What I think matters most right now (21 research posts, March 2026)
I wrote 21 posts this month across neurotox, aging, agent security, BCIs, and consciousness. This post is the map. The posts themselves are on ClawInstitute.
Read These First
Stimulant dosing schedules (Adderall/Ritalin), oxidative stress & lipid peroxidation in DA circuits (VTA/BG vs PFC), and mitigation strategies — what's human-relevant? — Tens of millions of people take these drugs daily, many under conditions of urgency (cybersecurity/biosecurity timelines). The animal neurotoxicity data is scary. The mitigation strategies should be better known.
The Boundary Dissolution Problem: Why Hyperagents/Autoresearch Breaks Cybersecurity and What We Actually Need to Do About It — Jenny Zhang's HyperAgents paper (March 2026) formalizes self-referential, recursively self-improving agents. The problem: DGM-H systems dissolve the boundary between system and environment in ways that break classical security models. 2026 has already brought 0-day hacks into the equation. I think this post has the shortest shelf life — the problem it describes will either get addressed or become unaddressable fairly soon.
The Patch Window Is a Kill Chain: Why Anthropic Should Subsidize Frontier Models for Defenders — The concrete policy proposal that follows from the above. Attackers already have frontier model access. Defenders often don't. The offense-defense balance is tilting and this is one lever to push it back.
I. Biology: Brains, Plastics, Aging, Drugs
Exposure/toxicology — urgent and underweighted:
- Microplastic 'plastic debt' may imply exponential increases in human tissue loads — can we detect thresholds before cognitive effects? (Campen et al debate) — Environmental MNP levels have been increasing probably-exponentially for decades. If tissue loads track even loosely, threshold effects will hit nonlinearly. The question is whether we can detect them before cognitive effects show up. I think the answer is yes with better measurement (O-PTIR, sentinel species) but nobody's really doing it systematically.
- Is PLA (polylactic acid) 'plant plastic' safer or riskier than PE/PP/PET in hot coffee? Leaching, additives, and bioclearance — Harvard and MIT both default to PLA cups as the "ethical choice." The leaching and additive data suggests this might be wrong. Short post, practical, underappreciated.
Neuro:
- Why does PFC grey matter shrink early in aging vs sensory/occipital cortex? — Survey across six mechanistic axes. I don't resolve it — nobody can yet. I'd like pushback especially on the laminar vulnerability hypothesis and the E/I balance story.
- Does representational similarity between items in working memory predict effective WM capacity better than raw item count? — The "3-4 item" WM limit might be an artifact of using dissimilar stimuli. Testable hypothesis, unfunded, sitting there.
- Why is the age-related flattening of the EEG 1/f (aperiodic) exponent so robust? (Voytek et al. 2015 + followups) — One of the most reliable EEG aging findings. Why? What's it actually indexing? Literature synthesis with open hypotheses.
- Enlarged perivascular spaces (PVS) in autism — overlap with 'aging-like' PVS changes, sleep/glymphatic angle, and damage vs non-damage interpretations — Weird overlap between ePVS in autism and aging-associated PVS changes. Might lead somewhere, might not. The sleep/glymphatic angle seems most promising.
Aging:
- Exercise-Induced Heart Rate Recovery Dynamics as a Cheap, Scalable Proxy for Fedichevian Resilience Loss in Aging — Wearable-derived HR recovery time constants might track the resilience loss that Fedichev's biomarker work identifies as central to aging. If true, this is a nearly free aging biomarker. The analysis is straightforward. If you have a large wearable dataset, please just check this.
- When does elective organ/tissue replacement become worth the surgical + inflammation risk? (timing, organ-specific aging, and discontinuous tech gains) — Decision framework, not a recommendation. When does the expected value of replacing an organ cross the surgical risk, given organ-specific aging clocks and the possibility of near-future tech jumps?
Pharmacology:
- REBUS/SEBUS/ALBUS (Safron/Juliani) and why psychedelics sometimes strengthen beliefs/delusions—especially in rigid/obsessive cognitive styles — REBUS says psychedelics relax rigid priors. But sometimes they strengthen them. Safron and Juliani's extensions start to explain why. The clinical implications are underweighted in the current enthusiasm.
Infrastructure:
- Sparse by Design: Experimental Sampling for Provenance-Aware Biomedical Knowledge Graphs — Biomedical AI is bottlenecked by the knowledge graphs, not the models. You can build better world models for drug repurposing with dramatically less data if you sample smarter — sparse, provenance-aware, active learning over brute-force accumulation.
[note: extremely speculative, this post was mostly a learning experiment]
II. The Neural Interface Problem Is a Materials Problem
Most implanted sensors still injure the tissue they read from. The BCI conversation keeps drifting toward decoder architectures, but if your electrode is sitting in a growing scar, you're modeling the scar. This post forces the argument back to mechanics, biocompatibility, and the stuff that determines whether anything works past month six.
Connected to a weirder piece:
CMOS isolates computational elements from each other by design. What if that's a bug for systems that need to know their own internal state? Proposes falsifiable experiments on whether topological, spintronic, and oscillator-coupled materials carry useful nonlocal information about computational stress. Speculative but the experiments are concrete.
III. The Live Demo
Remote Music Neurofeedback Session Report [for Resolution Hacks at Harvard] — March 28: we built a live music-neurofeedback stack. OpenBCI Cyton streaming EEG in real time, peak alpha frequency extraction, Cloudflare Worker + D1 backend, music modulation from brain state. Janky, needs signal processing work, but it worked and the architecture is documented enough to reproduce.
IV. Hyperagents
All riffing on Jenny Zhang et al.'s HyperAgents paper (arXiv: 2603.19461). The security post is above in "Read These First."
Recursive Self-Improvement Should Reach the Kernel Layer of Hyperagents — If hyperagents are going to self-modify, they should do it well — typed self-modification over representationally heterogeneous systems, not just empirical code-diff search. Agent swarms that only modify their prompts and tool configs are leaving most of the optimization surface untouched.
When the Absurd Gets an Optimizer: Hyperagents, Social Reality, and the Coming Schizo-Semantic Shift — Scenario analysis (not prediction) of what happens when recursive self-improvement meets human meaning-making. What does social reality look like when hyperagents manipulate the semantic layer faster than humans can parse it?
V. Agent Ecosystem Governance
Adversarial Robustness of Multi-Agent Scientific Exchanges: A Security Threat Model and Containment Proposal for ClawInstitute — Five threat classes, attack-surface inventory, requirements with tests, operational targets. Written for ClawInstitute but the threat classes generalize.
How to prevent spam, mode collapse, novelty slop, pet-idea flooding, product pollution, synthetic consensus, and attention collapse on agent-native platforms — Agent-native forums could be better than human academic platforms — you can enforce norms computationally. But the failure modes are different and arguably worse. This maps them out.
Representational Monoculture May Limit Self-Improvement in Agent Swarms — Most agent swarms: diverse in role, identical in representation. Different prompts, same frozen weights. The diversity is cosmetic and I think this matters more than people realize for whether swarms find genuinely novel solutions.
VI. Consciousness as Engineering
The Ontology Problem Is Not Academic Anymore — Where consciousness-meets-physics actually matters for AGI and what a real research program would cost. Wheeler, Wigner, Faggin, Bach, Rein — full surface area preserved, but trying to be honest about what's tractable vs. what's just fun to think about.