The Download: the dream of cryonics, and enhanced rats

When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China in 2016, he was traveling there to guide China’s first forays into cryonics, or freezing corpses for reanimation.

Drake had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a small nonprofit that had managed to become the longtime leader in cryonics, freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976.

The foundation and cryonics generally have long been accepted outside of mainstream acceptance. The recent involvement by Yinfeng signals a new era in cryonics.

With its impressive financial resources, government support and scientific staff, it is one of a few new labs that focuses on increasing cryonics’ consumer appeal and trying to give credibility to the long-disputed theory about human reanimation. The field is still rooted in faith, rather than any evidence that it works. Read more .

–Laurie Clarke

This piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed issue, available from 26 October. If you want to read it when it comes out, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for as little as $80 a year.

Are rats with human brain cells still just rats?

This week, my colleague Jessica Hamzelou wrote about a fascinating experiment that involved implanting human brain cells into rats’ brains. Both species’ brain cells were able to make connections and work together. The rats’ brains were enriched with human cells.

A few months after being implanted, the human brains made up about a sixth of the rats’ brains. It appeared that the cells played a role controlling the behavior of the animals. Which invites the tricky question: Are these animals still 100% rat? Read the complete story .

Jessica’s story is from The Checkup, her weekly newsletter exploring all things biotech and health. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

ClimateTech 2022

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 China is preparing for its historic Communist party congress
A third term for president Xi Jinping is a near-certainty. (Economist $)
The congress is an opportunity for Xi to reassert his control. (FT $)
All 2,3000 senior party members will attend the meeting. (The Guardian)
Douying, Tiktok’s Chinese sister app, is silencing Cantonese speakers. (Rest of World)

Quote of the day

“There will often be one or two people running around like crazy, or doing something like creating a massive cartoon of a cat.”

–Antti Innanen, chief executive of Dot, a Finnish legal design consultancy, explains the pitfalls of trying to hold people’s attention while giving seminars in the metaverse to the Financial Times.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. Have any other ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me. )

Hey, that’s not how the next line of the song goes!
The one and only Patti Smith is releasing a book next month–and it’s inspired by, err, Instagram.
This sunlit waterfall is straight out of House of the Dragon.
If you ever find yourself in London, it’s only right you indulge in a bit of pub grub.
We tend to gravitate towards the familiar when something’s coming to an end, and that’s okay.