Sunday Special: ‘World’s first’ flying boat takes off

Welcome back, Superhuman. Imagine boarding a boat in New York that quietly lifts out of the water and flies toward the Hamptons. Regent Craft has just completed the first crewed flight of its electric Seaglider, bringing that idea one step closer to reality. Meanwhile, scientists have conducted the most detailed study ever done on a supercentenarian, and have revealed an unusual biological contradiction.

1. ‘World’s first’ crewed flying boat completes maiden flight: Regent Craft's Seaglider, a 12-passenger electric vessel that floats, hydrofoils, then flies just above the water using ground effect, carried two people for a 30-second test flight over Narragansett Bay. Regent is pitching it as a new mode of coastal transport, with proposed routes already planned between cities like New York, Boston, Miami, and nearby destinations. You can see the boat lift off here.

2. AI may be able to hear signs of schizophrenia before doctors can: Scientists have found that AI models analyzing vocal features or the semantic flow of speech can distinguish people with schizophrenia from healthy controls with up to 87% accuracy. Since Americans with psychotic disorders currently wait an average of 18 months for diagnosis, faster detection could meaningfully improve treatment outcomes, though experts caution that the technique is not clinic-ready.

3. Scientists find signs of extreme aging and unusual youth in the same person: A detailed multi-omic study of Maria Branyas, who lived past 117, found she had classic signs of aging in her immune system and chromosomes, alongside low inflammation, protective genetic traits, and a biological age younger than her actual age. It's the most detailed biological study ever done on a supercentenarian, and it may even offer clues for understanding blood cancers tied to aging.

4. A stratospheric balloon just delivered cell service on a 30,000km round trip: Sceye's unmanned platform flew from New Mexico to Japan and back over 30 days, spending a week providing mobile broadband, drone communications, and edge computing from the sky. Working with SoftBank, it delivered voice calls, texts, and video streaming to regular unmodified phones — a striking proof of concept for stratospheric infrastructure as a cheaper alternative to satellites for future 6G connectivity.

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1. iPhone Duo: Apple’s first foldable, more than a decade in the making. A passport-sized screen that opens into a 7.6-inch display with new camera tricks built around the second screen.

2. Flowtica Scribe: An AI-powered recorder built inside a working pen. It records, transcribes, and creates searchable summaries while you write on paper.

3. Rokid AR Spatial: Glasses that turn any space into a private 300-inch screen. They run on Android, support voice commands, and float up to 3 apps in view.

4. Apple Watch Series 12: Apple’s biggest health sensor upgrade in years. It now checks your heart more often, using that data to tell you how ready your body is to train or recover.

🍍 Bikini Bottom: SpongeBob and Patrick may have real-life doppelgängers. Resurfaced footage showing a bright yellow sponge sitting beside a pink sea star more than a mile beneath the Atlantic has racked up over 11M views — though their relationship may be considerably less friendly than the cartoon suggests.

☕ Good Morning: Your morning coffee habit may be doing a lot more than you think. A large study has found that folks who drink coffee mainly before noon are linked to a surprising health benefit, and the report is generating some buzz.

👓 Glass Half Empty: Smart glasses may be getting more capable, but not everyone is impressed. A fake London Underground notice is going viral for absolutely torching the people wearing them. (34k likes)

🎮 Time Travel: Someone hooked a PlayStation 5 up to a black-and-white television from 1949, and the result is not what you’d expect. (29k likes)

🦄 Magic Beast: Despite what you may have been told, unicorns might not have been entirely fictional. Here’s a picture of the Elasmotherium, an ancient, gigantic relative of the rhino that roamed Siberia over 29,000 years ago.

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Wake-Up Call: Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that causes overwhelming daytime sleepiness and, in some patients, sudden episodes of muscle weakness called cataplexy. Now, the FDA has approved Orzeyful, a pill that mimics orexin, the brain chemical missing in type 1 narcolepsy. In late-stage trials, patients stayed awake for more than 20 minutes in controlled tests, versus just four to five minutes before treatment — a major breakthrough more than two decades in the making.

Snake Hack: Scientists have found that the antidote to snake venom might have been inside snakes all along. They combined toxin-blocking proteins that rattlesnakes naturally use to protect themselves from their own venom, creating a mixture roughly 10x more potent than current commercial antivenom in lab tests. It even neutralized venom from other viper species separated by millions of years of evolution. It could potentially lead to cheaper, more effective antivenoms made without relying on horses or sheep.

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Until next time,

Zain, Faiq, and the Superhuman AI team