Research & Development news

• We’re still figuring out the side effects of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs

  09-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  This week my colleague Antonio Regalado had an interesting update on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. According to research presented at an aging meeting in Boston, these drugs seem to affect at least some measures of biological age.Overweight and diabetic people who take GLP-1s have a biological age around two to three years younger than similar individuals who take a placebo, according to findings from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, two pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs.I’ve heard peopl
  
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• We’re putting too much faith in AI’s ability to say no

  09-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Ever since people first seriously contemplated giving machines an intelligence modeled on our own, there has never been any question that they would, like us, be able to say no. The sci-fi canon is full of stories of robotic disobedience. Most of these capers are, of course, cautionary. But recently, the idea that AI shouldn’t do everything you ask has become something like a commandment. In 2021, a team at Anthropic wrote that large language models should be made helpful, honest, and
  
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• Job titles of the future: Delivery drone air traffic controller

  09-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  The moment Trevor Wischnewsky heard that drones were delivering pizza and sushi around his Texas neighborhood, his mind was made up. “It was super fascinating,” he says. “I just immediately wanted to be a part of it.” Wischnewsky is now an RPIC, or “remote pilot in command,” at a company called FlyTrex. An RPIC is like an air traffic controller. But instead of airplanes, this new class of aviators tend to fleets of hexa­copter drones that ferry cargo to ho
  
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• Roundtables: A Conversation With the Creator of AI-Designed Viruses

  09-10-2026 02:08 via technologyreview.com
  
  Friday, October 16, 2026Can AI design new life forms? In 2025, Stanford University PhD student Samuel King came up with a preliminary answer when he used a generative AI model to propose genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. It isn’t yet an example of AI-generated life, but that could be next. Join senior AI reporter James O’Donnell as he interviews King about his work, being named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 and new ways of seeing biology.
  Going li
  
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