The web was built for humans. After thirty years of largely uninterrupted service, that assumption is being quietly disrupted by a new user base that doesn't click on links, doesn't watch ads, and doesn't sleep. AI agents have stopped writing copy and started doing things: navigating websites, filing forms, processing transactions, and sustaining hours of work unsupervised. The plumbing of the human web was never built with bots as customers, and the infrastructure pivot is now underway.

Two data points from the past fortnight. Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max, released on 20 May, ran unsupervised for 35 hours and rewrote a piece of software to run ten times faster on hardware it had never seen before. This isn’t a chatbot, it’s a freelance engineer. Meanwhile Parallel Web Systems, founded by ex-Twitter CEO and Stanford CS PhD Parag Agrawal, has just raised at a $2bn valuation building agent-native web infrastructure on the thesis that AIs will use the web far more than humans ever have.

🧐 What's in it for me? Less time clicking, more time delegating. The deeper consequence is economic. Every business model on the open web (ads, subscriptions, paywalls etc.) was built around capturing human attention. Agents don't browse for fun and don't watch ads, so the next decade's web economics will be rebuilt around access tolls, machine payments, and pay-per-fetch deals. Publishers and platforms haven't quite worked out where they sit in that yet.

💵 Out of the Lab: Almost every layer of the internet stack now has a startup trying to redo it for agents instead of humans. Search, browsers, payments, identity, content licensing: all up for grabs.

For most of human history, brain fog has been priced into the human condition, a steady tax on memory that compounds quietly after fifty. Scientists call the underlying process "neuroinflammaging" (a slow burn of inflammation deep in the brain's memory regions), and have long considered it a one-way street.

Researchers at Texas A&M led by Dr. Ashok Shetty have now shown that the street runs both ways. In a study published in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, just two doses of a nasal spray dramatically reduced brain inflammation, restored neurons' cellular power plants, and significantly improved memory, with effects holding for months. The spray contains microscopic biological packages (extracellular vesicles, harvested from human neural stem cells) carrying microRNA cargo. Delivered through the nose, they slip past the blood-brain barrier and switch off two of the main inflammation pathways linked to cognitive decline. A US patent has been filed.

🧐 What's in it for me? It's a mouse study, so calibrate expectations accordingly. But the underlying lever (switching off inflammation pathways in aged brains) is one of the most plausible in longevity science, and intranasal delivery is one of the few routes that can get large molecules into the brain without having to get the drill out. If any of this translates, dementia prevention starts looking less like an aspiration and more like a logistics problem.

💵 Out of the Lab: Brain aging is the single largest unsolved problem in medicine by total addressable market. US dementia cases are projected to roughly double by 2060, and a small group of researcher-founded companies are pushing the underlying biology toward the clinic.

The sun is renewable energy's most enthusiastic and least reliable employee. It refuses to operate after dark and the batteries that were meant to fix that are heavy, expensive, and give up a little capacity each time they're used. Now though, a team at UC Santa Barbara has decided to skip the electricity step entirely and store the sun chemically.

Grace Han's group designed a modified organic molecule called Dewar pyrimidone that absorbs sunlight, snaps into a strained high-energy form, and holds the energy for years without significant loss. Trigger it with mild heat or a catalyst and the molecule relaxes back, releasing the stored energy as heat. It packs nearly twice the energy per kilogram as a lithium-ion battery, and the team has demonstrated boiling water at ambient conditions, which sounds modest until you remember water heating accounts for around 20% of household energy use.

🧐 What's in it for me? This won't compete with batteries for grid storage where electricity is more flexible. But for heat-specific applications (residential hot water, off-grid heating, industrial low-temperature heat) molecular storage is pretty elegant. The compound is recyclable, water-compatible, and could circulate through rooftop collectors during the day before sitting in a tank releasing heat overnight.

💵 Out of the Lab: Thermal energy storage is currently dominated by approaches like carbon blocks, ceramic bricks and crushed rock that turn cheap electricity into glowing-hot industrial heat. Molecular thermal storage is a different category, but the same customers will eventually evaluate both.

The journals delivered a busy fortnight of verdicts on what is and isn't bad for you. A condensed digest.

😀 Inhaled CBD. A study in eNeuro from Augusta University found that inhaled cannabidiol reduced neuroinflammation in mouse models of Alzheimer's, alongside the anti-amyloid effects observed in earlier work. Impressive for something most people associate with vape pens.

☹️ Anything cooked over an open flame. Korean researchers have refined the testing method for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the carcinogens that form when fat drips onto hot surfaces during grilling, smoking, frying, and roasting. Worst offenders by concentration: soybean oil, duck meat, and canola oil.

😀 Rethinking long COVID. A brain imaging study from the University of Turku found no widespread inflammation in long COVID patients. The most severe symptoms correlate instead with increased activity in stress-related brain regions, which is inconvenient for any treatment built around the previous theory.

☹️ The dasatinib-plus-quercetin longevity stack. A favourite of biohackers who think they've found a shortcut. UConn researchers reported in PNAS that the senolytic combo damaged myelin in mice severely enough that the affected cells resembled those in multiple sclerosis.

Until next time.

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