Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Longevity

 LONGEVITY:  Scientists Put Anti-Aging Treatments to the Test – These Ones Actually Changed Biological Age


Can a Drug Reverse Age-Related Muscle Weakness?


Molecular biologist says one pill could reverse aging, but is it too good to be true?


Paul Numi – Wired on Wonder – Don’t Let The Old Man In

DON’T LET THE OLD MAN IN

We’re invisible

When was the last time

Anybody turned their head

Crossing us down main street?

We’re ghosts

Some kind of walking dead

We made it this far

That’s no mean feat

It’s not too late

Nor too soon

It’s not too late

Now is the time

Never surrender, never quit

Clench your teeth with grit

Shout Alalalalai

Alexander’s battle cry

Since you must be eighty

To make it to president

There’s mileage ahead of us

Come on cheer up matey

We’re in the zone, the right segment

The age of the really strong

More often right than wrong

It’s not too late

Nor too soon

It’s not too late

Now is the time

Never wiser, never better

Still the same go-getter

We’re shepherd dogs not sheep

A promise we must keep

It’s not too late

Nor too soon

Not too late

Don’t let the old man 

 

Viva La Difference

Published February 2005.

Human progress was never reasonable. It is driven by flashes of inspiration, streams of emotion and buckets of passion. Across time, a burning drive to make a difference has been the difference. Never truer than in this crazy age. Here’s 20 ways you can make a difference in 2005.

SIRENS

1. Be Soft

Soft is strong. King Kong (and its director Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings) are big softies. And a kangaroo can’t jump unless its tail is touching the ground. The future will belong to soft connections. Emotion not reason. Software not hardware. Soft not hard power. Soft is transparent. Soft is enabling. Soft is flexible. Soft is inclusive. Soft is slow Italian Food not Fast Fat Food. Soft.

2. Be in Spirit

To be inspired means to be “in spirit.” To be an Inspirational Player, a radical optimist, wherever you stand or fall. Remember the return of Steve Jobs and Apple’s “Think Different” campaign? Says Jobs: “That ad was to remind us of who our heroes are and who we are”. Want to be in spirit? By the end of this month pass on the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given to ten people under 20.

3. Be Sensuous

Touch. Sound. Scent. Sight. Taste. Designing products, services and experiences around the five senses calibrates a better world. Holistic is the new reality. In the food business? Sell all fruit with leaves attached so consumers see it’s fresh. With all five senses put on high alert, magic happens.

4. Simply Sustain

Jeffrey Sachs’ UN Millennium Project Report on poverty is required reading. An aperture is opening. A beam of light shines, one energized by low-cost simplicity. Every month 150,000 African children die of malaria because they don’t have bed nets to keep out mosquitoes. Nets in Africa and Asia could save one million children this year. How about “Adopt a Landmine”? You send the $300 it takes to dig one up and disarm it; you get sent a certificate with your mine’s code number.

5. Sleep

Joan Klempner said: “To achieve the impossible dream, try going to sleep.” With 24/7 lifestyles, we’re getting less and sleep. Yet for success, achievement, and happiness, sleep is fundamental. Now science says our best ideas surface when we drift into sleep. Anytime sleep is pure competitive advantage. Walt Disney got it right: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

GLOBAL RAP

6. Go LoGlo

The local / global debate is the soap opera of business. ‘Should I be thinking local?’ ‘Should I be thinking global?’… ‘Should I be glocal? Start with action in the local (there are no global consumers!). Then cross boundaries. Wherever you are, export is the way to go. It’s not about thinking. It’s about acting, and going. Act Local; Go Global. Go LoGlo.

7. Learn to say “Ni Hao”

Unlike other Asian countries China was “born global”. The dragon opened up and ventured out simultaneously, putting the globe in a spin. China is an Aladdin’s Cave for enterprise. Open it! Learn to say in Chinese “Hello”, “I love you” and “Pass the pasta” before the 2008 Olympics.

8. BRIC it!

Brazil, Russia, India and China is where the action is. BRIC’s share of world growth is predicted to rise from 20 per cent in 2003 to more than 40 per cent in 2025. Global economic activity is re-positioning from the developed to the developing world. Demand for consumer goods will boom. BRIC is the next Big Bang. Strike the match.

9. Don’t invent; innovate

The difference? World-changing. Arno Penzias, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, makes the distinction. An invention is the product of a creative or curious mind. Innovation, however, changes customers’ lives in some way or the world in which customers experience things.

