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Most people say they want to live to a ripe old age. But that isnt really true. What people really want is to live to a ripe, old age in good mental and physical health. Some of us actually get to live this dream. These folks are known as super-agers and they make it well into their 80s not just in decent physical shape, but also with minds at least as sharp as people 30 years younger. How do they manage it? Thats the question Northwestern University researchers have been aiming to answer with a 25-year-long study. It examined the brains and lifestyles of almost 300 super-agers. As youd expect, a quarter century of data shows it really helps to be born with lucky biology. The neuroscientists found a number of physical differences between the brains of super-agers and the average person. There isnt much non-scientists can do with that information. We have to make the most of the brains bequeathed to us by our DNA. Luckily, the researchers also discovered one big difference in behavior that sets apart super-agers who are still going strong into their 80s and beyond. Its something any of us can adopt in our own lives. Super-agers brains are different When you scan or posthumously autopsy the brains of super-agers, they look different than average brains, according to Sandra Weintraub, a Northwestern psychology professor involved in the study. Normal brains generally show some accumulation of the plaques and protein tangles that are characteristic of Alzheimers disease. Super-agers brains are largely free of them. The study also revealed that while the outer layer of the brain, known as the cortex, tends to thin out as we age, it stays thick in super-agers. They also have a different mix of cell types in their brain. Our findings show that exceptional memory in old age is not only possible but is linked to a distinct neurobiological profile. This opens the door to new interventions aimed at preserving brain health well into the later decades of life, Weintraub commented to Northwestern Now. Thats of huge interest in scientists looking for treatments that can help us stay healthier longer. Weintraub calls the findings earth-shattering for us. But for those of us without medical degrees, theres little we can do with this information. You cant vacuum rogue proteins out of your brain or plump its cortex. (Though other studies do suggest sleep helps to wash proteins and other gunk out of your brain, so maybe dont skimp on shut-eye.) And so are their social lives Further complicating those looking for an easy takeaway from the research, the super-agers also didnt have a lot of lifestyle factors in common. Some were athletes. Others confirmed loafers. Some drank. Others smoked. They ate different things and kept different habits. But there was one big exception. Super-agers, it turns out, tend to be incredibly social. The group was particularly sociable and relished extracurricular activities. Compared to their cognitively average, same-aged peers, they rated their relationships with others more positively. Similarly, on a self-reported questionnaire of personality traits they tended to endorse high levels of extraversion, the researchers reported in recent paper published in Alzheimers & Dementia. Want to be a super-ager? Focus on your relationships This might come as a surprise to laypeople who think aging well is all about HIIT workouts and plentiful kale. But it likely isnt a huge shock to other scientists. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been minutely tracking the lives of some 724 original participants (and now some of their descendants) since 1938. It discovered the biggest predictor of a long, healthy life isnt biological. Its social. The better the quality of your relationships, the more likely you are to age well. And while you have only indirect influence on things like your cholesterol level and brain health, you are directly in control of your social life. Its something we can and should prioritize, according to study director Robert Waldinger. We think of physical fitness as a practice, as something we do to maintain our bodies. Our social life is a living system, and it needs maintenance too, he told the Harvard Gazette. The effects of keeping up your social ties arent minor. Neuroscientist Bryan James, author of another study on aging and social contact, summed up his findings this way: Social activity is associated with a decreased risk of developing dementia and mild cognitive impairment [] the least socially active older adults developed dementia an average of five years before the most socially active. Keeping up with friends helps with healthy aging. But so does keeping up with learning. Research has shown a strong link between keeping your brain active and maintaining cognitive performance deep into your later years. One study found that just joining a class to learn a new skill or hobby improved brain performance as if subjects were 30 years younger. Another one, done at Stanford, found no cognitive decline at all until retirement and beyond if you stay mentally active. Are you getting your 5-3-1? All of which suggests that staying social and mentally engaged is one of the most impactful moves you can make if you dream of becoming a super-ager yourself. The basic takeaway when it comes to mental function and aging is, use it or lose it. But experts have offered more detailed guidance too. Harvard-trained ocial scientist and author Kasley Killam, for instance, has suggested the 531 rule: Spend time with five different people a week. This could be anyone from your gym buddy or book club bestie to the person the next pew over at church. Nurture three close relationships. Equally important is maintaining tighter bonds with three of the people closest to you, usually family and dear friends. Aim for one hour of social interaction a day. That doesnt have to be all at once. It could be 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, Killam explained to Business Insider. You can also combine social time with other activities, walking the dog with a neighbor, say. Even just chatting on the phone can have more of an impact than many people suspect. According to a recent study in the U.S., talking on the phone for 10 minutes two to five times a week significantly lowered peoples levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety, Killam reports in Psychology Today. Change what you can influence The bad news from science is that super-agers really are different physically. Their brains have biological quirks that help them stay sharp longer. Theres no way, unfortunately, to borrow that magic. But there is something else that sets super-agers apart that you can steal. Its not a diet or exercise plan. Its a love for getting out and seeing other people and learning new things. It turns out the more you maintain your social connections and mental stimuli, the more likely you are to get not just more years, but more healthy, active, and sharp years. Jessica Stillman This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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As gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite have exploded in popularity with Gen Alpha, its no surprise that more than half of children in the U.S. are putting video games high on their holiday wish lists. Entertainment Software Association (ESA) surveyed 700 children between the ages of 5 and 17 and found three in five kids are asking for video games this holiday season. However, the most highly requested gift isnt a console or even a specific game: Its in-game currency. The survey didnt dig into which currency is proving most popular, but the category as a whole tops the list with a 43% request rate, followed by 39% for a console, 37% for accessories, and 37% for physical games. A study published by Circana this year revealed only 4% of video game players in the U.S. buy a new game more often than once per month, with a third of players not buying any games at all. Behind this shift is the immense popularity of live service games such as Fortnite and those offered on the Roblox platform. Both are free to play, which means the app has to generate money in other ways. Much of Robloxs $3.6 billion revenue in 2024 was made via in-game microtransactions, particularly through purchases of its virtual currency Robux. Here, $5 will get you 400 Robux to spend in the game on emotes, character models, and skins, among other items. Players can also earn currency just by playing, but as with any free-to-play game, the process of earning in-game points will be slow and tedious compared to purchasing them outright. Its worth noting that while these games often seem innocent enough, about half of parents surveyed by Ygam, an independent U.K. charity dedicated to preventing gaming and gambling harms among young people, noted there are gambling-like mechanisms in the games their child plays, including mystery boxes and loot boxes, which may be harmful to children. Still, the average parent intends to spend $737 on game-related gifts, ESA reported. Parents who arent ableor willingto drop hundreds on Robux and V-bucks this holiday may be pleased to learn that more than half of the kids surveyed said they would like to spend more time playing games with their parents, with 73% of those ages 5 through 7. Turns out, the best gift you can give your child is quality time.
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Raquel Urtasun is the founder and CEO of self-driving truck startup Waabi as well as a computer science professor at the University of Toronto. Unlike some competitors, Waabis AI technology is designed to drive goods all the way to their destinations, rather than merely to autonomous vehicle hubs near highways. Urtasun, one of Fast Companys AI 20 honorees for 2025, spoke with us about the relationship between her academic and industry work, what sets Waabi apart from the competition, and the role augmented reality and simulation play in teaching computers to drive even in unusual road conditions. This Q&A is part of Fast Companys AI 20 for 2025, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AIs most innovative technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers. It has been edited for length and clarity. Can you tell me a bit about your background and how Waabi got started? Ive been working in AI for the last 25 years, and I started in academia, because AI systems werent ready for the real world. There was a lot of innovation that needed to happen in order to enable the revolution that we see today. For the last 15 years, Ive been dedicated to building AI systems for self-driving. Eight years ago, I made a jump to industry: I was chief scientist and head of R&D for Ubers self-driving program, which gave me a lot of visibility in terms of what building a world-class program and bringing the technology to market would look like. One of the things that became clear was that there was a tremendous opportunity for a disrupter in the industry, because everybody was going with an approach that was extremely complex and brittle, where you needed to incorporate by hand all the knowledge that the system should have. It was not something that was going to provide a scalable solution. So a little bit over four years ago, I left Uber to go all in on a different generation of technology. I had deep conviction that we should build a system designed with AI-first principles, where its a single AI system end-to-end, but at the same time a system that is built for the physical world. It has to be verifiable and interpretable. It has to have the ability to prove the safety of the system, be very efficient, and run onboard the vehicle. The second core pillar was that the data is as important as the model. You will never be able to observe everything and fully test the system by deploying fleets of vehicles. So we built a best-in-class simulator, where we can actually prove its realism. And what differentiates your approach from the competition today? The big difference is that other players have a black-box architecture, where they train the system basically with imitation learning to imitate what humans do. Its very hard to validate and verify and impossible to trace a decision. If the system does something wrong, you cant really explain why that is the case, and its impossible to really have guarantees about the system. Thats okay for a level two system [where a human is expected to be able to take over], but when you want to deploy level four, without a human, that becomes a huge problem. We built something very different, where the system is forced to interpret and explain at every fraction of a second all the things it could do, and how good or bad those decisions are, and then it chooses the best maneuver. And then through the simulator, we can learn much better how to handle safety-critical situations, and much faster as well. How are you able to ensure the simulator works as well as real-world driving? The goal of the simulator is to expose the self-driving vehicles full stack to many different situations. You want to prove that under each specific situation, how the system drives is the same as if the situation happens in the real world. So we take all the situations where Waabi driver has driven in the real world, and clone them in simulation, and then we see, did the truck do the same thing. We also recently unveiled a really exciting breakthrough with mixed-reality testing. The way the industry does safety testing is they bring a self-driving vehicle to a closed course and they expose it to a dozen, maybe two dozen, scenarios that are very simple in order to say it has basic capabilities. Its very orchestrated, and they use dummies in order to test things that are safety critical. Its a very small number of non-repeatable tests. But you can actually do safety testing in a much better way if you can do augmented reality on the self-driving vehicle. With our truck driving around in a closed course, we can intercept the live sensor data and create a view where theres a mix of reality and simulation, so in real time, as its driving in the world, its seeing all kinds of simulated