It looks like nothing more than a bedside fan. To program it, you hit the on button once.
But what happens next could improve your memory by 226%.
This is Memory Air, a new product born from decades of science charting the relationship between our nose and our brain. Each night, Memory Air cycles through 40 different, undisclosed scents, twice. As you sleepeven though you dont consciously smell these scentsresearch suggests that it can measurably improve your memory within weeks.
[Photo: Memory Air]
How is that possible?
As the companys founderUC Davis professor emeritus Michael Leonexplains, We are functionally odor deprived. Whereas humans evolved in a scent-filled world, where we didnt even shower, he suggests that whatever room youre residing in now probably smells like nothing by design.
Thats difficult, as our cognition and ability to smell are closely linked. “All memory loss precedes or is accompanied closely by olfactory loss,” notes Leon, who points out many of us experienced brain fog and loss of scent during COVID-19. “In most neurological diseases its the first symptom.”
We don’t need to completely untangle the relationship between smell and memory to understand that they affect one another. Smell is a learnable behaviorand often a re-learnable behavior. And relearning that behavior can actually improve our memory.
[Photo: Memory Air]
Leon believes that smell has such a powerful effect on memory because the olfactory system has an anatomical advantage. It is the only sense that has a straight pathway to your hippocampal cluster, which manages memory and emotion. (Meanwhile, all other senses take a detour through your thalamus first.)
By feeding this region of your brain new odors, research has found you can actually increase gray matter and neuroplasticitygenerating new connections in your brain. Smells appear to be a way to exercise and strengthen the very area of your brain that handles memory.
In 2023, Leon published a study demonstrating that by routinely exposing people to smells, you could improve some of their mental faculties. A randomly assorted collection of people ages 60 to 85 were exposed to one of seven smells each night for two hours over six months. After that time, his team observed that the smelling group tested with a 226% improvement in memory over a control groupand fMRI scans exhibited positive shifts in brain structures supporting memory.
But Leon is quick to point out that his findings are not special; rather, they are increasingly the norm. There are now about 20 studies that have used olfactory enrichment to improve memory, he says, noting that the methodologies vary wildly. I think the strength of literature as a whole is what we should look at. This is such a strong phenomenon. Who does it, and how they do it, is not as important as getting more odor to the brain.
[Photo: Memory Air]
Turning research into product
To develop this science into a functional product, Leons team raised an undisclosed sum from a group of wealthy investors. They also tapped Christian Garnett, from Garnett Design Group, to spend three years transforming theory into intervention.
For the final product, Leon wanted to mirror similar research out of South Korea, which subjected participants to a full 40 smells twice a day (and found similar gains around memory, while noting that it reduced depression and increased facilities with attention and language, too).
But how do you fit 40 smells in a box?
It was probably the biggest challenge, to figure out how to turn on and off scents at will, Garnett says.
Memory Air needed to run through dozens of scents, twice, making each distinctive with no lingering odor that would blend them from one to another. That meant each had four minutes to appear and dissipate.
Most of the scent industry is optimized to do the opposite: get the most scent out and have it last as long as possible, Garnett says with a laugh.
Garnetts team tested all sorts of ideas. It tried developing a white odor technologythink white noise but for smellswith so many frequencies that everything cancels out into nothing, blinding your nose. It tested enzymes, as used by Febreze, to break scents down to clear them out of the room.
But ultimately, it landed on an idea thats part Glade PlugIn, part machine gun.
When setting up the device, you load it with a belt that looks like a bandolier. Instead of bullets, its filled with 40 individual essential oilsscents the team refuses to detail but insists are nothing unusual. (The order appears irrelevant, but the sheer number helps reduce habituation.) As the bandolier rotates through the night, it uses a bit of heat on the active oil pouch. With a phase-changing material, scent diffuses out when warmed while a large, low-speed fan quietly wafts the scent toward the sleeping person.
The same moment you feel air from the fan hit you, you get the scent. The moment the fan cuts off, you don’t smell anything, Garnett says. This way you get 20 to 30 seconds of scent exposure before the fan tuns off, cools, and clears te room.
This whole experience is designed to be automatic. Garnett pared back the product, removing lights and test modes to ensure anyone could use it perfectly. When you set up the Memory Air, all you do is slip in the scent belt and hit the on button right before bed. From there, it will know when to kick on. And while the scent belt will run out after a month, a subscription ships replacements to customers on a schedule.
[Photo: Memory Air]
A UX you dont experience
The oddest part of Memory Air is that if it works as advertised, you wont actually even know its working. It runs in your sleep, leaving no olfactory footprint by design. And Leon notes that smells dont wake people up (smelling salts, incidentally, rouse people through irritation, not scent). In a way, its the opposite of sleep tracking. Memory Air isnt actively measuring anything. Its UX is largely imperceptible. But its value, if it works as research suggests, is that it could vastly impact someones mental capacity.
Leon believes users could discover other effects too: In his 2023 study, he discovered people whod done the olfactory battery got 22 minutes more sleep per nightbut hes validating the idea before making any bold claims around Memory Air as a sleep aid.
We think there are a number of other medical conditions that may be treatable with this same approach; weve identified 139 different medical conditions, all accompanied by olfactory loss, he says.
Benefits of Memory Air could be significant, while the only real cost is the price itself. Memory Air is available now for $799, including the first months scent belt. Replacement belts cost $39 with a monthly subscription.
For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing.
Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves.
Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGPT Atlas, Opera has Neon, and others are on the way. The pitch is that AI “agents” will soon be able to trudge through the web on your behalf, booking your flights, buying your groceries, and shopping on sites like Amazon. Both Perplexity and OpenAI view these browsers as imperative in their goals to build AI “operating systems” that can manage your life.
