Galapagos tortoises become first-time parents aged nearly 100
A pair of critically endangered, nearly 100-year-old Galapagos tortoises at the Philadelphia Zoo have become first-time parents.
The zoo said it was 'overjoyed' over the arrival of the four hatchlings, a first in its more than 150-year history.
The babies are the offspring of female Mommy and male Abrazzo, the zoo's two oldest residents.
The quartet is being kept behind the scenes inside the Reptile and Amphibian House for now, 'eating and growing appropriately', the zoo said. They weigh between 70 and 80 grams, about the weight of a chicken egg.
We have INCREDIBLE news! 🎉
For the first time in our 150+ year history, four critically endangered Western Santa Cruz Galapagos tortoises have hatched! 🐢 Mommy, who's around 100 years old, is now the oldest first-time mom of her species! Read more👉 https://t.co/lpJi9uq2aQ pic.twitter.com/pFG10hbQWu
— Philly Zoo (@phillyzoo) April 3, 2025
The first egg hatched on February 27, with more eggs that are yet to hatch being monitored by the zoo's animal care team.
President and chief executive Jo-Elle Mogerman said: 'This is a significant milestone in the history of Philadelphia Zoo, and we couldn't be more excited to share this news with our city, region and the world.
'Mommy arrived at the Zoo in 1932, meaning anyone that has visited the Zoo for the last 92 years has likely seen her.
'Philadelphia Zoo's vision is that those hatchlings will be a part of a thriving population of Galapagos tortoises on our healthy planet 100 years from now.'
Important pieces of history just hatched at Philadelphia Zoo… Stay tuned for the announcement tomorrow! 🤭 pic.twitter.com/7Ppv1Wp9Xr
— Philly Zoo (@phillyzoo) April 3, 2025
Mommy is considered one of the most genetically valuable Galapagos tortoises in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' (AZA) species survival plan.
She is also the oldest first-time mother of the Western Santa Cruz Galapagos species. The last clutch of such tortoises to hatch at an AZA-accredited zoo was in 2019 at Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia, South Carolina.
The San Diego Zoo, Zoo Miami and Honolulu Zoo also have breeding pairs of the reptiles.
The Philadelphia Zoo is planning a public debut of the hatchlings on April 23, as well as a naming contest.
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WIRED
a day ago
- WIRED
Inside the AI Party at the End of the World
Jun 11, 2025 7:00 AM At a mansion overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a group of AI insiders met to debate one unsettling question: If humanity ends, what comes next? Photo-Illustration:In a $30 million mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a group of AI researchers, philosophers, and technologists gathered to discuss the end of humanity. The Sunday afternoon symposium, called 'Worthy Successor,' revolved around a provocative idea from entrepreneur Daniel Faggella: The 'moral aim' of advanced AI should be to create a form of intelligence so powerful and wise that 'you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.' Faggella made the theme clear in his invitation. 'This event is very much focused on posthuman transition,' he wrote to me via X DMs. 'Not on AGI that eternally serves as a tool for humanity.' A party filled with futuristic fantasies, where attendees discuss the end of humanity as a logistics problem rather than a metaphorical one, could be described as niche. If you live in San Francisco and work in AI, then this is a typical Sunday. About 100 guests nursed nonalcoholic cocktails and nibbled on cheese plates near floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Pacific ocean before gathering to hear three talks on the future of intelligence. One attendee sported a shirt that said 'Kurzweil was right,' seemingly a reference to Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicted machines will surpass human intelligence in the coming years. Another wore a shirt that said 'does this help us get to safe AGI?' accompanied by a thinking face emoji. Faggella told WIRED that he threw this event because 'the big labs, the people that know that AGI is likely to end humanity, don't talk about it because the incentives don't permit it' and referenced early comments from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, who 