NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

Is Your Car Safe for Women?

A “safe” car doesn’t always mean safe for everyone.

Car safety is defined by crash test dummies: these plastic bodies are packed with sensors and built to mimic how a human body moves and bends in a crash.

Engineers slam cars into walls, deploy airbags, and tighten seatbelts - then read the data from the dummy to predict where injuries would occur. That data shapes everything from airbag placement to seatbelt tension.

But here’s the problem: these dummies have always been designed around male bodies. The closest substitute is a simplified dummy created in the 1970s - it couldn’t twist, or measure stress on internal organs.

And that’s important: statistically, women are more likely to be injured in certain types of crashes, even when wearing seatbelts.

Now the US Department of Transportation has released the THOR-05F, a crash test dummy based on the female anatomy:

• It’s the first detailed, female-specific crash test dummy - representing an adult with a tailored pelvis, breasts, and flexible spine.

• It can sit up or slouch, reflecting how people actually drive.

• It’s more precise: over 150 sensors measure injury risk to the head, chest, abdomen, and limbs.

It’s big: if women aren’t accurately represented, safety features won’t fully protect them. Better dummies lead to better data, which leads to safer seatbelts, airbags, and vehicle designs - for everyone.

The design of the THOR-05F has been shared with automakers, and will be integrated into official crash testing and safety ratings by 2028.

(Source: Michael Harley reporting for Forbes)

Does Your Pet Need a Camera Crew? 📸 

Be honest… your phone is already about 90% pet photos, isn’t it?

Sleeping. Stretching. Staring at absolutely nothing. You didn’t mean to film them for five minutes straight - they were just being unbearably cute.

Now imagine a robot whose full-time job is to follow your pet around and capture their best angles.

Chinese AI company Tuya Smart has unveiled Aura, an AI companion that roams your home, tracks your pet, and takes videos all day long. Zoomies? Filmed. Mid-nap snore? Documented. That dramatic stare out the window like they’re in a movie? Saved for later.

Why Living Longer Isn’t Enough

Living longer isn’t the breakthrough. Living better is.

For most of history, adding years to life often meant adding years of illness and dependence. Medicine became very good at keeping people alive - but not at helping them stay strong and mobile as they aged.

That gap is what Sonia Arrison set out to fix.

Born in Canada, Sonia began asking a simple question: what’s the point of longer lives if people spend those extra years unwell? 

She went on to write the book 100 Plus, which argued that the future of aging wouldn’t be solved by a single miracle drug. Real progress, she said, would require biology, tech, and society to move forward together.

Today, Sonia is helping turn that idea into action. She’s a longevity investor and advisor, a venture partner at Portfolia, and runs her own angel fund. She invests in AI diagnostics, regenerative medicine, women’s health, and preventative care - tools designed to help people understand and manage their health earlier, not just treat disease later.

She also chairs the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, working to bring longevity science into public policy so these ideas don’t stay trapped in labs.

If aging well matters to you, this one’s worth the watch. Listen to the full episode on YouTube or Spotify.

Thanks to Google for sponsoring this episode.

AI Around the World

In Spain, authorities are warning about a TikTok scam using AI videos of Princess Leonor, the 20-year-old heir to the throne. The fake clips promise large payouts if users first send a small fee - some videos have reached over 1M views.  

In Denmark, toymaker Lego is launching an AI curriculum to help children understand how AI works. Using Lego bricks equipped with sensors, students can see how machines learn, make decisions, and sometimes get things wrong. Lego found that 90% of children want to learn more about AI, yet most feel left out of the conversation.