Amazon, which has a lot to lose if people stop accessing its website directly, is suing to stop that from happening. It’s been trying to block Perplexity, but so far to no avail.
Therein lies the irony: These AI browsers promise a future where you’ll never have to visit a website again, yet that promise depends on having viable websites to crawl through in the first place. Amazon’s lawsuit is a sign that these two goals may be incompatible.
Feeding the beast
For companies like Perplexity and OpenAI, web browsers are suddenly important because they open the door to content and data that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Consider Amazon. If you’re just using ChatGPT’s website, you might ask it to recommend a few Amazon items or summarize a product’s user reviews, but its answers wouldn’t include any personal data from Amazon’s site. By contrast, ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet can access Amazon exactly as it appears in your own browser window. That means they can crawl through your order history or weigh in on Amazon’s personalized product recommendations.
Perplexity says these “agentic” browsers make for a better shopping experience, which is why Amazon should embrace thembut Perplexity also stands to benefit in other ways. By understanding things like your order history, personalized recommendations, and all the questions you asked Perplexity’s AI to arrive at a particular product, the company can build a much richer user profile for things like targeted advertising.
“You’ve gone from behavior tracking to psychological modeling,” says Eamonn Maguire, who leads the machine learning team at Proton. “Where you have traditional browsers tracking what you do, AI browsers infer why you do it.”
This isn’t speculation. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on the TBPN podcast earlier this year that its browser will enable “hyper-personalized” ads by understanding more about users’ personal lives.
“What are the things youre buying, which hotels are you going to, which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” Srinivas said.
Amazon, meanwhile, has much to lose from AI shopping agents, even if they ultimately help make a purchase. The company has its own $56 billion advertising business, fueled in part by the ads it stuffs into its shopping pages. CEO Andy Jassy has acknowledged that AI agents could disrupt that business.
You may have little sympathy for Amazon in that scenario, but consider also the many smaller entities that stand to lose from an agentic web. Your favorite newsletter, for instanceone that paywalls content for its most loyal readersmay now have that content exposed within the tabs of an AI browser.
Eamonn also gives the example of research papers that sit behind paywalls, or personal documents that wouldn’t exist on the web at all. The contents of emails, shopping lists, and productivity apps could all become fodder for AI to learn more about you. And while Perplexity and OpenAI have said they won’t train AI models on what people view in their web browsers, Eamonn says they could easily change that policy in the future.
“Cynically speaking, it’s a smart way not only of building particularly good profiles of users but also getting more data,” Eamonn says.
Why the web?
Srinivas has acknowledged that AI companies need the openness of the web to provide them with all this context, because other platforms are too locked down.
“The only reason we’re doing a browser is there’s no other way to build an agent with enough control over many applications simultaneously,” Srinivas said at the Upfront Summit in February. “Especially on iOS, you cannot even access another app. You don’t want to be bottlenecked by how Apple is building its ecosystem. You want to work around it, and the browser is a very good work-around in the short term for us.”
OpenAI has similarly described the web browser as key to its broader ambitions.
“Now that we have feedback and signals from hundreds of millions of people around the world, its clear ChatGPT needs to become so much more than the simple chatbot it started as,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, wrote in a blog post announcing the Atlas browser. “Over time, we see ChatGPT evolving to become the operating system for your life: a fully connected hub that helps you manage your day and achieve your long-term goals.”
While AI companies have clear ideas of what they can do on te open web, it’s less certain whether the open web will cooperate. Lots of websites already attempt to block AI crawlersReddit has even cut off search engines that don’t provide compensationbut AI browsers represent yet another way around those restrictions. Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity could be a sign of further fights to come when attempts to block AI fail.
AI companies would have you believe that these efforts are just delaying the inevitable. But that raises a bigger question of what the open web even looks like if it becomes entirely intermediated by AI. A common complaint against AI tools like ChatGPT is that they’ll erode the incentives to create new content, and that AI itself will ultimately suffer from having nothing new to train on.
“Nothing really gets better unless you have content, but the content is getting worse because people are just using AI to generate this content, and then these models are getting worse because the content is getting worse,” Proton’s Maguire says.
With the rise of agentic AI browsers, a similar argument could be applied to the web as a whole: What motivation will exist to design beautiful, unique websites for humans when there’s no one left to browse them?
Tis the season for givingand that means tis the season for shopping. Maybe youll splurge on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, thinking, Ill just return it if they dont like it. But before you click purchase, its worth knowing that many retailers have quietly tightened their return policies in recent years.
As a marketing professor, I study how retailers manage the flood of returns that follow big shopping events like these, and what it reveals about the hidden costs of convenience. Returns might seem like a routine part of doing business, but theyre anything but trivial. According to the National Retail Federation, returns cost U.S. retailers almost $890 billion each year.
Part of that staggering figure comes from returns fraud, which includes everything from consumers buying and wearing items once before returning thema practice known as wardrobingto more deceptive acts such as falsely claiming an item never arrived.
Returns also drain resources because they require reverse logistics: shipping, inspecting, restocking, and often repackaging items. Many returned products cant be resold at full price or must be liquidated, leading to lost revenue. Processing returns also adds labor and operational expenses that erode profit margins.
How e-commerce transformed returns
While retailers have offered return options for decades, their use has expanded dramatically in recent years, reflecting how much shopping habits have changed. Before the rise of e-commerce, shopping was a sensory experience: Consumers would touch fabrics, try on clothing, and see colors in natural light before buying. If something didnt work out, customers brought it back to the store, where an associate could quickly inspect and restock it.