'were all pretty frank about the possibility of AGI killing us all.' Now that the incentives are to compete, he says, 'they're all racing full bore to build it.' (To be fair, Musk still talks about the risks associated with advanced AI, though this hasn't stopped him from racing ahead). On LinkedIn, Faggella boasted a star-studded guest list, with AI founders, researchers from all the top Western AI labs, and 'most of the important philosophical thinkers on AGI.' The first speaker, Ginevera Davis, a writer based in New York, warned that human values might be impossible to translate to AI. Machines may never understand what it's like to be conscious, she said, and trying to hard-code human preferences into future systems may be shortsighted. Instead, she proposed a lofty-sounding idea called 'cosmic alignment'—building AI that can seek out deeper, more universal values we haven't yet discovered. Her slides often showed a seemingly AI-generated image of a techno-utopia, with a group of humans gathered on a grass knoll overlooking a futuristic city in the distance. Critics of machine consciousness will say that large language models are simply stochastic parrots—a metaphor coined by a group of researchers, some of whom worked at Google, who wrote in a famous paper that LLMs do not actually understand language and are only probabilistic machines. But that debate wasn't part of the symposium, where speakers took as a given the idea that superintelligence is coming, and fast. By the second talk, the room was fully engaged. Attendees sat cross-legged on the wood floor, scribbling notes. A philosopher named Michael Edward Johnson took the mic and argued that we all have an intuition that radical technological change is imminent, but we lack a principled framework for dealing with the shift—especially as it relates to human values. He said that if consciousness is 'the home of value,' then building AI without fully understanding consciousness is a dangerous gamble. We risk either enslaving something that can suffer or trusting something that can't. (This idea relies on a similar premise to machine consciousness and is also hotly debated.) Rather than forcing AI to follow human commands forever, he proposed a more ambitious goal: teaching both humans and our machines to pursue 'the good.' (He didn't share a precise definition of what 'the good' is, but he insists it isn't mystical and hopes it can be defined scientifically.) Philosopher Michael Edward Johnson Photograph: Kylie Robison Entrepreneur and speaker Daniel Faggella Photograph: Kylie Robison Finally, Faggella took the stage. He believes humanity won't last forever in its current form and that we have a responsibility to design a successor, not just one that survives but one that can create new kinds of meaning and value. He pointed to two traits this successor must have: consciousness and 'autopoiesis,' the ability to evolve and generate new experiences. Citing philosophers like Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, he argued that most value in the universe is still undiscovered and that our job is not to cling to the old but to build something capable of uncovering what comes next. This, he said, is the heart of what he calls 'axiological cosmism,' a worldview where the purpose of intelligence is to expand the space of what's possible and valuable rather than merely serve human needs. He warned that the AGI race today is reckless and that humanity may not be ready for what it's building. But if we do it right, he said, AI won't just inherit the Earth—it might inherit the universe's potential for meaning itself. During a break between panels and the Q&A, clusters of guests debated topics like the AI race between the US and China. I chatted with the CEO of an AI startup who argued that, of course , there are other forms of intelligence in the galaxy. Whatever we're building here is trivial compared to what must already exist beyond the Milky Way. At the end of the event, some guests poured out of the mansion and into Ubers and Waymos, while many stuck around to continue talking. "This is not an advocacy group for the destruction of man,' Faggella told me. 'This is an advocacy group for the slowing down of AI progress, if anything, to make sure we're going in the right direction.'