10. Be Irreplaceable and Irresistible

Hating America while loving all things American is the 21st century paradox says Louis Chunovic. Wherever you stand, America’s creative spirit remains irresistible and a beacon for modern enterprise. Brands set national and cultural boundaries. Lovemarks explode through them. They dazzle.

Love is the Potion

11. Don’t be a Polar Bear

Polarization of values – cultural conflict – is as a bigger opportunity as a threat. Brands that take sides will lose. Brands that listen and bring sides together can become Lovemarks. In the US, stone barricades erected near government buildings post-9/11 have been replaced with stone-containers filled with plants. Lovemarks are part of a human conversation. They make the world a better place.

12. Join the Consumer Republic.

Manufacturers and retailers now work for consumers – not vice versa. Technology has given power to consumers. We’re in the Consumer Republic – at last! It’s a time of instant of connectivity, transparency and accountability. Message to marketers? Stimulate me, surprise me, intrigue me, involve me, entertain me, love me – just don’t bore me.

13. Be an Inspirational Consumer

The people who love a brand are its Inspirational Consumers. The passionate advocates, the radical optimists, the storytellers, the trendsetters, the moral guardians, the reconcilers of “stuff” and “spirit”. Is it really impossible to lick your elbow? Go ask an Inspirational Consumer. She’s the medium.

14. Touch technology

Smart objects like Adidas smart shoe. Content co-creation like blogging. Customization like Ipod. All are part of this power and control shift to consumers. Question du jour – does technology make people happy? No. Does it make people happier? Yes. Lets get over this one and move on. It’s technology and happiness. It’s And / And not Either / Or.

15. Build it, they will come

Globally, the supermarket experience is a 20-minute dash through hell. Radio, lighting and air con should be done for assault. The Store – where 80% of purchase decisions are made – is the last mass medium and the biggest opportunity in business today. Solution? Drip it with mystery, sensuality, intimacy. Build a theatre of dreams.

Lightening Strikes

16. Build windmills

A Boeing 747’s wingspan is longer than the first flight of the Wright brothers. You can resist change and go backwards or embrace it and go forwards. When hurricanes come, build windmills! Pursue failure – you discover your limits when you crash up against them. When others Zig, Zag.

17. Live on the Edge

Edge of the world. Edge your seats. Edge of your dreams. And edge of time in my home New Zealand, half a day ahead of Italy. Edge is a big idea. Where will competitive edge cluster? In regions with technology, talent and tolerance. These will attract and unleash deep emotional intelligence.

18. Surprise with the Obvious

The most popular first name in the world is Muhammad. No piece of paper can be folded more than 7 times. The stall closest to the door in a bathroom is the cleanest, because it is the least used. Obvious. Overlooked. For cut-through innovation, communication, surprise with the obvious.

19. Get Together

To be inspired Europe needs to be together. Airbus A380 knows it (now so does Boeing). A belly from Spain, wings from Britain, a nose from France, interior from Germany, fuselage from Italy. The headline: “New technology from ‘Old Europe’ overwhelms old technology from new America.” Creativity is connecting things.

20. Make Love

It’s a timeless classic: “what the world needs now is love sweet love.” Italy, with its chronic population challenge could sure use some. Go to work for Italy!!


Posted by at

AI turbocharging Australia’s $82b organised crime wave

Testicles, tarot cards and tapes: ICAC unravels mayoral blackmail coups

Rachel Maddow on why Trump keeps attacking the media: ‘You play the hits’

Maddow kicks off season seven of ‘The Poynter Report Podcast’ to talk Trump, the press, polling and the future of news


What if America Went Completely Dark?“We came up with some very astounding numbers. If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” And it could last months?

Artificial intelligence is turbocharging crime syndicates into an $82 billion-a-year illicit empire that is draining the federal budget, driving up insurance premiums and recruiting young people into an alarming national wave of criminals for hire.
In a rare interview, Heather Cook, the chief executive of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, said criminal networks were “optimising” the use of new technology to drive a wave of scams, violent assault, white-collar crime and money-laundering, all of which were pushing up business and hip pocket costs and eating into social services resources.
Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission chief executive, Heather Cook. 
In 2025, ACIC warned the combined hit to the economy from serious and organised crime was $82.3 billion, representing about 3.2 per cent of Australia’s GDP, but Cook told The Australian Financial Review that figure was set to spike higher when new estimates are unveiled in November.
“It is going up. I can tell you it has gone up,” she said. “That’s bigger than the [$63.2 billion] annual defence budget. It’s money that is not being spent on critical services for Australians.”
The biggest proportion of this cost is linked to the illicit drug trade and related economic losses from spending on illegal substances, lost productivity, health impacts and 


But  the economic toll is also seen in tax evasion and financial crimes and superannuation, banking, investment and NDIS fraud, as well as illegal tobacco and weapons smuggling and associated crimes such as extortion and arson during gang turf wars.

