Christine Peterson
5.6K posts
@lifeext
Cofounder and Senior Fellow at Foresight Institute @foresightinst, with an interest in longevity and life extension. Coauthor of Gaming the Future (2022).
Thread. Have you ever heard of "civil asset forfeiture"? You're never going to think about the police the same way again. (1)
Getting old shouldn't be viewed as inevitable, just because it happens to everyone. It's a disease that kills over 100,000 people a day, and hopefully it will be optional in the future.
🦔 Researchers at Aikido Security found 151 malicious packages uploaded to GitHub between March 3 and March 9. The packages use Unicode characters that are invisible to humans but execute as code when run. Manual code reviews and static analysis tools see only whitespace or blank lines. The surrounding code looks legitimate, with realistic documentation tweaks, version bumps, and bug fixes. Researchers suspect the attackers are using LLMs to generate convincing packages at scale. Similar packages have been found on NPM and the VS Code marketplace. My Take Supply chain attacks on code repositories aren't new, but this technique is nasty. The malicious payload is encoded in Unicode characters that don't render in any editor, terminal, or review interface. You can stare at the code all day and see nothing. A small decoder extracts the hidden bytes at runtime and passes them to eval(). Unless you're specifically looking for invisible Unicode ranges, you won't catch it. The researchers think AI is writing these packages because 151 bespoke code changes across different projects in a week isn't something a human team could do manually. If that's right, we're watching AI-generated attacks hit AI-assisted development workflows. The vibe coders pulling packages without reading them are the target, and there are a lot of them. The best defense is still carefully inspecting dependencies before adding them, but that's exactly the step people skip when they're moving fast. I don't really know how any of this gets better. The attackers are scaling faster than the defenses. Hedgie🤗 arstechnica.com/security/2026/…
The US government spent $25 million over a decade trying to prove your cell phone gives you cancer. The study accidentally produced one of the strongest pieces of evidence for radiation hormesis ever recorded. The NTP study was nominated by the FDA in 1999 specifically because they expected to find harm. They built 21 custom reverberation chambers in Switzerland. Exposed 1,679 mice and 859 rats to cell phone frequencies for 9 hours a day, every day, for 2 years. The whole operation was designed as the definitive “cell phones cause cancer” study. The cancer results were mixed at best. Male rats got more heart schwannomas. Mice showed nothing significant. But the survival data was so unexpected that the researchers didn’t even know how to explain it in their own report. Look at the survival curve. Every single radiation group outlived the control. The 2.5 W/kg group hit p=0.0020, the only statistically significant result in the entire longevity analysis. By day 700, the control group’s survival probability had dropped to ~0.65. The lowest dose group was still above 0.80. That’s the hormesis signature. The smallest dose produced the largest benefit. The same pattern shows up in exercise, fasting, and cold exposure. A mild biological stressor activates repair mechanisms that wouldn’t otherwise turn on. Over 3,000 published papers have documented this across microbes, plants, insects, and mammals. The French Academy of Sciences formally accepted it in 2005. The US still builds its entire radiation safety framework on the opposite assumption: that all radiation, at any dose, causes proportional harm. The FCC limit for cell phones is 1.6 W/kg. Your AirPods operate at a fraction of that. The dose that produced the strongest longevity signal in this study was 2.5 W/kg. Barely above the regulatory ceiling. The entire regulatory framework for wireless device safety assumes a dose-response curve that this $25 million study failed to find.
Interesting results here. Cooper & Northoff '22 found that beginner meditators start out in a period of positive correlation between the default mode & central executive networks before proceeding into the intermediate state of anti-correlation between them. New SEMA lab paper found that ultrasound stimulation basically helped beginners ~skip the first phase and get right to decoupling DMN and CEN activity.
Join us for our first ever Vision Weekend in the UK! 2026 marks 40 years of Foresight. Over three days, we will gather leading researchers, builders, and funders to look forward: exploring what scientific and technological frontiers will shape the coming decades, and how to make them reality. June 5–7 | London Confirmed speakers include: • Ed Boyden (MIT) on biologically accurate brain simulation • Greg Wayne (Google DeepMind) on universal AI assistants • Jano Costard (SPRIND) on challenges as a tool for breakthrough innovation • Christine Peterson (Foresight Institute) on Foresight, 40 years later • Dorothy Chou (Google DeepMind) on capital for the long game: financing durable innovation in an age of hype • Irina Rish (Mila) on beyond scaling: toward continual and adaptive intelligence • Chris Rozell (Georgia Tech) on closed-loop neuroengineering: algorithms that learn from the brain in real time • Lee Cronin (University of Glasgow) • Mehmet Fisek (Meridial) on Focused Research Organisation mission and setup • Zoë Brammer (Google DeepMind) on AI for science 2030 • João Pedro de Magalhães (University of Birmingham) on hacking aging biology and many more. Get your tickets: foresight.org/events/vision-… Powered by: @apolloaievals @ARIA_research @e184media @CUHPartners @RenPhilanthropy @SPRIND @andnowstudio