Newsweek
a day ago
- Newsweek
Ravi Kumar's Vision: Leading Cognizant Through Uncertainty Into the AI-Powered Future
Growing up in India as the eldest of three brothers, Ravi Kumar didn't start out looking like leadership material. "I didn't do well in school. I was at the bottom of my class," he admits. "Normally, when you're at the bottom, you're good at something like sports or art. I wasn't good at anything." He lived in the shadow of his younger siblings—both brilliant students who went on to become doctors. "I was the elder, and I was known as their brother," Kumar says, the irony evident in his voice. "It wasn't a great thing." Yet, the academic underachiever would go on to produce a remarkable turnaround, excelling in chemical engineering at Shivaji University, a solid but decidedly not elite state school. "Once I tasted success, the aspirations to punch above my weight grew," Kumar says. He eventually landed a coveted position at India's prestigious Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC). There, working alongside graduates of elite institutions, Kumar discovered his potential. "I didn't go to an IIT [Indian Institute of Technology], but I felt like, 'Wait a minute, I'm able to compete with these guys,'" he says. Not that everyone agreed at the time. In 1992, Kumar won an award for young scientists named after "the Indian Oppenheimer," Dr. Homi Bhabha. "When I told my dad, he couldn't believe it," Kumar recalls. "He almost innocuously said, 'Can I see the certificate?'" Today, that once-struggling student turned nuclear scientist runs a $36 billion global technology company with nearly 350,000 employees. In his office high in a gleaming tower in Manhattan's Hudson Yards development, Kumar greets visitors with a high-wattage smile. Dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, he gestures toward large windows that frame a panoramic view out towards the Hudson River—and, as he points out with amusement, his own apartment in the next tower over. Cognizant at the Crossroads Kumar inherited a company at an inflection point. Founded in 1994 as an in-house technology unit of Dun & Bradstreet, Cognizant had grown into a powerhouse in IT services by providing skilled technical labor in India—today, more than two-thirds of Cognizant's employees are based in India—to Western companies looking to outsource their technology operations. But after years of stellar growth, the company had hit turbulence. In the months before Kumar's arrival, its stock had declined nearly 40 percent off its pandemic peak. The challenges weren't unique to Cognizant. The rise of AI threatened to upend decades-old business models. The entire IT services industry faced an existential question: What happens to a business built on human outsourcing when machines start writing code? Kumar's response was characteristically bold. Just months after joining Cognizant (which has led to ongoing litigation with Infosys over trade secrets and anti-competition allegations by both companies), he committed $1 billion to AI initiatives—a massive bet for a company still working through organizational challenges. "Cognizant had a lull for a couple of years," Kumar acknowledges. "It was hard for somebody to say, 'As I'm fixing the ship, I'm going to invest $1 billion into the future.'" The Outsider's Path What makes Kumar's rise to CEO remarkable is how dramatically it diverges from those of most Indian executives who lead large global companies. High-profile CEOs of Indian ancestry often follow one of a few well-worn paths: They are either American-born to immigrant parents, American-educated (usually the privilege of quite wealthy families in India), graduates of the hyper-competitive IITs which have acceptance rates that make the Ivy League look like community colleges, or they work their way up the corporate ladder at a large multinational company, usually moving to the United States as younger adults. Kumar did none of these things. Instead, Kumar forged his own way through the less-traveled route of nuclear science at BARC, a pivotal institution in India's recent history and a symbol of its scientific self-reliance and national ambition. Working in this environment provided Kumar with an analytical framework that would underpin his entire career. "Science was slow and methodical, giving you a framework to apply yourself," he explains. This scientific grounding would shape his approach to business problems throughout his career, but he also discovered something else about science: "The pace of science was slower than the pace of technology." That insight led Kumar to make a pivotal decision to shift from science to business. "I felt like if I had to make an impact, I had to be in a high-velocity world. So, I switched to technology, a high-velocity world." This led him to pursue an MBA and eventually a 20-year stint at Indian IT giant Infosys, where he rose to become president before taking the top job at Cognizant in 2023. "Each one of us discovers ourselves," Kumar reflects. "I discovered myself pretty late." His early frustrations stemmed from an intense drive for excellence that wasn't yet finding its outlet. After exploring various roles, Kumar recognized his true strength lay in organizational leadership, particularly