“Syndicates are operating in a much more decentralised way. They’re operating like multinational businesses,” said Cook.
“They’re prepared to purchase services, criminal services that are available now, whether that’s through money laundering, digital asset services, violence as a service, insiders and enablers, to get their products into a country across borders,” she said.
Alliances of criminal syndicates were melding when it was in their financial interests to do so, but turf wars were also causing a surge in violence, shootings and fire bombings, Cook said. “There’s still a lot of vying for market control.”
At the same time, criminal enterprises were also harnessing artificial intelligence to engage in mass online scamming and train bots on victims.
High-end technology was helping to “digitally move money and assets around onshore and offshore at speed and scale with very little human intervention,” creating major hurdles for authorities in detecting it, she said.
“It’s certainly enabling crime to access their profits and reinvest them in other criminal activity, or get the wealth out of their criminal activity,” said Cook.
“Technology in general is such a significant enabler of crime, and it’s certainly the most significant evolution that we’ve seen in the recent past of how crime is operating.
“AI just adds another layer of complexity to that and opportunity to that.”
In one of the most shocking rising trends of the past year, young people were being lured as guns-for-hire through gaming and social media platforms by syndicates operating offshore, outsourcing shootings and arson attacks.
“There’s been a rapid uptick, and I think we can see that in a number of recent arrests,” said Cook.
“There is an ability to use social media and online platforms and gaming platforms to reach more victims or more potential recruits,” she said, adding that young people, “attracted to the intrigue and adventure” were actively bidding for jobs to make a fast buck.
“They have no ability to know who’s directing them. They don’t really care, and they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re vulnerable. They’re attracted to the money,” she said.
“Young people simply don’t consider the consequences, and criminal networks are exploiting those vulnerabilities, and they’re doing it with a complete disregard for the impact on these young people.”
Many of the outsourced crimes are linked to territorial fights over Australia’s vast black market in cigarettes. More than half of the tobacco consumed in Australia last year was bought illegally.
Australia levies one of the highest tobacco excises and has the most expensive legal cigarettes in the world, and both the Coalition and One Nation have said they would drastically curtail excise to undercut criminal activity.
Cook would not weigh in on policy decisions, but revealed that a powerful, entrenched syndicate was behind the “orchestrated and aggressive” surge in black-market sales since 2024.
The ACIC was tackling the tobacco underworld in the way it tackled all forms of organised crime, said Cook.
“You identify the network responsible. You identify its operating model and enablers and how it’s succeeding, and you start targeting that,” she said.
“Our job and the job of law enforcement is to tackle all of these syndicates at their source.”

Go inside the big political stories, policies and power plays.

Sign up for the The Week in Politics newsletter.
SIGN UP NOW
 is The Australian Financial Review’s Foreign affairs and defence correspondent. She was formerly the Canberra bureau chief and a foreign correspondent covering Asia and the European Union. She joined the Financial Review in 2025. Reach Nicola securely on Signal @niccijsmith.03. Email Nicola at nicci.smith@afr.com
Posted by at

Monday, September 28, 2026

Dogs use a surprising method to understand human language


‘For so long, my greatest fear was to live a meaningless life. In my ignorance, I believed that to avoid this, I had to be constantly on the move—always doing, achieving, and undertaking new things. Before long, this terrible compulsion to do, do, do overtook my life and stole it from me. Every time boredom crept in, I declared war on a neighbor or commissioned the construction of another palace. It was all in vain. The beast always found me, forcing me to keep moving, endlessly.’


"The rajah paused and pointed to the small cushion in the center of the room, then went on:


«One day, when I was consumed by boredom, I made a bold and courageous decision: to do nothing. I sat down on that cushion over there and waited for weariness to launch its assaults.

~ Small Island



This is a profound and beautifully written excerpt about the trap of hyper-activity and the profound courage it takes to practice stillness. 