Online shopping changed all that. While e-commerce offers convenience and variety, it removes key sensory cues. You cant feel the material, test the fit, or see the true color. The result is uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes higher rates of returns. One analysis by Capital One suggests that the rate for returns is almost three times higher for online purchases than for in-store purchases.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the move toward online shopping went into overdrive. Even hesitant online shoppers had to adapt. To encourage purchases, many retailers introduced or expanded generous return policies. The strategy worked to boost sales, but it also created a culture of returning.
In 2020, returns accounted for 10.6% of total U.S. retail sales, nearly double the prior year, according to the National Retail Federation data. By 2021, that had climbed to 16.6%. Unable to try things on in stores, consumers began ordering multiple sizes or styles, keeping one and sending the rest back. The behavior was rational from a shoppers perspective but devastatingly expensive for retailers.
The high cost of convenience
Most supply chains are designed to move in one direction: from production to consumption. Returns reverse that flow. When merchandise moves backward, it adds layers of cost and complexity.
In-store returns used to be simple: A customer would take an item back to the store, the retailer would inspect the product, and, if it was in good condition, it would go right back on the shelf. Online returns, however, are far more cumbersome. Products can spend weeks in transit and often cant be resoldby the time they arrive, they may be out of season, obsolete, or no longer in their original packaging.
Logistics costs compound the problem. During the pandemic, consumers grew accustomed to free shipping. That means retailers now often pay twice: once to deliver the item and again to retrieve it.
Now, in a post-pandemic world, retailers are trying to strike a balancemaintaining customer goodwill without sacrificing profitability. One solution is to raise prices, but especially today, with inflation in the headlines, shoppers are sensitive to price hikes. The other, more common approach is to tighten return policies.
In practice, thats taken several forms. Some retailers have begun charging small flat fees for returns, even when a customer mails an item back at their own expense. For example, the direct-to-consumer retailer Curvy Sense offers customers unlimited returns and exchanges of an item for an initial $2.98 fee. Others have shortened their return windows. Over the summer, for example, beauty retailers Sephora and Ulta reduced their return window from 60 days to 30.
Many brands now attach large, conspicuous do not remove tags to prevent consumers from wearing items and then sending them back. And increasingly, retailers are offering store credit rather than cash or credit card refunds, ensuring that returned sales at least stay within their company.
Few retailers advertise these changes prominently. Instead, they appear quietly in the fine print of return policiespolicies that are now longer, more specific, and far less forgiving than they once were.
As we head into the busiest shopping season of the year, its worth pausing before you click purchase. Ask yourself: Is this something I truly wantor am I planning to return it later?
Whenever possible, shop in person and return in person. And if youre buying online, make sure you familiarize yourself with the return policy.
Lauren Beitelspacher is a professor of marketing at Babson College.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Heres a common pattern in my house. See if it seems familiar to you. After my husband showers, he often forgets to put his dirty clothes in the hamper. This drives me batty, so I remind him to please pick them up. Again and again and again.
Weve been married for 15 years now and the result of all my nagging appears to be exactly zilch. Half the time I go in the bathroom there is a ball of socks and underwear on the floor.
My husband is an otherwise thoughtful and considerate guy. So whats going on? According to psychology research, the problem likely isnt him. Its my belief that nagging is an effective strategy to get another person to change their behavior.
The psychology of why nagging doesnt work
We have a perception that we wont get what we want from the other person, so we feel we need to keep asking in order to get it, psychologist Scott Wetzler explained to The Wall Street Journal. But rather than prompting change, nagging causes people to feel demeaned and withhold the desired behavior. The nagger then nags more and resentment builds.
This dynamic can kill a romantic relationshipstudies find that, unsurprisingly, a lot of nagging is associated with low relationship satisfactionbut its equally useless between parents and kids, cofounders, or bosses and employees.
So what works better to get someone to actually change their behavior? A new study has a suggestion. But, be warned, if youre stuck in a pattern of habitual nagging, it will probably feel counterintuitive.
The jujitsu mind trick that actually changes behavior
After years of low-level laundry conflict, I admit the last thing I feel inclined to do is thank my husband the one time in a dozen that his clothes end up in the hamper. But according to a new study out of the University of Toronto recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, when it comes to changing his behavior, gratitude would beat nagging.
The research was conducted by psychologist Natalie Sisson and colleagues and consisted of three separate studies looking at the connection between expressions of gratitude and behavior change in couples.
One study asked 151 couples to keep a daily diary of their interactions around some change sought by one member of the pair. These diaries showed that the more a member of the couple felt their partner was grateful for their efforts to change, the more likely they were to make further adjustments. After nine months, partners who felt their better halves were most grateful had made the biggest changes.
Taken together, all the findings suggest that, if you ask your partner to change something about themselves or their behavior, and they say they are willing to try, being grateful will help them to develop their own motivation to make that change, making it more likely to happen, writes the British Psychological Societys Research Digest, summing up the results.
Easy to explain, harder to implement
In some sense, thats intuitive. When you praise someone for their efforts, even if theyre minimal, they feel positive about you and themselves. When you nag them, the opposite happens. Which scenario do you think is more likely to result in someone putting in more effort?
But my personal experience at least suggests that, in the heat of the moment, this jujitsu mind trickpraising faint signs of improvement even when you feel like complainingcan be hard to muster. The last thing I want to do when I finally spot one of my husbands socks in the hamper is to offer him kudos. Its hard not to think about the hundreds Ive had to deposit there before.