in businesses centered on human capital. Gut, Data, Gut Kumar may have left the laboratory behind, but he never abandoned his scientific mindset. It deeply influences his approach to business decisions through a framework he calls "gut, data, gut." "I'm a believer that decision-making is about blending intuition, experience, and data. There is a formula in my head that I've applied to decision-making: You don't make a decision with less than 40 percent of the information needed. You make the decision when you have at most 70 percent of the information," Kumar explains. "Don't wait for a decision to be made beyond 70 percent of the data, because if you make that decision after 70 percent, you're already late. Intuition helps you ask the right questions, and data helps you validate it." Srinivas Kamadi, who worked with Kumar at Infosys and now runs his own AI firm, AidenAI, has witnessed this decision-making framework firsthand. "He's always validating his hypothesis," Kamadi notes, describing how Kumar rigorously applies data to test his ideas. Rather than seeking consensus or popularity, "he goes about his job in a very clinical way," filtering through options methodically. Kumar's $1 billion AI investment at Cognizant stands as perhaps the boldest application of this framework of combining scientific rigor with an intuitive leap—a high-stakes decision made when the company was still struggling to regain its footing and, coming before the ChatGPT-fueled AI boom had fully kicked in, when committing such resources to an emerging technology seemed risky to many observers. His conviction came partly from early signs that AI would transform software development—Cognizant's core business. "Some of the early experiments we did, including with Microsoft, [Amazon Web Services], and Google, gave me this feeling that this is going to come and conquer software development cycles and write code," he says. The bet appears to be paying off. On a recent Cognizant earnings call, Kumar boasted that 20 percent of its code had been generated by AI. The Networked CEO "I spent my first 40 years of my life in India and the next 10 in the US," he says. This later-career transition provided a unique perspective on both business environments. "In those 40 years, I dealt with the world in India, which is a very chaotic country. It's a growing economy but very chaotic." A daily life of "navigating that heterogeneity, complexity, uncomfortable zones and ambiguity," he explains, built strengths that prepared him for leadership challenges. Kumar points to a simple example: Indian roads. "If you drive a car in India, you can drive in any part of the world," he laughs. With more than 172,000 road fatalities in 2023 alone—approximately one death every three minutes—India's roads are a place where life-or-death decisions happen constantly. "Thriving in ambiguity, as I call it," Kumar says. The easy part of being a visionary leader, Ravi Kumar says, is having a vision of what's to come. The harder part is "to make everybody believe something is coming that they don't see." The easy part of being a visionary leader, Ravi Kumar says, is having a vision of what's to come. The harder part is "to make everybody believe something is coming that they don't see." Marleen Moise Kumar's leadership philosophy reflects another significant shift: from command-and-control to network-based organizational structures. "As organizations evolved in the digital age—I call it the golden age of technology—organizations went from hierarchical structures to network structures," he explains. In this networked world, Kumar believes the art of persuasion is more important than one's position on an org chart. Rather than imposing directives from above, he emphasizes building support through influence and communication. "As a CEO, I've always said it's easy to see what is coming," he explains, because people are constantly bringing you information, "so you can see what's coming." The hard part of being a visionary leader is not coming up with a vision but rather figuring out how to inspire others to follow it. "The bigger virtue is to make everybody believe something is coming that they don't see," he explains. Shrinivas Udatha, who worked with Kumar at Infosys for over 20 years, witnessed this persuasive leadership when Kumar spearheaded Infosys's U.S. expansion around 2018. "He can connect dots," Udatha observes, explaining how Kumar tailored his messaging to different stakeholders—highlighting long-term financial benefits when speaking with the CFO while emphasizing strategic client proximity when addressing the CEO. At Cognizant, Kumar describes his role as balancing the needs of key constituencies: employees, clients, and investors. Rather than considering these groups in isolation or prioritizing them sequentially, he emphasizes a holistic approach. "Every decision has to be integrated across these three stakeholders," he says. Kumar strives to create what he calls a "big small company" at Cognizant—an organization with enterprise-scale capabilities that maintains startup-like agility and entrepreneurial spirit. "For the fact that we have 350,000 employees, I'm amazed that everybody seems to know everybody," he says. "It's a very closely knit