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Tech execs love popping supplements and infusing themselves with youthful young plasma to ward off Father Time, but new research shows that a substance humanity has been ingesting for a thousand years holds powerful anti-aging effects. A new study published in Nature Partner Journals Aging discovered that naturally occurring compounds in the modest psychedelic mushroom were able to slow aging in cells and even increase a mouses lifespan. The two-pronged study out of Emory University examined the effects of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, on the micro level using human lung and skin cells, and the macro level using lab mice. Human fetal lung cells treated with psilocin, psilocybins active metabolite, showed a 29% boost to their cellular lifespans a number that rocketed to 57% when exposed to a much larger dosage. When the scientists repeated the study with human skin cells, the large psilocin dose increased the cells lifespan by 51%. Across the cellular experiments, exposure to the psychedelic reduced the oxidative stress that can lead to cell damage and preserved the length of telomeres, a part of the chromosome implicated in cancer and other age-related diseases. The scientists findings in living mice were even more impressive. When dosing older mice with psilocybin and comparing them to a control group, the research team found the aged mice lived 30% longer than their peers who werent subject to the same psychedelic journey. On top of that, the mice given psilocybin looked healthier, with better fur quality, hair regrowth and less graying on their coats. Psilocybin is an emerging frontier in mental health research, but it obviously holds some strong potential in the field of longevity too. The psychedelic substance has shown promise for everything from helping smokers and alcoholics quit to giving patients long-lasting relief from major depression. Our study opens new questions about what long-term treatments can do, senior study author and former Emory University associate professor Louise Hecker, PhD said. Additionally, even when the intervention is initiated late in life in mice, it still leads to improved survival, which is clinically relevant in healthy aging,
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E-Commerce
While tariffs threaten to whittle away profits for many businesses, those costs arent subtle when theyre tacked onto the price tag of an airplane. In an effort to preserve its bottom line, Delta Air Lines is getting creative. The Atlanta-based company has been pulling engines off new Airbus jets in Europe and bringing them stateside to get grounded U.S. planes up and flyingwithout paying costs associated with importing new planes and parts. Bloomberg reports that the company has a new practice of removing some U.S.-made Pratt & Whitney engines from new Airbus A321neo jets that were constructed in Europe and sending them to the U.S. in order to avoid import tariffs. Delta is then installing the engines on some of its older A320neo jets that arent currently flying due to engine problems. Because Delta is reportedly waiting for regulators to give its new set of jets the green light, the engine swapping doesnt mean grounding Europe-based planes that would otherwise be flying. Along with Boeing, Airbus is one of the two largest manufacturers of commercial aircraft in the world. Unlike U.S.-based Boeing, Airbus was founded in Europe and is co-owned by the governments of France, Germany, and Spain, among other investors. Under President Trumps current tariff rules, European-built aircraft incur a 10% tariff when imported into the U.S. Because airlines regularly pay Airbus and Boeing billions to bolster their fleets with modern jets, even a small percentage of additional cost stands to zap the airline industrys already notoriously thin margins. For Delta, one of the largest airlines in the U.S., coming to peace with trade chaos and paying Trumps tariffs isnt on the flight plan. We will not be paying tariffs on any aircraft deliveries, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in an April earnings call. These times are pretty uncertain, and if you start to put a 20% incremental cost on top of an aircraft, it gets very difficult to make that math work.
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E-Commerce
An AI called Devin just landed a job on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs just “hired” an AI software engineer made by the startup Cognition. Goldman Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti told CNBC that the company plans to augment its workforce with the AI tool, which will execute tasks on behalf of its more than 10,000 human software developers. Initially, we will have hundreds of Devins [and] that might go into the thousands, depending on the use cases, Argenti said. Wall Street has been wading in and exploring AI in the last couple of years, but Goldmans push to integrate autonomous AI agents might be the finance sectors first plunge into the deep end. A brief history of Devin Cognition introduced the technology, which it hailed as the worlds first AI software engineer, last year. That tech, known as Devin, was designed to execute software engineering tasks independently, making thousands of decisions along the way. Using natural language prompts, programmers can put Devin to work doing complex tasks like building an app or finding and fixing bugs in a codebase. Cognition describes Devin as a a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review a description as likely to strike fear in the hearts of workers as it is to have executives seeing dollar signs. Shortly after its launch, the founder of prominent AI search engine Perplexity praised Cognitions Devin as the first AI agent that seems to cross the threshold of what is human level and works reliably. The company was valued at $4 billion in March after raising hundreds of millions in investment led by 8VC, an early stage venture capital firm founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Cognition is obviously leaning on Devins anthropomorphic branding to generate buzz and make Devin feel like a one to one substitute for a human that can write code, but so far that strategy seems to be working. Like most promising new technologies, the marketing doesnt always match reality at least not yet. When one group of data scientists put Devin to the test, they found that the AI software engineer only successfully completed three of 20 proposed tasks, with 14 of the test projects being total flops. In benchmark tests, Devin performed twice as well as an LLM-based chatbot, but didnt deliver on the promise of operating fully autonomously. AI-generated code can also pose its own problems for companies, with bugs leading to downtime and security risks being glossed over due to less human involvement in the process. What is agentic AI? Agentic AI is yet another AI buzzword, but it does mean something specific. Unlike chatbots or AI research tools that people are most likely to interact with, agentic AI is designed to execute tasks and make decisions on its own without constant human input (hence the emphasis on agency in agentic). The ability to execute multi-step jobs from start to finish means these tools work more how humans do, pursuing set goals and completing various kinds of tasks to get there. While generative AI is focused on generating outputs, like writing a draft email or compiling research, agentic AI is all about executing tasks and taking action, though how those systems accomplish that and the degree to which they are successful is up to their design. Wall Street wades in Goldman Sachs seems to be the only major bank implementing a start-to-finish AI coding tool like Devin, but its competitors likely arent far behind. AI assistants and chatbots are used widely on Wall Street already as big banks look for a competitive edge and pour investment into AI-related hires and technology. JPMorgan Chase introduced its own generative AI assistant internally last year, making the tool available to 60,000 employees who can leverage it to write emails and file reports. Morgan Stanley similarly provided financial advisors with internal tools running OpenAIs tech under the hood. We are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary and possibly as transformational as some of the major technological inventions of the past several hundred years, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in bullish comments on AI last year, adding that he expects the technology to augment virtually every job. While AI chatbots and other lower-level tools are approaching ubiquity, adoption of agentic AI isnt there yet. In a report last year, Deloitte predicted that a quarter of companies already using generative AI would begin exploring agentic AI in 2025, but risks from the technologys relative lack of human oversight means companies will move more slowly to fully implement it.
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E-Commerce
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