If you care about effectiveness more than venting, though, psychology suggests this is the way to go. Positive reinforcement works best to train a puppy. It also apparently works best to train people. Bigging others up with gratitude is more likely to motivate them to change their behavior than tearing them down with nagging.
Other tricks to help someone change their behavior
What else can you do to help other people change their behavior? This isnt the first study to dig into ths question. Experts have other ideas that may complement a liberal application of gratitude.
BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, has suggested catching a ride on the other persons motivational wave. When you notice the other party seems keen to make the desired change, step up and offer them concrete support.
If you want someone in your life to exercise more, that could mean going to tour gyms with them when they express an interest. Or it could mean sitting down with your perpetually disorganized employee and walking them through a new calendar system when they come to you for help.
Another idea, suggested by psychologist Devon Price, is digging into what barriers or obstacles might be preventing a person from changing. If my husbands laundry delinquency is a result of being rushed in the morning, maybe we could switch around some chores to ease his time crunch. If your colleague is putting off a task because of fear of failure, additional training or support will probably work better than scolding.
Finally, time-use expert and author Laura Vanderkam says that, if you want others to change, you should first talk about your own self-improvement projects. If a direct report is struggling with time management, for instance, she advises walking them through your own diary as a way to get a conversation about tradeoffs and challenges started.
Step one: Give up the nagging
What all of these experts agree on is that if you really want someone to change their behavior, nagging might relieve some of your frustration. But its not going to actually work. Try gratitude, support, and open dialogue instead.
By Jessica Stillman
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
This article originally appeared in Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Caralynn Nowinski Collens, Ramille Shah, and Adam Jakus spent years developing an innovative technology to regenerate injured bone. The results, they thought, were . . . okay. The company they founded, Dimension Bio, received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for its approach: providing a 3D-printed lattice or “scaffold” for new bone to grow in. However, it didn’t form new bone fast enough to compete with established treatment methods, such as transplanting a patients own bone tissue.
But Collens, Dimension’s CEO, sees the experience as a net positive, validating the companys technology and processes with the FDA. That could help the Chicago-based startup work toward a more-ambitious goal in about three years: building a human liver using its scaffold and donated cells. It would actually be a miniature, simplified version of the organ, meant to function well enough to keep someone alive. That could provide breathing room for an injured or diseased liver to heal, or buy time for the patient to receive a transplant.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 52,222 people died of liver disease and cirrhosis in 2023. The death rate from cirrhosis increased 26.4% from 2000 to 2019, per the National Institutes of Health. (Cirrhosis is most often the result result of fat buildup, viral hepatitis B and C, or long-term alcohol abuse, though there are other causes.)
“The mortality rates are very high when a patient can’t get a transplant. And so that’s where we’re looking to be able to provide [help],” Collens says.
[Photo: Dimension Bio]
Reprinting Older Science
Building a scaffold for cells to grow in is not novel, Collens concedes, nor is the material the company uses: poly lactic-co-glycolic acid. PLGA is found throughout everyday medicine, including in dissolving sutures, dermal fillers, and tiny capsules to deliver drugs to the body.
Dimension Bios innovation is in how it utilizes 3D printing to build the PLGA scaffold, part of an overall system its dubbed BioNidum. [When] we put that in the body, what happens is it gets new blood vessels very quickly, and that’s unusual,” says Collens, noting that typically the immune system walls off the foreign body and prevents blood vessels from growing easily.
Collens attributes the success to a scaffold structure that provides pores of different sizes, designed to help cells move into the scaffold easily and not provoke a strong immune response. The larger pores allow the blood vessels to grow into the new tissue.
The company was originally called Dimension Inx, a bit of wordplay. “We make biomaterial inks,” Collens says.
The technology grew out of Northwestern Universitys TEAM lab, short for tissue engineering and additive manufacturing (a fancy name for 3D printing), founded by Shah in 2010. At the time, Collens was running an advanced manufacturing innovation center in Chicago, part of a national network of institutes funded by the federal government and companies including Microsoft and Lockheed Martin. In 2015, one of the board members sent Collens an email, “and he said, I just saw this rock star young faculty member present, and I think you should meet her,” she recalls.
Shah, a materials science professor at the time, and then-graduate student Jakus founded Dimension Inx in 2016, and Collens joined as a cofounder and CEO 2019. Jakus left the company in 2023. Shah serves as chief science officer. She, Collens, and three other women account for all voting members on Dimension’s board of directors. The overall staff is about “70% diverse,” Collens says. “I’ll say it’s intentional only in the fact that we have a strong belief, and it’s one of the values of the company, that diversity leads to better outcomes and better innovation.”
The company raised $20.52 million through seed rounds in 2020 and 2021, and a series A in 2023. Lead investors include KdT Ventures and Prime Movers Lab. Another major investor is Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which focuses on startups outside top investment regions and doesnt typically fund biotech. The company is planning what it calls a series A2 funding round in 2026, with the goal of raising up to $50 million.
Boning Up on the Technology
CMFlexthe companys earlier bone repair productis considered a “medical device, requiring a less-stringent FDA review than medications or Dimensions upcoming mini-liver. Thats because CMFlex is just the scaffold for the patients own cells to grow into, rather than to introduce new cells. Bone provided the “lowest hanging fruit,” for Dimension to prove out its technology, Collens says, because its a naturally regenerative tissue. “We were putting this matrix or scaffold inside to serve as a guide or an instigator to get new bone.”