company." This networked approach has also influenced Kumar's approach to innovation. Shortly after taking the helm at Cognizant, he launched an initiative called Bluebolt to drive grassroots innovation across the company. "Everybody believes innovation is done in a department," Kumar says, rejecting the conventional siloed approach of "innovation labs" and "chief innovation officers." "I mean, you are insulting innovation by saying it has to be in a department." Instead, the Bluebolt program encourages all 350,000 Cognizant employees to think entrepreneurially about their work. So far, the initiative has generated over 300,000 ideas. "We have a central team which looks at these ideas, and we fund them with expertise, financial capital infrastructure so that we can prototype them and take it to clients," Kumar explains. "And in the process, you find the big idea as you keep looking for the small idea." The AI Revolution Cognizant was born during a period of global business expansion that was creating new technological needs. "As enterprises went global, they used technology to scale efficiently," Kumar explains. What that means, he says, is that instead of companies building their own "technology plumbing," as he calls it, "You wanted to focus on your own core and outsource the non-core." That outsourcing model formed the foundation of Cognizant's business for decades, but Kumar sees AI demanding a fundamentally different approach. Now, with AI, Kumar sees an even more profound change: "The future of technology is every industry is going to be a tech industry. Software is the alchemy for every business." He describes AI's impact working along three vectors. The first is embracing AI's ability to write code to speed up an organization's technology development cycle. "The second vector is to enable AI and agentification in an enterprise. You integrate it with the workflows in a company." The third vector, which he considers the most fascinating, is using AI to "unlock new service pools. These are new business opportunities." Cognizant office in Plano, Texas, USA. Cognizant office in Plano, Texas, USA. JHVEPhoto/Getty As an example, Kumar cites a recent client visit with a medical device company. The CIO described how they sell compact home medical equipment, including dialysis machines previously available only in clinical settings. The primary users are typically seniors aged 65 and older who, despite having these devices at home, often struggle to operate them independently. Instead of enjoying the convenience of home care, "they buy these compact devices, and then go to a clinic and they get a nurse to help them." Kumar recognized an opportunity: "I said, we can build a digital nurse for you as a service around the device. People can use the digital nurse to self-serve themselves." The transformation Kumar envisions goes beyond simply expanding Cognizant's service offerings—it's about redrawing the boundaries between what companies consider core functions and what they're willing to entrust to partners. Insurance underwriting exemplifies this shift. Surya Gummadi, Cognizant's president of Americas, explains: "Underwriting is considered core for the insurance industry. Historically, they have kept underwriting within their wheelhouse." But AI is fundamentally altering this calculus by disaggregating the process into components where intelligent agents can handle specific functions. The Human Element Despite his focus on technology, Kumar places remarkable emphasis on the human aspects of leadership—particularly vulnerability and psychological safety. "I'm one of those people who will not only be vulnerable but make everybody around me comfortable to be vulnerable," he says. His passion for Formula 1 is evident throughout his office space, where racing memorabilia dominates the décor—paintings of F1 cars adorn the walls. In the reception area, visitors can try their hand at a full-size simulator of the Aston Martin car his company sponsors. During a recent gathering with CEOs at a Formula 1 race in Las Vegas, Kumar found himself rethinking conventional wisdom about vulnerability. "When I'm the CEO and say I don't know AI, people won't judge me because I'm in a position of strength," he reflects. The challenge is different for those with less power or status. "If a school graduate tells me they don't know how to put on a tie or write something," he says, "they are putting their jobs at stake." And there lies the value of making employees feel safe: "If you create a psychological safety net, they will punch above their weight," he says, becoming "your force multiplier because people are learning boldly without hesitation." Workers working on laptops. Workers working on laptops. Abdul-Rafay Shaikh/Getty This human-centered approach to leadership reveals a profound understanding of what will distinguish human contribution in the age of intelligent machines. As AI takes over more routine cognitive tasks, the premium on uniquely human capabilities—creativity, empathy, collaboration, ethical judgment—will only increase. In Newsweek's AI Impact interview series with leading thinkers in the field, the importance of keeping humans in the loop with new AI tools has been a recurring