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Tuesday, 8 November 2022

Twitter has seen some rough days, but Musk’s takeover boosted user figures + Make your doggo live longer

Has Musk actually been good news for Twitter? The platform’s monetizable active daily user growth hit an all time high last week thanks to Musk, accelerating to 20% from last quarter’s 15%, Twitter said in an email seen by the Financial Times. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, prominent names decided to deactivate their accounts, including actress (and Musk’s ex-girlfriend) Amber Heard and model Gigi Hadid, who said that the platform is becoming “more and more of a cesspool of hate and bigotry.” Musk is using the platform like his own personal playground, suspending comics Kathy Griffin and Ethan Klein from Twitter for impersonating him, despite the latter following Musk’s newly-introduced rules for parody accounts. Musk closed his USD 44 bn acquisition of Twitter last week, and has done his fair share of damage since then, including introducing a USD 8 fee for the blue checkmark granted to verified accounts and pushing through mass layoffs. At the same time, he’s trying to bring back big advertisers, General Motors, Volkswagen and United Airlines, who ended their partnership with the social media platform over fear that Musk’s freedom of speech beliefs would weaken content moderation.


Good news for dog lovers: Your pet may have a chance to live longer with a new drug: Dog longevity company Loyal is currently testing two medications that work on extending the lifespan of dogs while preserving their health and ensuring they can still be active Wired reports. CEO Celine Halioua raised USD 58 mn to fund her research, which she argues can also be adopted by humans as “the lifespan and lifestyle of a pet dog are more human like, and they live shorter lives meaning it won’t take decades to know whether a pill boosts longevity,” according to Wired.

Although 90% of clinical trials of new meds fail, there are high hopes for this one to work, as previous studies already confirmed success of doubling the lives of worms, flies and mice — although regulators including the US Food and Drug Administration are not on board with the idea of identifying aging as a medical problem, Wired reported. Trials for studies on longevity began even before Halioua was born. Cynthia Kenyon, a UC San Francisco molecular biologist, performed a study that helped spark a new discipline to unraveling and controlling the biological mechanisms of aging.

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