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The mitochondria, perhaps better known as the powerhouses of cells, are emerging as a possible factor in the pains of aging. Some scientists are of the mind that poor mitochondrial health can lead to symptoms and diseases related to aging, like Alzheimers and cancer. The mitochondria just give up earlier than other parts of the cell because of the wear and tear that theyre subjected to, Pinchas Cohen, dean of USCs Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, told The New York Times. Theyre the canary in the coal mine of cellular dysfunction. Its true that mitochondria produce energy from the food that we eat. But thats actually not all that they do. How Cell Health Impacts Aging They also help immune functioning, create peptides that send messages between organs, and are essential for general cellular housekeeping, according to the NYT. But as we get older, the number of mitochondria in our cells and their ability to function decline. The organelle begins producing more and more reactive oxygen species (ROS), a toxic byproduct of the energy production process. That has an effect on our overall health. Other researchers believe the reverse, that aging and disease actually cause the dysfunction in the mitochondria. The billion-dollar question in the mitochondria aging field, in my opinion, is cause and effect, said Vamsi Mootha, a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Is the decline leading to aging, or do you just have old tissue thats sick, so you have sick mitochondria? Either way, its clear that taking care of the mitochondria in your cells is of utmost importancewhich means taking care of your body. Mitochondria Care Daria Mochly-Rosen, a professor of chemical and systems biology at Stanford University and an author of The Life Machines: How Taking Care of Your Mitochondria Can Transform Your Health, told the NYT that working out has an interesting way of healing mitochondria. Exercise causes a little bit of use and tear of the mitochondria, Mochly-Rosen said. And so by exercising, youre actually telling the whole body, OK, time to replenish your mitochondria and make them more pristine by making new parts for it. Sleep is crucial, too, because its during the seven to eight hours a night that the mitochondria get rid of parts that may have been harmed throughout the day. According to the Institute for Functional Medicine, reducing stress and consuming enough nutrition are also beneficial. Plant-based nutrients like polyphenols help strengthen mitochondrial function, as do omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants like vitamin C and zinc, magnesium, L-carnitine, alpha-lipoic acid, the vitamin B family, and coenzyme Q10. Ava Levinson This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister website, Inc.com. 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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E-Commerce
Would you consider tying your shoelaces an achievement? If you’re able-bodied, probably not. Now imagine doing it with one hand, or no hands at all. Suddenly it is. Fewer than 10,000 people have stood on the summit of Everest. It takes months of training and tests the limits of human endurance. However, if you helicoptered to the top, stepped out for a photograph, and flew back down, would that be an achievement? The outcome is the same. Same summit. Same view, but most of us would not consider it an achievement. A new kind of helicopter has now arrived. Artificial intelligence can draft reports, write software, compose correspondence, and generate ideas in a matter of seconds. The systems are improving at a pace few anticipated. Googles chief executive has informed investors that more than a quarter of new code at the company is now AI-generated. At Microsoft, the comparable figure lies between 20 and 30%. Shopifys chief executive told employees that before requesting permission to hire, they must first demonstrate that the role cannot be performed by AI. This was not speculation about a distant future. It was a policy memorandum circulated last year. Artificial intelligence is not merely altering how we work. It is quietly reshaping what it means to have accomplished anything. Philosopher Gwen Bradford argues that an achievement has three core features. First, it must arise from your own agency. The outcome must be attributable to your effort and direction. You cannot outsource the substantive work to another person, or to a machine, and claim the result as fully your own. Second, it must be meaningfully difficult. Achievements typically require effort, skill, and perseverance. Thats why an Olympic medal is universally regarded as an achievement. It is the celebration of the years of grind the athlete went through. Third, it must be non-accidental. The success must result from the exercise of competence rather than the favour of fortune. Winning a lottery may transform ones circumstances, but it displays no mastery. We may envy the outcome, yet we do not admire the ability behind it, because there is none. Sound judgement, effort, discipline and perseverance are what transform a result into an accomplishment. They bind the outcome to the person who produced it. Artificial intelligence unsettles precisely that bond. If increasingly valuable outputs can be produced with ever less reliance on human skill, the source of credit becomes harder to locate. So the question is not whether we will collaborate with algorithms. We will. The question is what counts as achievement in such a world. We will have to shape our sense of achievement by creating new opportunities and by redefining what mastery looks like in a world where our tools think alongside us. LLMs can write a basic article on almost anything. This means that if writers want a creatively fulfilling career, they will need to work with technology to create something richer, more nuanced, and more distinctly human. Three things worth sitting with: 1) Audit your effort, not your output. Bradford’s framework gives you a useful personal test: look at something you produced this week and ask honestly how much of the difficulty you actually absorbed. Whether the output was good matters less than whether the struggle was yours. 2) Resist the urge to skip to the summit. The helicopter analogy extends well beyond Everest. Every time you use a tool to bypass the hard part of thinking, the wrestling, the false starts, the moment before clarity, you arrive at the answer without making the journey. Occasionally, that is fine. As a habit, it quietly hollows out the skills you believe you still have. Use AI to go further, not to go without. Consider a student preparing an essay on constitutional law. Faced with a difficult case, she could struggle through the judgments, reconstruct the reasoning, and attempt her own argument, refining it through revision. Or she could prompt an AI system to produce a polished draft in seconds. The submission might earn a respectable mark. Yet in outsourcing the intellectual labour, she has also outsourced the formation of her own judgement. The grade records an outcome; it does not record the capacities she failed to build. 