theme. As Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun told Newsweek, "AI will have a similar transformative effect on society as the printing press had in the 15th century." But crucially, the impact will be through "amplifying human intelligence, not replacing it." Staying Hungry For all his success, Kumar maintains the hunger that drove him to overcome his early academic struggles. This sometimes leads him to actively seek out uncomfortable situations, such as when he was invited to speak at a school in India while running a 25,000-person operation. When he got home, his wife, Amita, asked how it went. "Look, I didn't do well. I didn't feel like I hit it out of the park," Kumar recalls telling her. His wife's response: "So be it. Nobody's appraising you there. Why the hell are you worried? Move on." But Kumar couldn't let it go. "The next day, I went to my office. I kept calling schools," he says, inquiring whether they needed a guest speaker. He was determined to master this new challenge. "I wanted to do it again. I mean, I just wanted to beat it." "I'm very hungry for learning," Kumar says simply. "Who cares whether I did well in school?" This willingness to acknowledge shortcomings while relentlessly working to overcome them forms the cornerstone of Kumar's approach to both personal growth and corporate leadership. Leading a global technology giant into an uncertain future, Kumar—the once overlooked elder brother turned nuclear scientist turned global CEO—approaches the AI era with the quiet confidence of someone who has made a career of turning uncertainty into opportunity. The unconventional path that once made him an outsider may be precisely what equips him to lead in this new technological era. With reporting by Katherine Fung, Lauren Giella and Oliver Staley
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Get Ready to Hear a Lot More About Your Mitochondria
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s warning about mitochondria slipped in between the anti-vaccine junk science and the excoriation of pharmaceutical drugs as 'the No. 3 killer in our country.' He was speaking in 2023 to Joe Rogan, elaborating on the dangers of Wi-Fi—which no high-quality scientific evidence has shown to harm anyone's health—and arguing that it causes disease by somehow opening the blood-brain barrier, and by degrading victims' mitochondria. The mention of mitochondria—the tiny structures that generate energy within our cells—was brief. Two years later, mitochondrial health is poised to become a pillar of the MAHA movement, already showing up in marketing for supplements and on podcasts across the 'manosphere.' Casey Means, President Donald Trump's newest nominee for surgeon general, has singled out the organelle as the main casualty of the modern American health crisis. According to Means (who has an M.D. but no active medical license), most of America's chronic ailments can be traced to mitochondrial dysfunction. Should she be confirmed to the post of surgeon general, the American public can expect to hear a lot more about mitochondria. Among scientists, interest and investment in mitochondria have risen notably in the past five years, Kay Macleod, a University of Chicago researcher who studies mitochondria's role in cancer, told me. Mitochondria, after all, perform a variety of crucial functions in the human body. Beyond powering cells, they can affect gene expression, help certain enzymes function, and modulate cell death, Macleod said. When mitochondria are defective, people do indeed suffer. Vamsi Mootha, a mitochondrial biologist based at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, told me that rare genetic defects (appearing in about one in 4,300 people) can cause the organelles to malfunction, leading to muscle weakness, heart abnormalities, cognitive disability, and liver and kidney problems. Evidence also suggests that defects in mitochondria directly contribute to symptoms of Parkinson's disease, and could be both a cause and an effect of type 2 diabetes. Other conditions' links to mitochondria are blurrier. Researchers see aberrant mitochondria in postmortem biopsies of patients with illnesses such as Alzheimer's, cancer, and fatty-liver disease, Mootha said; whether those damaged mitochondria cause or result from such conditions is not yet clear. But according to Good Energy, the book Means published last year with a top MAHA adviser—her brother, Calley—mitochondrial dysfunction is a veritable plague upon the United States, responsible for both serious illness and everyday malaise. In their view, modern Western diets and lifestyles wreck countless Americans' metabolic health: Every time you drink unfiltered water or a soda, or feel the stress of mounting phone notifications, you hurt your mitochondria, they say, triggering an immune response that in turn triggers inflammation. (Damaged mitochondria really can cause inflammation, Macleod said.) This chain of events, the Meanses claim, can be blamed for virtually every common chronic health condition: migraines, depression, infertility, heart disease, obesity, cancer, and more. (Casey Means did not respond to requests for comment; reached by email, Calley did not respond to my questions about mitochondria, but noted, 'There is significant