond cost. Lithium-rich rock exists across the United States, Europe, and Africa — regions currently locked out of production not by geology but by the expense and complexity of conventional extraction. A simpler process changes that math.

There's still a long road to scale, and the team will be going up against entrenched giants in a volatile market. But the researcher behind it has a clear view of what they're building toward.

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SpaceX just filed its IPO prospectus — and what's inside is not quite the story the $1.75 trillion valuation tells.

Break the business down by segment and a different picture emerges. About 60% of last year's revenue came from Starlink. The rocket launch business generated $4 billion. There's an AI infrastructure unit now renting server capacity to firms like Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month. And SpaceX holds an option to acquire AI coding assistant Cursor for $60 billion.

Run the numbers against comparable public companies in each category — broadband, launch, cloud infrastructure, advertising — and one analyst's back-of-the-envelope math lands the core business somewhere between $500 billion and $678 billion.

The ask is $1.75 trillion.

The gap between those two numbers represents a bet on things that haven't happened yet: Starship reaching commercial service, an orbital cloud computing platform, and the industrialization of the moon. Whether that bet is visionary or inflated depends entirely on your confidence in the timeline.

What the prospectus makes clear is that anyone buying in at the headline valuation should know exactly what they're paying for — and what they're not.

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A 49-year-old nurse with multiple sclerosis gave up her active job, feared ending up in a wheelchair full-time, and couldn't carry her grandchildren without risking a fall. She had tried the best available medications. Nothing was improving.

Then she enrolled in a clinical trial for a therapy originally designed to treat cancer — and became the first MS patient to receive it.

CAR T cell therapy works by reprogramming a patient's own immune cells to hunt down the specific cells driving disease. In blood cancers, it has produced long-term remission in patients who had run out of options. Researchers are now asking whether it can do the same thing for autoimmune conditions — not just managing symptoms, but resetting the immune system entirely.

There are now hundreds of active clinical trials across lupus, Graves' disease, vasculitis, stiff person syndrome, and more. Early results in several of them are difficult to ignore.

The risks are real, the costs are significant, and there are open questions that won't be answered for years. But for patients who have exhausted every other option, the calculus looks different.

What happened to Jan after her infusion — and what researchers are learning about how far this therapy can go — is worth reading in full.

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