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Best Massage Guns of 2026: Hyperice, Therabody, and More

WIRED

Massage guns used to be simple percussive devices. Now, they use vibrations, hot and cold therapy, and even LED light to ease post-workout pain and promote muscle recovery. Massage guns relieve muscle tension and increase blood flow for faster recovery . In her words, "As we exercise, we cause breakdown within the muscle fibers, which in turn stimulates muscle growth and regrowth, hypertrophy, and strength." After consulting the experts and testing them on myself pre-and post-workout, I've rounded up a lineup of the best massage guns, like our top pick, the Hyperice Hypervolt 2 ($229) .



'At 2am, it feels like someone's there': why Nigerians are choosing chatbots to give them advice and therapy

The Guardian

AI platforms offering first-line mental health support have proliferated in Nigeria, where health services are sparse and underfunded. AI platforms offering first-line mental health support have proliferated in Nigeria, where health services are sparse and underfunded. 'At 2am, it feels like someone's there': why Nigerians are choosing chatbots to give them advice and therapy O n a quiet evening in her Abuja hotel, Joy Adeboye, 23, sits on her bed clutching her phone, her mind racing and chest tightening. On her screen is yet another abusive message from her stalker - a man she had met nine months earlier at her church. He had asked Adeboye out; when she declined, he began sending her intimidating, insulting and blackmailing messages on social media, as well as spreading false information about her online.


Three technologies that will shape biotech in 2026

MIT Technology Review

Why personalized gene editing, genetic resurrections and embryo scoring made our list. Earlier this week, published its annual list of Ten Breakthrough Technologies. As always, it features technologies that made the news last year, and which--for better or worse--stand to make waves in the coming years. They're the technologies you should really be paying attention to. This year's list includes tech that's set to transform the energy industry, artificial intelligence, space travel --and of course biotech and health. Our breakthrough biotechnologies for 2026 involve editing a baby's genes and, separately, resurrecting genes from ancient species.


The Download: sodium-ion batteries and China's bright tech future

MIT Technology Review

Plus: This company is developing gene therapies for muscle growth, erectile dysfunction, and "radical longevity" For decades, lithium-ion batteries have powered our phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But lithium's limited supply and volatile price have led the industry to seek more resilient alternatives. They work much like lithium-ion ones: they store and release energy by shuttling ions between two electrodes. But unlike lithium, a somewhat rare element that is currently mined in only a handful of countries, sodium is cheap and found everywhere. Read why it's poised to become more important to our energy future. Sodium-ion batteries are one of 10 Breakthrough Technologies this year.


The ascent of the AI therapist

MIT Technology Review

Four new books grapple with a global mental-health crisis and the dawn of algorithmic therapy. A technician adjusts the wiring inside the Mark I Perceptron. This early AI system was designed not by a mathematician but by a psychologist. More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people, and suicide is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year. Given the clear demand for accessible and affordable mental-health services, it's no wonder that people have looked to artificial intelligence for possible relief.


'Memory manipulation is inevitable': How rewriting memory in the lab might one day heal humans

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. 'Memory manipulation is inevitable': How rewriting memory in the lab might one day heal humans Professor and neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, shown working with brain samples, is exploring the science of memory manipulation. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Scientists have found that memories are not static records but dynamic processes that change the brain's wiring each time they are recalled.


Online Reinforcement Learning for Mixed Policy Scopes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Combination therapy refers to the use of multiple treatments -- such as surgery, medication, and behavioral therapy - to cure a single disease, and has become a cornerstone for treating various conditions including cancer, HIV, and depression. All possible combinations of treatments lead to a collection of treatment regimens (i.e., policies) with mixed scopes, or what physicians could observe and which actions they should take depending on the context. In this paper, we investigate the online reinforcement learning setting for optimizing the policy space with mixed scopes. In particular, we develop novel online algorithms that achieve sublinear regret compared to an optimal agent deployed in the environment. The regret bound has a dependency on the maximal cardinality of the induced state-action space associated with mixed scopes. We further introduce a canonical representation for an arbitrary subset of interventional distributions given a causal diagram, which leads to a non-trivial, minimal representation of the model parameters.


It's One of the Hardest Confrontations Anyone Can Have. It Might Be One Good Use of a Controversial Technology.

Slate

Technology "Why Did You Do It?" A radical new use of deepfake technology is allowing survivors of abuse to confront their perpetrators. Marina vd Roest hadn't faced the man who abused her in decades when she first sat down in front of the laptop. Confronted with his realistic, blinking, speaking face, she felt "scared like a little child again." "Sometimes I had to close the laptop and get my breath back before opening it and continuing with the conversation," she says. Vd Roest is one of the first people to have tried out a radical new form of therapy that involves putting survivors face-to-face with A.I.-generated deepfakes of their attackers as a means of healing unresolved trauma.


Can adding light sensors to nerve cells switch off pain, epilepsy, and other disorders?

Science

In the past 20 years, mice with glowing cables sprouting from their heads have become a staple of neuroscience. They reflect the rise of optogenetics, in which neurons are engineered to contain light-sensitive proteins called opsins, allowing pulses of light to turn them on or off. The method has powered thousands of basic experiments into the brain circuits that drive behavior and underlie disease. As this research tool matured, hopes arose for using it as a treatment, too. Compared with the electrical or magnetic brain stimulation approaches already in use, optogenetics offers a way to more precisely target and manipulate the exact cell types underlying brain disorders.