situations as though they were real. That way, you can have orders of magnitude more tests. You can test all kinds of things that are otherwise impossible, like accidents on the road, a traffic jam, construction, or motorbikes cutting in front of you. You can mix real vehicles with things that are not real, like an emergency vehicle in the opposite lane. Youre also a full professor. Are you still teaching and supervising graduate students? I do not teachI obviously do not have time to teach at all. I do have graduate students, but they do their studies at the company. We have this really interesting partnership with the University of Toronto. If you want to really learn and do research in self-driving, it is a must that you get access to a full product. And thats impossible in academia. So a few years ago, we designed this program where students can do research within the company. Its one of a kind, and to me, this is the future of education for physical AI. When did you realize the time was ripe for moving from academic research to industry work? That was about eight and a half years ago. We were at the forefront of innovation, and I saw companies were using our technology, but it was hard for me to understand if we were working on the right things and if there was something that I hadnt thought of that is important when deploying a real product in the real world. And I decided at the time to join Uber, and I had an amazing almost four years. It blew my mind in terms of how the problem of self-driving is much bigger than I thought. I thought, Okay, autonomy is basically it, and then I learned about how you need to design the hardware, the software, the systems around safety, etc., in a way that everything is scalable and efficient. It was very clear to me that end-to-end systems and foundational models would be the thing. And four and a half years in, our rate of hitting milestones really speaks to this technology. Its amazingto give an example, the first time that we drove in rain, the system had never seen rain before. And it drove with no interventions in rain, even though it never saw the phenomenon before. That for me was the “aha” moment. I was actually [in the vehicle] with some investors on the track, so it was kind of nerve-racking. But it was amazing to see. I always have very, very high expectations, but it blew my mind what it could do.
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Bringing a new drug to market usually requires a decade-long, multibillion-dollar journey, with a high failure rate in the clinical trial phase. Nvidias Kimberly Powell is at the center of a major industry effort to apply AI to the challenge. If you look at the history of drug discovery, weve been kind of circling around the same targets for a long time, and weve largely exhausted the drugs for those targets, she says. A target is a biological molecule, often a protein, thats causing a disease. But human biology is extraordinarily complex, and many diseases are likely caused by multiple targets.Thats why cancer is so hard, says Powell. Because its many things going wrong in concert that actually cause cancer and cause different people to respond to cancer differently.Nvidia, which in July became the first publicly traded company to cross $4 trillion in market capitalization, is the primary provider of the chips and infrastructure that power large AI models, both within the tech companies developing the models and the far larger number of businesses relying on them. New generative AI models are quite capable of encoding and generating words, numbers, images, and computer code. But much of the work in the healthcare space involves specialized data sets, including DNA and protein structures. The sheer number of molecule combinations is mind-bogglingly big, straining the capacity of language models. Nvidia is customizing its hardware and software to work in that world.[W]e have to do a bunch of really intricate data science work to . . . take this method and apply it to these crazy data domains, Powell says. Were going from language and words that are just short little sequences to something thats 3 billion [characters] long.Powell, who was recruited by Nvidia to jump-start its investment in healthcare 17 years ago, manages the companys relationships with healthcare giants and startups, trying to translate their business and research problems into computational solutions. Among those partners are 5,000 or so startups participating in Nvidias Inception accelerator program.I spend a ton of my time talking to the disrupters, she explains. Because theyre really thinking about what [AI computing] needs to be possible in two to three years time. This profile is part of Fast Companys AI 20 for 2025, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AIs most innovative technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers.
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You might not spend a lot of time thinking about your web browser, whether its Safari, Chrome, or something else. But the decades-old piece of software remains a pretty important canvas for getting things done. Thats why Tara Feener, who spent years developing creative tools with companies such as Adobe, WeTransfer, and Vimeo, decided to join the Browser Company and within two years became head of engineering, overseeing its AI-forward Dia browser. This is more ambitious than any of the other things Ive done, because its where you live your life, and where you create within, she says. Whereas a conventional browser presents you with a search box on its home screen, Dia will either answer your query with AI or route it to a traditional search based on what you write. You can also ask for information from your open tabs or have Dia intelligently sort them into groups. Several of these features have since found their way into more mainstream browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and in September, Atlassian announced it had acquired the Browser Company and Dia (a $610 million deal), hoping to develop the ultimate AI browser for knowledge workers.Other AI companies are catching on to the importance of owning a browser. Perplexity has launched Comet, and OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas in October. This strategic value isnt lost on Feener, who notes that browsers are typically the starting point for workers seeking information. They also provide a treasure trove of context for AI assistants. Dia can already do things like analyze your history for trends and draft messages in Gmail. Feener says her team has never felt more creative coming up with things to do next.With Dia, we have context, we have memory, we have your cookies, so we actually own the entire layer, she says. Just like TikTok gets better with every swipe, every time you open something in Dia, we learn something about you. This profile is part of Fast Companys AI 20 for 2025, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AIs most innovative technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers.
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