scientific evidence that healthy food, exercise and sleep have a significant impact on reversing chronic disease.') Good Energy follows a typical wellness playbook: using a mixture of valid and dubious research to pin a slew of common health problems on one overlooked element of health—and advertising a cure. Among the culprits for our mitochondrial ravaging, according to the Meanses, are poor sleep, medications, ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, too many calories, and too few vitamins, as well as chronically staying in comfortable ambient temperatures. The Means siblings therefore recommend eschewing refined sugar in favor of leafy greens, avoiding nicotine and alcohol, frequenting saunas and cold plunges, getting seven to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, and cleansing your life of environmental toxins. Some studies indeed suggest that mitochondrial function is linked with sleep and temperature, but they've all been conducted on cell cultures, organoids, or mice. According to Macleod, evidence suggests that diet, too, is likely important. But only one lifestyle intervention—exercise—has been definitively shown to improve mitochondrial health in humans. The Meanses are riding a wave of interest in mitochondrial health in the wellness world. Earlier this year, the longevity influencer Bryan Johnson and the ivermectin enthusiast Mel Gibson both endorsed the dye methylene blue for its power to improve mitochondrial respiration; Kennedy was filmed slipping something that looks a lot like methylene blue into his drink. (Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment; the FDA has approved methylene blue, but only as a treatment for the blood disease methemoglobinemia.) AG1, formerly known as Athletic Greens, formulates its drinkable vitamins for mitochondrial health. Even one laser-light skin treatment promises to 'recharge failing mitochondria.' The enzyme CoQ10 is popular right now as a supplement for mitochondrial function, as is NAD, a molecule involved in mitochondria's production of energy. NAD IV drips are especially beloved by celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Kendall Jenner, and the Biebers. These supplements are generally thought to be safe, and some preliminary research shows that NAD supplementation could help patients with Parkinson's or other neurodegenerative diseases, and that CoQ10 could benefit people with mitochondrial disorders. Patients whose symptoms are clearly caused or made worse by deficiencies in a specific vitamin, such as thiamine, can benefit from supplementing those vitamins, Mootha said. But little research explores how these supplements might affect healthy adults. [Read: The MAHA takeover is complete] In Good Energy, as well as on her website and in podcast appearances, Casey Means promotes a number of supplements for mitochondrial health. She also recommends that people wear continuous glucose monitors—available from her company, Levels Health, for $184 a month—to help prevent overwhelming their mitochondria with too much glucose. (According to Macleod, glucose levels are only 'a very indirect measure' of mitochondrial activity.) As with so many problems that wellness influencers harp on, the supposed solution to this one involves buying products from those exact same people. At best, all of this attention to mitochondria could lead Americans to healthier habits. Much of the advice in Good Energy echoes health recommendations we've all heard for decades; getting regular exercise and plenty of fiber is good guidance, regardless of anyone's reasons for doing so. Switching out unhealthy habits for healthy ones will likely even improve your mitochondrial health, Jaya Ganesh, a mitochondrial-disease expert at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told me. After all, 'if you consistently beat your body up with unhealthy habits, everything is going to fall sick,' Ganesh said. But the mitochondrial approach to wellness carries risks, too. For patients with genetically caused mitochondrial disease, lifestyle changes might marginally improve some symptoms, Ganesh said, but attempting to cure such conditions with supplements and a healthy diet alone could be dangerous. Means also calls out medications—including antibiotics, chemotherapy, antiretrovirals, statins, and high-blood-pressure drugs—for interfering with mitochondria. Macleod told me that statins really do affect mitochondria, as do some antibiotics. (The latter makes sense: Mitochondria are thought to have evolved from bacteria more than a billion years ago.) That's no reason, though, to avoid any of these medications if a doctor has determined that you need them. [Read: America can't break its wellness habit] And yet, a whole chapter of Good Energy is dedicated to the idea that readers should mistrust the motives of their doctors, who the authors say profit by keeping Americans sick. The book is less critical of the ways the wellness industry preys on people's fears. Zooming in on mitochondria might offer a reassuringly specific and seemingly scientific explanation of the many real ills of the U.S. population, but ultimately, Means and MAHA are only helping obscure the big picture. Article originally published at The Atlantic
