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PFAS are among the more dispiriting achievements of 20th century chemistry. Invented in the 1940s and deployed across Teflon pans, waterproof clothing, and food packaging, they were celebrated for resisting heat, grease, and water. The problem, which took several decades to appreciate, is that they resist breaking down in the environment with exactly the same enthusiasm. They are now detectable across the globe in water, soil, air and 99% of humans, whilst being linked to liver damage, reproductive disorders and cancers. Thanks DuPont. 

Current removal methods get the chemicals to stick to materials like activated carbon, but are slow, inefficient, and generate contaminated waste that still needs to go somewhere. Now though, a research team at Rice University has developed a layered double hydroxide material made from copper and aluminium whose internal structure removes PFAS molecules over 1,000 times more effectively than existing materials, and roughly 100 times faster than commercial carbon filters.

🧐 What's in it for me? PFAS contamination is already a regulatory crisis in the US, Europe, and Australia, and treatment infrastructure is years behind where it needs to be. A material that works this fast and this effectively in continuous-flow setups could realistically end up in municipal water systems.

💵 Out of the Lab: PFAS remediation is about to become a very large industry whether it wants to or not. Regulatory pressure in the US and EU is forcing utilities and manufacturers to act, and the existing tech is inadequate.

Rapamycin is possibly the most interesting pill you’ve never heard of. Originally developed to stop the body rejecting transplanted organs, along the way it was discovered to be the biohackers dream, a lifespan extender. In mouse models, it blocked a protein called mTOR, which regulates cell growth and division, convincing the body to spend less time expanding and more time doing maintenance. Scientists got excited, and unsurprisingly, waves of San Franciscan started popping pills pre-human trials. 

Now a reanalysis of 167 studies has confirmed the average effect is real, but adds an important caveat: individual responses vary enormously. Some animals lived dramatically longer (9%–14%) whilst others lived about as long as they would have done anyway.

So if the effects translate in the same magnitude to humans, and if you’re one of the genetically lucky, this could add 12 years to your life. Not bad for an accidental discovery.

🧐 What's in it for me? Rapamycin won't be prescribed any time soon, but the research direction is genuinely interesting: personalised longevity medicine, where your genome tells you which interventions are actually worth taking. In the meantime, human trial data is slowly accumulating.

💵 Out of the Lab: Whoever identifies the genomic profile of a rapamycin responder owns the longevity prescription market, which is not a small market to own.

Ever since you plugged in your router, it's been taking a radio-wave photos of everyone in the building, 24 hours a day, every few milliseconds. Until recently though it hadn't occurred to anyone to actually look at them. Enter KIT researchers.

Their technique works by exploiting signals that WiFi devices constantly send back to your router to keep the connection healthy. These signals bounce off everything in a room, including people, and return carrying a faint imprint of whatever they hit. Feed those into a machine learning model and you can identify individuals with nearly 100% accuracy. In a study of 197 participants, the team managed it every time. No phone required. No connection to the network required. Simply being in the room is sufficient.

The researchers are now calling for privacy protections in the next WiFi standard. Regulatory bodies have been asked to act on WiFi privacy before. They’re still thinking about it…

🧐 What's in it for me? This is a research capability rather than a deployed threat, for now. The uncomfortable detail is that no new infrastructure is required. Every WiFi network that already exists is, in principle, capable of this. If you want real privacy, you might need to shut off your WiFi next time you close the curtains. 

💵 Out of the Lab: Whilst the surveillance angle is new, the commercial one is not. WiFi sensing has been a product category for years, which means the infrastructure for exploitation is already built, and machine learning makes it a whole lot more effective:

A study following more than 5,000 adults over 80 in China found that non-meat eaters were less likely to reach 100. Interestingly though, this disparity only kicks in for the underweight vegetarians. Less a verdict against plant-based diets and more a reminder that calorie density matters rather more than cardiovascular virtue. 

However, if you do happen to be a skinny vegetarian, please don’t worry. It won’t help... Another study, found that women who worry about age-related health decline show signs of faster biological ageing at the cellular level. 

When adjusted for associated behaviours like smoking and drinking, the statistical significance did weaken though, so the causal picture is murky. The takeaway is either that anxiety about aging accelerates the process, or that people who are already aging faster have more to be anxious about. Possibly both. Either way, don’t worry!

Until next time.

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