The FDA didnt require human trials for this medical device. Although it had success in animal studies, Dimension chose to do a pilot program in patients before making the product available. “We have lots of examples of being able to create bone in patients and in animals,” Collens says, adding, however, “We didn’t do it fast enough for the structure that’s neededand the structure meaning the hardness to withstand the forces that bone allows you to withstand.” Dimension eventually decided working with tissue would be more impactful, and decided not to go to market with CMFlex.
Moving to soft tissue and then organs was part of the original pitch deck to investors. The company is investigating restoring function in ovaries, for instance. It also succeeded in growing insulin-producing cells seeded in its scaffold in diabetic mice, which could pave the way for treating diabetes in humans. But that area was already a crowded market, Collens says.
“We ended up focusing on liver failure for a variety of reasons, but probably one of the biggest reasons is it’s a huge problem with no good alternative, except for liver transplant,” she says.
Dimensions plan is to grow a small, simplified liver under the skin as a temporary fix until either the full liver can recover or the patient can get a transplant. “I think that’s a good way to go, says James Anderson, a retired professor of pathology, macromolecular science, and biomedical engineering who taught at Case Western Reserve University for more than 40 years. Anderson, who is not associated with Dimension Bio, reviewed its research and was impressed with the methods and results. The liver, he says, is not only a worthy target for regenerative medicine; its also a conducive one. “They picked an organ that can reproduce itself,” he says.
But even a mini-organ is much more complicated than bone. “It’s a fundamentally ifferent type of product, when we’re talking about putting cells on a scaffold,” Collens says.
In mice whose livers were deliberately damaged, the company reports that it increased the survival rate by more than 70% after seeding with liver cells from mice and humans. That required hundreds of millions of cells. But according to Collens, building the miniature human liver could require seeding the scaffold with 5 billion to 20 billion cells.
For humans, Dimension will use stem cells to produce those billions of liver cells. But first come tests in rats and pigs. The companys timetable is aggressive. It aims to start clinical trials in humans in 2028.
The next question might be: Why not grow an entire liver replacement? That seems to be, at best, a very distant goal. Anderson is not sure its possible, given the complex structure of the full organ. Collens says Dimension Bio is not working on that lofty goal, for now. But she doesnt rule it out.
“I think we’re at a really interesting inflection point . . . of this convergence of engineering and biology, where we can actually engineer biological systems that support function that we couldn’t do before.”
You may think working hard, showing initiative, boosting your skill set, and being a team player is what it takes to be noticed to get promoted. But even with all these notable wins and strides, the call to a higher position often never comes.
The reality of being repeatedly passed over is frustratingand such a promotion plateau can leave you questioning whats really within your control.
To learn more about the concept, Fast Company asked three career experts for advice on how to handle a stagnant job path . . . as well as what you can do to add some momentum to your promotion game plan.
What exactly is a promotion plateau?
The most significant telltale sign is the feeling of stagnation with ones career. This can include feeling like a promotion is coming slower than anticipated, ones skills are not improving, or that one is no longer being challenged in their role, says Ryne Sherman, chief science officer at Hogan Assessments, a personality insights provider based in Tulsa.
Typically, a promotion plateau results from the organizational structure of a business with barriers of advancement: hierarchy, red tape, poor structural systems in place, even budget constraints. In some cases, an employees apathy and lack of transferable skills due to these structural challenges can affect the possibility of being promoted.
Whatever the reason, if you cannot see a clear path for advancement in your organization, you may be at a promotion plateau, Sherman says.
Many large, long-standing organizations have built-in promotional structures that are reliable and predictable in nature. But if you work for smaller, midsized, or younger organizations, they may not have reliable promotional steps built into their system, says Sherman. So you might have to get a bit introspective instead.
Another place to look is in your gut, he also says. Ambitious employees who feel they have reached a promotional plateau will begin to feel dissatisfied with their work.
The upside of hiring ambitious workers is that they are often highly engaged and productive, continues Sherman. The downside? Organizations without a plan for them will struggle to retain talent.
The warning signs
Erin Pash, a Minneapolis-St. Paul-based CEO and founder of Pash Company, a social health incubator, offers the following red flags that signal youre approaching a promotion plateau:
A lack of new responsibilities or challenging assignments
Annual reviews that feel like carbon copies of previous years
Watching peers or junior colleagues advance more quickly
Receiving no substantive discussions about career development during evaluations
Feeling intellectually unchallenged and professionally stuck
Minimal or no exposure to strategic company initiatives
A sense of professional invisibility within the organization
Its a persistent sense that your career has hit an invisible wall, despite your continued dedication and competence, says Pash.
Surmounting the plateau
It requires a multifaceted approach, says Pash, and a commitment of effort and action is expected.
Broaden your skills. Invest in your own skill set and accomplishments by pursuing relevant certifications in your field, and by taking online courses to expand technical and soft skills, Pash explains.
Networkand network some more. Attend workshops and conferences to keep a pulse on your industry. These opportunities can help you develop skills that can keep you aligned with emerging industry trends, says Pash. Plus, attending such events can also build up contacts in your professional circle.
Consider other internal roles. Explore lateral moves within different departments of your company which could offer more room for growth.
Seek targeted feedback. Engage directly with supervisors to understand specific barriers to advancement, says Pash. Request a comprehensive performance review that outlines precise skills and achievements needed for progression, she continues. This candid dialogue transforms performance conversations from passive assessments to active career development planning.
Leave when you have to. Sometimes you can do everything right and still hit a brick wall with your career. Some companies are like old boys’ clubs where your brilliant ideas and hard work feel about as useful as a screen door on a submarine, adds Pash.The smartest move isn’t always fighting the system, but recognizing when it’s time to take your talents somewhere that actually values what you bring to the table. All the skills you learn to overcome the plateau will absolutely prove to be helpful in the event you begin looking to jump to another ship.