3) Pick one thing that machines are bad at and get unusually good at it. Machines are poor at navigating moral ambiguity, at building trust in fractured human situations, and at knowing which question matters more than the answer. These are among the hardest skills that exist. Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist who discovered penicillin, stumbled upon it by accident. But he had the trained eye to recognise what he was seeing. Another researcher might have discarded the contaminated petri dish as a failed experiment. Fleming understood its significance. Luck finds the prepared. So does the future. It is more useful to think of AI not as artificial intelligence that replaces us, but as intelligence augmented, a tool that extends human capacity. A surgeon who uses AI-assisted imaging to detect a tumour earlier than would otherwise be possible has not diminished her achievement; she has elevated it. A composer who uses machine learning tools to experiment with harmonic structures he would never have imagined unaided is expanding the frontier of his own creativity. The nature of achievement is changing, and with it, the scale of what we can reach for. What we can build, solve, and imagine in partnership with these tools exceeds anything a previous generation could have attempted alone. That is not a reason to be complacent about effort. It is a reason to be genuinely excited about what honest, skilled, human-directed effort can now produce.
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E-Commerce
Headlines this week signaled that a major boycott against Target had come to an end. The retail giant has been under fire since winding back many of its commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion a year ago, which sparked widespread criticism from the Black community and consumer boycotts that had a tangible impact on the business. Over the course of 2025, Targets already sluggish sales dropped further, and its share price fell by more than 30%; by August, the company had announced that CEO Brian Cornell would be stepping down. One of those boycotts, which originally started as a 40-day Target Fast led by Atlanta-based pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant, has now been called off, following what Bryant described as productive conversations with company leaders. But that boycott reportedly did not result in any meaningful changes to Targets DEI policiesand the Minnesota civil rights activists behind another major boycott have made clear that they dont plan to back down anytime soon. Lets be clear: The Target boycott is not over, Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the boycott cofounders, said in a statement. This is a grassroots movement led by communities demanding corporate accountability, and we will not stop until Target reverses its retreat from diversity, equity, and inclusion. Another cofounder, Jaylani Hussein, emphasized that Target had not met the demands of the boycott, and therefore the boycott continues. (When contacted by Fast Company, Target was not available for comment.) Bryant suggested in a March 12 press conference that the company had reassured him of its continued commitment to DEI, and in particular the Black community, which until last year Target had long supported through internal DEI programs and efforts to boost supplier diversity and Black-owned brands. They have a program called Belonging, which gives access to everybody, not just for entry-level positions, but to be able to ascend into C-suites,” Bryant elaborated in an interview with USA Today. It is essentially DEI as I read it. It is the exact same thing. In conversations with Bryant and other activists, Target also reportedly acknowledged that the company had lost the trust of Black consumers and employees, according to The Wall Street Journal. Target has not, however, walked back its reversal on DEI or reinstated any of its previous policies in response to the boycotts. (Bryant told USA Today that Target had addressed some boycott demandsnamely that the company would continue investing in Black-owned businesses.) While the company did sign on to a letter penned by a group of prominent CEOs in Minnesota, Target has not spoken forcefully about the immigration crackdown and violence in its home stateeven as its stores and workers were directly affected. Target is, of course, not alone in distancing itself from DEI. The company is just one of many corporate employers that have taken pains to disavow DEIat least publiclyover the past few years. While this shift started with the Supreme Court ruling that overturned affirmative action in 2023, it has accelerated in the past year as the Trump administration has explicitly targeted DEI programs across the federal government and in the private sector. Some companies have opted to rebrand their DEI programs to mitigate legal risk without abandoning them outright. Like many other employers, Target took steps to shield itself from legal liability due to the evolving external landscape, concluding many of its DEI initiatives. But Target has been particularly vulnerable to blowback because of its reputation as a company that has historically supported the Black community. In the aftermath of George Floyds murder in 2020which happened just miles from company headquartersTarget made significant commitments to promote racial equity, pledging to increase its share of Black workers by 20% over the following three years and invest $2 billion in Black-owned businesses by 2025. Amid the political environment, its not clear whether the ongoing boycott will move Target to reevaluate its approach to DEI, especially as the company continues to navigate broader business woes and falling sales. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently embarked on a major investigation into Nikes DEI practices, which could eventually have significant consequences for corporate DEI effortsand, in the meantime, discourage employers from engaging in entirely legal forms of diversity work. At the moment, it seems companies like Target have little incentive to openly support DEI or draw attention to any DEI initiatives they may have in place.
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E-Commerce
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