In today's edition: the transhumanist candidate, Equipay, VHS tape and lasers, the mutable genome, the opera of the telephone, a disappearing coastline, and solving the ghost phone mystery. 

Real Future TV, segment 5: Maybe you've heard of Zoltan Istvan, who is running as the Transhumanist candidate for president. He wants to live forever and maybe genetically modify his children. His ideas are pretty extreme, yet he seems like your average Bay Area dad. So I went to see him at his house in Mill Valley to try to understand how such a normal dude ended up the face of a movement to transcend the human body. Check out the episode.

1. The winning entry in Comedy Hack Day SF 2016 is the brilliant, brilliant Equipay. Go watch this.

"Pulling data income data from US Department of Labor, Equipay allows you and your friends to split the cost of a meal in accordance with gender and racial income inequalities. Bill-splitting app that splits the bill fairly. No really, fairly. Reparations one meal at a time. TEAM MEMBERS: Brian Carter, George Chen, Rohan Dhaimade, Franklin Ho, Luna Malbroux, Graham Starr, Star Zagofsky"

2. VHS tape a key component of laser-plasma accelerator.

"'We decided from the beginning of the project that instead of worrying about blowing up the mirror, we’d blow it up with every shot,' says Leemans. They first developed a prototype mirror of water film, he says, 'but settled for much more robust VHS tape.' Video cassette players may be out of fashion, but VHS tape is thin, stretch-resistant, and capable of running for hours at a time. The electron beam pierces the tape virtually untouched. On the opposite side, in the merest fraction of a second before the laser pulse can penetrate the tape, it ionizes the surface to form a dense, perfectly flat plasma: a highly efficient mirror."

3. It's advisable to read a big Craig Venter profile every 3-5 years, just to see what he's up to.

"Venter says their findings have changed his static view of the genome. For instance, he has been able to compare his 2006 genome with today’s, using three different sequencing technologies. 'One of the findings that would have shocked me and the rest of the world 15 years ago is that our genome is continually changing,' he says. 'We can relatively accurately predict your age from your genome sequence, or at least the age when the sample was taken.'"

4. The opera of the telephone.

"The opera tells the story of the end of a love affair. Expertly constructed, it unfolds as one half of a phone conversation. The other half takes place on the far end of the phone line, unheard by the audience. The woman is Elle, and Duval was the first to perform the role. There’s a filmed version of Duval’s performance, directed by Dominique Delouche, which uses another technology, television, to emphasize the creative constraints inherent in Cocteau’s vision: a woman, alone in a room, trying to navigate a failed love — and her own faltering psyche — using failing technology."

5. Coastlines are going to get weird over the next few decades.

"Pacifica declared a state of emergency Jan. 22 after rain and big surf pounded the base of the cliffs, causing a huge chunk of dirt to separate and fall onto the beach. Forty apartment residents were ordered out by city officials who judged their homes to be too close to the vertical face of the cliff. As The Chronicle reported Sunday, the Pacifica cliffs have been crumbling for decades, but experts say the sea’s creep inland accelerated due to a combination of natural and man-made factors, including an increase in El Niño storms and a drastic decrease in sediment flowing out of San Francisco Bay."

On Fusion: Kashmir Hill and our friends at Reply All may have solved the mystery of this house in suburban Atlanta that, for some reason, showed up as the location for many people's lost phones.

1. youtube.com 2. newscenter.lbl.gov | @awojdyla 3. mosaicscience.com | @chrissyfarr 4. disquiet.com 5. sfchronicle.com | @demianbulwa

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A Dense, Perfectly Flat Plasma: A Highly Efficient Mirror