What are some ways of finding a growth-friendly organization?
When evaluating whether an organization offers growth opportunities for its employees, Karen Burke, a knowledge adviser with the Society of Human Resource Management, says the following strategies are recommended:
A review of a companys organizational chart can provide valuable insights. Companies with multiple hierarchical levels, such as associate, manager, director, and vice president, typically demonstrate clear pathways for advancement, says Burke.
Assess a companys management structure. The presence of various management positions (e.g., assistant manager, manager, senior manager, assistant vice president, vice president) reflects distributed leadership and increases the likelihood of opportunities to progress into management roles, she points out.
Evaluating a companys departmental structure is helpful as well. Organizations with a broad range of departments (such as marketing, operations, and finance), including specialized sub-departments, tend to offer greater internal mobility. This structure supports both vertical and lateral career progression, outlines Burke.
Consider any evidence of business expansion, such as published information regarding business growth, new initiatives, or expanded networks. Whether identified through company communications or external research, this information often signals the potential for future opportunities, she adds.
Identify project-based teams. Companies that utilize project-based or rotational teams frequently facilitate rapid skill development and provide avenues for promotion, notes Burke.
Monitor a companys vacancy trends. Commonly, frequent or multiple job vacancies may indicate active hiring and suggest the possibility of upward mobility within an organization, Burke says.
Or if youre up for the challengestart your own company
But Burke also says another option, as opposed to adapting to the dynamics and timing that ead to promotions, is simply to go into business yourselfa drastic change, to be sure, but it can lead to drastic growth.
Thats especially if you find yourself in a company or industry with inherently limited growth opportunities, says Burke. Again, sometimes growth-limiting organizational structures are simply too much for you (or anyone else) to overcome.
Should you decide to explore this option, its recommended that comprehensive market research is conducted: evaluating your risk tolerance, and developing a strong business plan. Starting your own business can provide a platform to pursue professional opportunities that align with your aspirations and skill set. Entrepreneurship also offers the ability to shape your own career path, respond proactively to market needs, and foster both personal and professional development.
This strategic approach will enable you to leverage your experience and expertise, resulting in greater autonomy and, possibly, career satisfaction, she says.
Unfortunately, a promotion plateau is tricky, because there can be so many different factors limiting your growth.
Fortunately, though, you do have a lot of options available to you, if youre willing to do your research and think outside the box.
Based on my experience, employees who encounter a promotion plateau typically pursue several strategies to advance their careers, says Burke.
After writing more than one article a day for the last 23 years, Ive accumulated a body of text large enough to train an AI model that could convincingly write like me. With todays technology, it would not be difficult to build a system capable of generating opinions that sound as if they came from Enrique Dansan algorithmic professor that keeps publishing long after Im gone.
That, apparently, is the next frontier of productivity: the digital twin. Startups such as Viven and tools like Synthesia are building AI clones of employees and executivestrained on their voices, writing, decisions, and habits. The idea is seductive. Imagine scaling yourself infinitely: answering emails, recording videos, writing updates, etc., while you do something else, or nothing at all.
But seductive doesnt mean sensible.
A world full of digital ghosts
We are entering an era where professionals will not just automate tasks; they will replicate their personas. A company might build a digital copy of its best salesperson or customer service agent. A CEO might train a virtual twin to respond to inquiries. A university might deploy an AI version of a popular lecturer to deliver courses at scale.
In theory, this sounds efficient. In practice, it invites a form of existential confusion: If the replica is convincing enough, what happens to the person? What does it mean to be productive when your digital version is the one doing the work?
The fascination with cloning ourselves digitally reflects the same temptation that has driven automation for centuries: outsourcing not just labor, but also identity. The difference is that AI can now replicate the voice of that identity, both literally and metaphorically.
What I would look like as an algorithm
I could easily do it. Feed a large language model the millions of words Ive written since 2003every article, every post, every commentand youd get a fairly accurate simulation of me. It would probably have the right tone, vocabulary, and rhythm. It could write plausible articles, maybe even publish them at the same pace.
But it would just miss the point.
I dont write to fill a schedule or a database. I write to think or to teach. Writing, for me, is not an act of production, but of reflection. Thats why, as I explained recently in Why I let AI help me thinkbut never think for me, I never let AI write my articles for me. It makes no sense. Asking a model to think for me would defeat the very reason I sit down every morning to write.
Of course, I use AI constantly: summarizing sources, checking facts, exploring counterarguments, and finding references. But I never let it finish my sentences. Thats the boundary that keeps my work mine.
The illusion of scaling yourself
The promise of digital clones is rooted in the same misconception: that replicating output equals replicating value. Companies now talk about bottling expertise or scaling human capital as if personality were a production line.
But cloning output is not the same as extending competence. A persons professional value is not their words or gestures. Its their judgment, built over time through context and curiosity. A model trained on your past decisions may imitate your tone, but it cannot anticipate your evolution. Its a fossil, not a future.
An AI clone of me could mimic my writing style from 2025. But if I let it publish, it would freeze me in that year forever, a museum piece updated daily.
From productivity to presence
Executives, entrepreneurs, and creators should be careful what they wish for. A digital twin may handle the inbox or record video briefings, but it also dilutes what makes leadership or creativity meaningful: presence.
In Axioss coverage of CEO clones, many executives confessed that they liked their AI doubles but didnt fully trust them. The clone could handle repetitive interactions, but not empathy, timing, or nuancethe qualities that define credibility.
