Sunday Special: China fires up the world's largest superconducting magnet

Welcome back, Superhuman. A new engineering milestone puts China leaps ahead in the race to commercial fusion. Scientists at the country’s CRAFT fusion project have successfully tested the world's largest superconducting magnet, capable of confining plasma at 100 million degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, scientists have uncovered DNA from an unknown ancient human lineage in every living population.

1. China fires up the world's largest superconducting magnet for nuclear fusion: The 582-tonne toroidal-field coil, heavier than a fully loaded Boeing 747, has passed full-load testing in Hefei. Designed for China's CRAFT fusion project, it generates a magnetic field strong enough to trap plasma at 100M degrees Celsius without it ever touching the reactor wall. Sixteen of these magnets will eventually form a ring — a critical step toward a working fusion power plant. Watch the enormous magnet go live here.

2. Scientists find DNA from a mysterious human ancestor in every living person: A new analysis of 503 modern genomes has uncovered traces of an unknown archaic human lineage — a "ghost" population that interbred with our ancestors but has never been identified in the fossil record. The signature appears in every population on Earth, likely split from our branch over 500K years ago, and shows up in regions of the genome previously thought to be uniquely human, including around a gene linked to speech.

3. Scientists engineer an enzyme that reverses a key driver of aging: As we age, sugars in the bloodstream react with proteins to form compounds called AGEs, sticky, inflammatory molecules that make tissues rigid and contribute to heart disease, kidney failure, and eye damage. Now, scientists have used AI to identify and engineer a natural enzyme called CMLase that removes these compounds from human tissue. In one test, it restored 70-year-old human skin to AGE levels typical of a 30-year-old.

4. A Qantas jet just completed the longest commercial flight in history: A custom Airbus A350-1000ULR flew from Melbourne to Toulouse in 24 hours and 25 minutes, covering 23,075 kilometers across the Pacific and Atlantic, shattering the previous record of 22 hours and 42 minutes set in 2005. The test flight is part of Qantas's Project Sunrise, which aims to launch nonstop Sydney–London commercial service in 2027 — a sign that the era of truly nonstop ultra-long-haul travel is getting closer.

Other AI tools require downloads and onboarding. Slack makes automating seamless because its AI tools are built-in and always improving.

Exhibit A: This video shows the 3 biggest AI upgrades coming to Slack. 

No code or bottlenecks, just smart workflows you can use today.

Watch the webinar.

1. XPolar C1: The Eight Sleep for your office chair. It’s a smart cushion that uses semiconductor cooling and posture sensing to make long sitting sessions comfortable.

2. HoverAir Versa: A pocket camera that can fly. It works as a stabilized handheld camera on the ground, then snaps into wings to become a self-flying AI camera in the air. See it in action here.

3. Minimal Phone 2: A compact phone built like a modern BlackBerry to stop doomscrolling. It keeps the physical keyboard and focus-first software, but upgrades the design with a smaller body and a premium aluminum build.

4. Formovie Theater Premium TV: With a screen size of almost 150 inches, this smart projector can turn almost any space into a home theatre.

🐙 Glass Ghost: Some of Earth's most extraordinary animals remain almost impossible to find. Rare footage of the glass octopus, a nearly transparent species living deep beneath the Pacific, has resurfaced and blown up on social media.

🧊 Beating the Heat: Extreme heat waves across the world are pushing scientists to think outside the box. Japan has unveiled a futuristic "human fridge" that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie and claims it can lower body temperature in just 10 minutes.

☀ Don’t Look Up: Total solar eclipses remain one of nature's rarest spectacles. One may be heading your way this month, and even if you aren't in its path, you'll be able to watch it live online here.

💡 Maker's Guide: Every great creator has learned a few hard lessons along the way. The Steve Jobs Archive has compiled them into a new collection of letters from leaders across science, technology, and business.

📜 Genius Preserved: Some ideas are centuries ahead of their time. This manuscript from Leonardo da Vinci, purchased by Bill Gates for $30.8M in 1994, was found to contain concepts resembling modern fluid mechanics nearly 200 years before the field formally existed

Top engineers at Anthropic say AI now writes 100% of their code.

If you're not using AI, you're spending 40 hours doing what they do in 4.

These 100+ Claude Code hacks fix that and help you ship 10x faster.

Sign up for The Code and get:

Join 300K+ Engineers

Mobility Chip: Neuralink has shared footage of clinical trial participants controlling and steering powered wheelchairs entirely through neural signals. The N1 implant records electrical activity from neurons in the motor cortex and decodes it in real time into directional commands. Although it’s not FDA-approved yet, the technology could eventually give people with severe paralysis a level of independent mobility that currently doesn't exist. See it in action here.

Nerve Switch: Guillain-Barré syndrome can strike anyone after an infection, causing the immune system to attack its own nerves, leading to paralysis, breathing failure, and sometimes death. Now, a new drug called tanruprubart switches off the specific immune pathway responsible for attacking nerves, and has helped patients walk independently 31 days earlier than those receiving a placebo. For the roughly 8,000 Americans diagnosed each year, it could be the most significant treatment advance in three decades.

You’re the reason our team spends hundreds of hours every week researching and writing this email. Please let us know what you thought of today’s email to help us create better emails for you.

Until next time,

Zain, Faiq, and the Superhuman AI team