An AI built a drug to fight lung disease. Rentosertib, a drug Insilico Medicine designed almost entirely using AI, was created to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The results hint at a possible anti-aging effect. On the more grim side of things, the foldable iPhone slated to launch tomorrow could cost as much as $3,000 for the top-spec variants. Over in the world of EVs, battery aging has emerged as a bane for the used car sales market, and it’s hurting the wallet of early adopters.

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An AI-designed drug might help slow aging, but we're not there yet. Rentosertib, a drug developed by Insilico Medicine using artificial intelligence, was originally designed to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that progressively scars and stiffens the lungs. In a 12-week phase 2a trial involving 42 patients, researchers tracked lung function while simultaneously measuring biological age using six different proteomic aging clocks, tools that estimate how old a body behaves based on the proteins circulating in the blood rather than years lived. All six models pointed in the same direction: patients taking rentosertib showed a measurable drop in biological age compared to those on placebo.

The effect was most pronounced at the lower 30mg dose taken twice daily rather than a single 60mg dose, even though both deliver the same total amount of drug. When researchers compared the protein changes against aging data from more than 55,000 people in the UK Biobank, the twice-daily group showed a genuine reversal of normal age-related protein shifts, something the once-daily group did not replicate despite posting the strongest lung function improvements. The researchers themselves caution that more direct testing is needed before rentosertib can be called a proven anti-aging treatment, since the biological age reduction could be a byproduct of improved lung health rather than a standalone effect on aging. Still, the results offer an early signal that designing drugs around aging biology from the ground up.

The used electric vehicle market is hitting a wall, and it comes exactly five years into a car's life. In China, the world's largest EV market for a decade, with 44 million electric vehicles now on its roads, roughly four out of five used car dealers refuse to accept any fully electric vehicle older than five years. The reason is simple and expensive: no one has agreed on a reliable way to measure the health of a battery, which can account for a third of a new car's price if it needs replacing. A three-year-old EV in China now resells for about 45 percent of its original price, down from nearly 55 percent just two years ago, and the slide accelerates as the manufacturer's eight-year battery warranty winds down and the financial risk shifts to the owner.

Diagnostic tools that could surface this information exist and are inexpensive to use, but the industry has been slow to make battery health certificates a standard part of any used EV transaction. The stakes extend well beyond China. Chinese automakers exported more than 2.5 million EVs last year, and those cars now account for 55 percent of EV sales in markets outside Europe and the United States. As that fleet ages toward the five-year mark in the Gulf, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, every market that imported these vehicles will confront the same pricing vacuum China is grappling with now. China, at least, is already responding, with buyers demanding inspection reports and dealerships investing in testing equipment, a model that the rest of the world will almost certainly need to follow.

Apple's long-anticipated foldable iPhone is expected to be announced imminently, and new details from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman paint a vivid picture of how the device came together, and how much it will cost. The company originally targeted a starting price of $1,999, hoping to stay just under what it considered a psychologically significant $2,000 threshold, but a global memory shortage has pushed that figure to around $2,199, with some storage configurations potentially approaching $3,000. Apple anticipates consumer sticker shock but believes that the willingness of customers to spend heavily on high-storage iPhone models justifies bringing a premium foldable to market.

Much of the device's internal history traces back to then-CEO Tim Cook, who returned from a trip to Asia around 2020 "unusually energized" after seeing widespread adoption of foldables from Samsung and Huawei. Cook pushed Apple to accelerate development and steered the project toward a mainstream foldable iPhone form factor, moving away from earlier concepts such as an iPad mini that could unfold into a larger tablet. His level of personal involvement was described as unusual. The project also received a major push from current CEO John Ternus, who, as hardware chief, played a central role in bringing the device to completion. Apple settled on a titanium and aluminum hinge with custom Corning cover glass, and the finished device features a 7.8-inch inner display and a 5.5-inch outer display in a short, wide form factor that designers compared in proportion to a passport when folded and a Magic Trackpad when open.

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