Delegating those things to an algorithm is like sending a mannequin to a meeting: technically present, emotionally vacant.
Corporate immortality and the ethics of legacy
Theres also the question of what happens when your digital twin outlives you. Some companies already treat employee data as assets, so why wouldnt they treat their digital clones the same way?
Imagine a firm continuing to deploy the AI version of a beloved leader or educator after theyve passed away. It might seem like a tribute, but its really a form of corporate necromancy: using a persons intellectual remains to perpetuate a brand.
Its not hard to picture universities selling virtual professors or corporations reusing former CEOs as permanent avatars. In a recent academic paper on digital twins, researchers warned that the boundary between representation and possession is getting blurry. Who owns the clone? Who profits from it?
When we replicate people as data objects, we risk turning identity into infrastructure, into something that can be licensed, monetized, or rebranded at will.
The right way to use AI for personal scale
There is, however, a rational way to use AI for scale: as augmentation, not imitation.
I use AI every day as a thinking partner. It reads drafts, proposes structures, suggests sources, and critiques my logic. Its like having a tireless research assistant, one that never gets offended when I ignore its advice. But the act of reasoning, the decision of what to say and how to say it, remains mine.
Thats the key difference between using artificial intelligence and becoming it. When we outsource thinking, we lose the feedback loop that makes us human: the constant process of reflection, revision, and growth.
Professionals who embrace AI responsibly will amplify their reach without diluting their essence. Those who dont will eventually find their own voices indistinguishable from their machines.
What businesses should learn from this
For companies flirting with employee clones or AI avatars, heres a checklist worth remembering:
Define purpose, not imitation. Dont build AI twins to replicate people. Build systems that free them to do higher-value work.
Keep the human in the authorship loop. AI can assist in drafting, coding, and summarizing, but final judgment must remain human.
Treat data as legacy, not property. Respect employee and creator autonomy. No one should become a perpetual digital asset without consent.
Focus on augmentation, not automation. Use AI to enhance collective intelligence, not to eliminate the need for it.
AI is not here to replace human expertise; its here to challenge how we apply it.
The paradox of self-replication
Soon, anyone with enough data will be able to build a digital version of themselves. Some will see it as immortality; others, as redundancy. I see it as a mirror, a test of what truly matters in human work.
When my own digital twin can write a decent article about AI, I wont be impressed. The question isnt whether it can write. Its whether it can care, and whether it serves me for the purpose Im trying to achieve.
And until algorithms can care about truth, nuance, curiosity, or purpose, Ill keep doing what Ive done for the last 23 years: Sit down, think, and write. Not because I have to, but because I still can.
Do your office, inbox, and calendar feel like a ghost town on Friday afternoons? Youre not alone.
Im a labor economist who studies how technology and organizational change affect productivity and well-being. In a study published in an August 2025 working paper, I found that the way people allocate their time to work has changed profoundly since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
For example, among professionals in occupations that can be done remotely, 35% to 40% worked remotely on Thursdays and Fridays in 2024, compared with only 15% in 2019. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, nearly 30% worked remotely, versus 10% to 15% five years earlier.
And white-collar employees have also become more likely to log off from work early on Fridays. Theyre starting the weekend sooner than before the pandemic, whether while working at an office or remotely as the workweek comes to a close. Why is that happening? I suspect that remote work has diluted the barrier between the workweek and the weekendespecially when employees arent working at the office.
The changing rhythm of work
The American Time Use Survey, which the U.S. Labor Departments Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts annually, asks thousands of Americans to recount how they spent the previous day, minute by minute. It tracks how long they spend working, commuting, doing housework, and caregiving.
Because these diaries cover both weekdays and weekends, and include information about whether respondents could work remotely, this survey offers the most detailed picture available of how the rhythms of work and life are changing. This data also allows me to see where people conduct each activity, making it possible to estimate the share of time American professionals spend working from home.
When I examined how the typical workday changed between 2019 and 2024, I saw dramatic shifts in where, when, and how people worked throughout that period.
Millions of professionals who had never worked remotely suddenly did so full time at the height of the pandemic. Hybrid arrangements have since become common; many employees spend two or three days a week at home and the rest in the office.
I found another change: From 2019 to 2024, the average number of minutes worked on Fridays fell by about 90 minutes in jobs that can be done from home. That change accounts for other factors, such as a professionals age, education, and occupation.
The decline for employees with jobs that are harder to do remotely was much smaller.
Even if you just look at the raw data, U.S. employees with the potential to work remotely were working about 7 hours per weekday on average in 2024, down about 13 minutes from 2019. These averages mask substantial variation between those with jobs that can more easily be done remotely and those who must report to the office most of the time.
For example, among workers in the more remote-intensive jobs, they spent 7 hours, 6 minutes working on Fridays in 2024, but 8 hours, 24 minutes in 2019.
That means I found, looking at the raw data, that Americans were working 78 fewer minutes on Fridays in 2024 than five years earlier. And controlling for other factors (e.g., demographics), this is actually an even larger 90-minute difference for employees who can do their jobs remotely.
In contrast, those employees were working longer hours on Wednesdays. They worked 8 hours, 24 minutes on Wednesdays in 2024, half an hour more than the 7 hours, 54 minutes logged on that day of the week in 2019. Clearly, theres a shift from some Friday hours, with employees making up the bulk of the difference on other weekdays.
Fridays have long been a little different
Although employees are shifting some of this skipped work time to other days of the week, most of the reductionwhether at the office or at homehas gone to leisure.
To be sure, Fridays have always been a little different than other weekdays. Many bosses allowed their staff to dress more casually on Fridays and permitted people to depart early, long before the pandemic began. But the ability to work remotely has evidently amplified that tendency.