The rajah’s realization captures a very modern dilemma: the tendency to mistake constant motion, achievement, and distraction for a meaningful life. In his case, the compulsion to "do, do, do" was an attempt to outrun the "beast" of boredom and existential dread—manifesting in extreme distractions like waging wars or building palaces.
By choosing to sit on the cushion and do absolutely nothing, the rajah is engaging in what many philosophical and mindfulness traditions describe as the ultimate act of bravery: facing oneself without a filter. Instead of fighting or fleeing boredom, he invites it in to see what happens when the dust finally settles.

Dogs use a surprising method to understand human language, new study suggests (Good Boy)

In a brain activity study, dogs seemed to listen for consonants to figure out when one word ends and another begins.

 Humans have sophisticated language abilities that could be unique to our species — but dogs, it turns out, may have learned some of our tricks.

In new research out of Hungary published this week in the journal Science, scientists found that dogs use the same strategy to pick out words in streams of speech that human infants do: They listen for consonants to figure out when one word ends and another begins.

“This is what we call the consonant bias,” explained Attila Andics, a cognitive neuroscientist at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and author of the new study. “Basically, what we show now here is evidence that unlike other mammals, dogs do the same. They also process speech with a consonant bias.”

To study this, the researchers brought 20 dogs and 20 humans into a lab and played streams of nonsense words for them, some with consonant patterns, some with vowel patterns and some with no pattern at all. The scientists collected electroencephalographic (EEG) data to measure brain activity. 

A dog prepared for an EEG measurement. (Sarolta Sziliágyi/Eotvos Lorand University)
Some of the dogs had been with families their whole lives, while others had been in shelters or on the streets as puppies, which allowed the researchers to test whether early exposure to language is critical for dogs to develop the ability to segment out words by listening for consonants.
The researchers found that both the dogs and the humans had increased brain activity with the consonant patterns — including the dogs who weren’t exposed to speech until later.
“It sheds new light on what we know about language evolution,” said Andics. “It suggests that speech can also shape the brains of animals that don’t have those special human complex language abilities.”

A humanlike ability to identify words

This study contributes to a growing body of research that has found that dogs are attuned to language in a way that seems similar to young humans.
“Babies have a unique problem,” said Francys Subiaul, a cognitive scientist and associate professor at George Washington University who wasn’t involved in the study. “They have to learn this super complicated signal. I mean, just think about the speech signal. It’s super messy. Men and women sound differently, older and younger people sound differently, and yet we have to cut through all of that noise and get to the heart of the matter: identify words and then identify their meanings.”
Subiaul said the fact that dogs have also developed the ability to do this points to how attuned they are to us.
“They’re listening, they’re paying attention,” Subiaul said. “And those experiences are shaping their brains in ways that are quite similar to how those experiences shape the brains of our babies.”
One big question is whether this is because of how dogs evolved through domestication over the last 15,000 years or so, or if this is something that was always in their abilities.
“But to answer that question, there’s a key control group that you need,” Subiaul said. “You need wolves.” He explained that researchers could do a study where they raise wolves in speech-rich environments to see if they develop the same abilities. But Subiaul suspects they wouldn’t, because other research shows what a powerful force domestication has been in making dogs and humans attuned to one another. 
In previous studies, scientists have found that contact between dogs and humans gives both a boost of oxytocin, the bonding hormone that surges in parents and babies. 
“That could only be explained through domestication,” Subiaul said. 
Another dog prepared for an EEG. (Boglárka Morvai/Eotvos Lorand University)
Subiaul has worked extensively with primates, and he suspects that despite their intelligence, they wouldn’t perform as well on these tests as dogs do either.
“Dogs seem to be more emotionally attuned with humans. Dogs are also much more sensitive to human social cues,” he said. “Dogs are more sensitive to eye gaze. They’re more sensitive to pointing cues than primates are. And all of that we believe is a product of domestication.”
This new study was relatively small, and more research is needed to confirm the finding and fully understand how dogs might have developed this ability. But researchers said that it adds to our understanding of how humans and dogs have become inextricably linked over millennia. 
“It shows what a long, important history we have together,” said Amritha Mallikarjun, a postdoctoral research associate at Harvard University who wasn’t involved in the study. “Our experiences as dogs have been domesticated have both shaped their brains and our brains, and it’s showing up in all of the research about dog language and dog social behavior. I think this is adding to this story about dogs and their relationship with 
Posted by at
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)