This informal easing into the weekend, once confined to office norms, can be a morale booster. But as it has expanded, its become more individualized through remote and hybrid arrangements.
Those workers in remote-intensive occupations who are single, young, or male reduced their working hours across the board the most, relative to 2019, although their time on the job increased a bit in 2024.
The benefits and limits of flexibility
There are a few causal studies on the effects of remote work on productivity and well-being in the workplace, including some in which I participated. A general takeaway is that people tend to spend less time collaborating and more time on independent tasks when they work remotely.
Thats fine for some professions, but in roles that depend on frequent coordination, that pattern can complicate communication or weaken team cohesion. Colocationbeing physically present with your colleaguesdoes matter for some types of tasks.
But even if productivity doesnt necessarily suffer, every hour of unscheduled, independent work can be an hour not spent in coordinated effort with colleagues. That means what happens when people clock out or log off early on a Fridaywhether at home or at their officedepends on the nature of their work.
In occupations that require continuous handoffssuch as journalism, healthcare, or customer servicestaggered schedules can actually improve efficiency by spreading coverage across more hours in the day.
But for employees in project-based or collaborative roles that depend on overlapping hours for brainstorming, review, or decision-making, uneven schedules can create friction. When colleagues are rarely online at the same time, small delays can compound and slow collective progress.
The problem arises when flexible work becomes so individualized that it erodes shared rhythms altogether. The time-use data I analyzed suggests that remote-capable employees now spread their work more unevenly across the week, with less overlap in real time.
Eventually, that can make it harder to sustain the informal interactions and team cohesion that once happened organically when everyone left the office together at the nd of the week. As some of my other research has shown, that also can reduce job satisfaction and increase turnover in jobs requiring greater coordination.
The future of work
To be sure, allowing employees to do remote work and have some scheduling flexibility on any day of the week isnt necessarily bad for business.
The benefitsin terms of work-life balance, autonomy, recruitment, and reducing turnovercan be very real.
Flexible and remote arrangements expand the pool of potential applicants by freeing employers from strict geographic limits. A company based in Chicago can now hire a software engineer in Boise or a designer in Atlanta without requiring relocation.
This wider reach increases the supply of qualified candidates. It canparticularly in jobs requiring more coordinationalso improve retention by allowing employees to adjust their work schedules around family or personal needs rather than having to choose between relocating or quitting.
Whats more, many women who might have had to exit the labor force altogether when they became parents have been able to remain employed, at least on a part-time basis.
But in my view, the erosion of Fridays may go beyond what began as an informal traditionleaving the office early before the weekend begins. It is part of a broader shift toward individualized schedules that expand autonomy but reduce shared time for coordination.
Christos Makridis is an associate research professor of information systems at Arizona State University, Institute for Humane Studies.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Inspired by the ongoing auction of Bob Ross paintings to raise money for public television, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver is putting some of its own TV artifacts up for auction for a good cause.
Host John Oliver dedicated the close of Sunday’s season finale to local public television, which is facing an unprecedented crisis. Federal budget cuts could by next year close as many as 115 public television and radio stations in the U.S. serving 43 million Americans, according to the Public Media Bridge Fund, a philanthropic initiative.
“These stations can fill a vital community role,” Oliver said during Sunday’s show.
[Screenshot: johnoliversjunk.com]
Bob Ross Inc. said in October that it was putting 30 paintings by the late artist up for auction to pay for public station licensing fees. The first three paintings sold last week in Los Angeles for more than $600,000 total.
Oliver said Last Week Tonight originally tried bidding on one of the recently auctioned Ross paintings in hopes of flipping it to raise even more money for public television.
“Sadly, those prices were outside of our budget,” Oliver said. So instead, the show is tapping its own archives with the auction site johnoliversjunk.com.
[Screenshot: johnoliversjunk.com]
Items like the giant Reese’s mug that made its first appearance during a 2017 episode about net neutrality are now up for auction alongside Oliver’s “on-screen wife,” Mrs. Cabbage, and a quintet of bad wax replicas of presidents originally purchased by the show from the now-closed Hall of Presidents and First Ladies in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. All the proceeds from the auctions will go to the Public Media Bridge Fund.
[Screenshot: johnoliversjunk.com]
Though Last Week Tonight didn’t have the budget to drop six figures on an original Bob Ross painting at last week’s auction, Bob Ross Inc. did donate one to Oliver’s auction. “Cabin at Sunset” was created during an 1987 episode of Ross’s PBS show The Joy of Painting, and it’s presently the first item shown on Oliver’s auction site. The painting currently has a bid of more than a million dollars.
The top bid for a sculpture titled “LBJ’s Balls” is over $25,000, and the top bid for a trip to New York City to meet Oliver is higher than $50,000 at the time of this writing. So far, the leading bid to appear in a photo over Oliver’s shoulder during a future episode has just passed $100,000 after 45 bids.
[Screenshot: johnoliversjunk.com]
The show found some lower-priced ways to raise money, too, like signed merchandise from the Moon Mammoths, the minor league baseball team Last Week Tonight temporarily rebranded in July, and a Mr. Bean DVD signed by Joel McHale.
The auction closes on November 24. Oliver also promoted Adopt A Station, a nonprofit for people who want to help out and donate to public media stations but aren’t able to participate in his auction.
Trump administration budget cuts meant an end to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which said in August that it is winding down operations. The Public Media Bridge Fund says the end of CPB funding will destabilize the public media system. It’s seeking to raise $100 million over two years to help the most at-risk communities.
