Chris Hemsworth has told Sky News that finding out he had a greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease was a “gear shift” in his life motivations.

During a genetic test in season one of Limitless: Live Better Now, the Australian actor discovered that he is, biologically, eight to 10 times more likely than others to have the brain disorder during his lifetime as he carries two copies of the APOE4 gene.

He had first taken part in the National Geographic show to be its “guinea pig” and face new experiences that challenge the body and mind.

But after having the test, the 41-year-old Thor, Furiosa and Transformers star was faced with an unexpected truth.

One in every 50 people inherit two copies of the APOE4 gene and research has found that nearly all double carriers showed key early signs of the disease which causes dementia by the age of 55.

Everyone’s risk is different, and evidence suggests there are things you can do to reduce your risk whether you’re a carrier of the gene or not, including not smoking, reducing alcohol intake, daily exercise, monitoring cholesterol and blood pressure and eating a balanced diet.

Speaking of when he found out he was a double carrier, Hemsworth told Sky News: “It was just kind of this point in my life where up until your 40s, you’re kind of gathering data and information and it’s all reactionary and then you get to a point where you think, oh some of this sort of identity that I’ve sort of built doesn’t hold true anymore.

“There’s some inner sort of protest or inner voice that has a deeper need to understand and there’s deeper questions and what is the purpose and the why behind what I’m doing … and what am I seeking, what am I contributing, as opposed to just what I am collecting.”

Reacting on screen, he said it made him shift his focus to living better and increase the chances of him spending as much time as possible with his family and friends.

What’s changed in the second series?

The change in mindset is evident in season two.

“This time around, I was very involved in the orchestration and the sort of production and bringing together spaces that I was interested in or there was a deep curiosity or were deeply personal to me. And it was more sort of experiential journalism as opposed to a contestant in a challenging kind of fun, reality show.

He adds: “I was much more committed or invested in the experience.

“And I was a bit more educated on the topics too. I had to research, I had a deeper point of view, I suppose, personally, but also sort of the education I was given prior and I enjoyed that more, to be honest, I didn’t like that I felt very uncomfortable in the first season because I was standing around all these experts and I knew nothing about these topics, yet I was kind of asked to speak on them and so I felt like an imposter the entire time.”

Limitless: Live Better Now looks at the ways in which you can improve your brain and body’s health through endurance challenges and learning a new instrument.

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Teaming up with Sheeran

Hemsworth chose the drums and, taking it to the extreme, was set the task of joining his friend Ed Sheeran on stage to play Thinking Out Loud.

“That fear and that anxiety was incredibly overwhelming,” Hemsworth says, detailing how he felt “underwater” in the weeks leading up to the event.

“It’s weird the way intense situations actually cause a hyper focus; it’s a survival mechanism of the brain.

“Some of the other challenges where if I did the training it was beneficial, but I could kind of muscle my way through it. You can’t do that with a musical instrument and then the realisation that the entire band is relying on you to keep time. And then 70,000 people are sitting there going, ‘please don’t wreck our favourite song’.”

Reflecting on the moment, he says it’s one of the most magical feelings he’s ever had.

“The joy was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. You know, if you could bottle that and have it in a healthy way and not have all the negatives that someone may have for it, it was amazing. It was a true kind of one of my first probably proper out of body experiences, I suppose.

“It was like, I kind of remember being in the out, looking down at myself almost, kind of going, wow, I’m kind of floating along with this thing that’s so much bigger than me and I’m in true sort of flow state with it.”

National Geographic’s Limitless: Live Better Now is available to stream on Disney+ from 15 August.

It could be diplomatic dynamite.

The first meeting between a sitting US and Russian president in more than four years, following one of the bleakest periods in the history of their countries’ bilateral relations.

But a Putin–Trump summit does not necessarily mean there will be a ceasefire.

Ukraine war latest: Kremlin aide’s full statement on Trump-Putin talks

On the one hand, it could signal that a point of agreement has been reached and a face-to-face meeting is needed to seal the deal.

That has always been Russia’s stance. It’s consistently said it would only meet at a presidential level if there’s something to agree on.

On the other hand, there might not be anything substantive. It might just be for show.

It might just be the latest attempt by the Kremlin to diffuse Donald Trump’s anger and dodge his deadline to end the war by Friday or face sanctions.

It would give Trump something that can be presented as progress, but in reality, it delivers anything but.

After all, there has certainly not been any sign that Moscow is willing to soften its negotiating position or step back from its goals on the battlefield.

Tellingly, perhaps, it’s this latter view which has been taken by some of the Russian press on Thursday.

“Putin won” is the headline in Moskovsky Komsomolets regarding the Kremlin leader’s meeting with Witkoff.

The state-run tabloid quotes a political scientist, Marat Bashirov, who claims Putin “bought time” ahead of Friday’s deadline.

“It is noteworthy that in his rhetoric [on sanctions] Trump did not mention Russia at all,” the paper notes.

Komsomolskaya Pravda is similarly dismissive.

“Donald Trump has two simple interests in connection with Ukraine: to earn money for America, and political whistles and the Nobel Peace Prize for himself,” it says.

“Russia has its own interests,” it adds, “securing them is what Vladimir Putin will seek at a meeting with Trump.”

At this stage, the most likely location is the United Arab Emirates. Putin met the country’s president in the Kremlin today, and afterwards said it would be a “suitable location”. It felt like a strong hint.

And the UAE certainly makes sense.

It’s played mediator for a number of the prisoner swaps between Russia and Ukraine; it has good relations with the US (and was one of Trump’s stops on his recent Middle East tour); and most importantly for Moscow, it’s not a member of the International Criminal Court. So Putin doesn’t have to worry about being arrested.

But if NBC’s reports are correct, that a Putin-Trump summit is conditional on the Russian president meeting with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then the summit may not happen at all.

Read more on Russia and Ukraine:
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What could a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine involve?
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Until now, Putin has refused to meet Zelenskyy, despite numerous demands from Kyiv, because he views him as illegitimate.

The Kremlin said the prospect of a trilateral meeting between the leaders was mentioned by Witkoff on Wednesday, but the proposal was left “completely without comment” by Russia.

GPT-5, the long-awaited upgrade to the ChatGPT AI chatbot, has been released by its maker OpenAI.

It has been one of the most highly anticipated launches in Silicon Valley after OpenAI’s first offering ChatGPT – powered by its GPT-3 model – kick-started the current AI boom in late 2022.

“GPT-3 sort of felt like talking to a high school student,” said Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive.

“GPT-4, maybe it was like talking to a college student. But with GPT-5, now it’s like talking to an expert, a PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand.”

At the launch event, OpenAI claimed the new chatbot, which will be released to all ChatGPT users on Thursday, was more than a simple upgrade to its previous offerings.

According to OpenAI, the new model exceeds the chatbot competition from the likes of Google, X and Antropic on “benchmarks” – standardised tests used to rank models.

OpenAI claims it has been designed to be easier and more natural to communicate with, better at writing prose and advanced computer code, solving academic questions from mathematics to law, assisting with healthcare-related questions, as well as being safer than its predecessors.

“It’s an incredible superpower on demand,” claimed Mr Altman.

The model is also more intelligent in how it uses its own brain power – and therefore an expensive computing resource – according to OpenAI.

It is a hybrid of previous chatbots and slower, more computing-intensive “reasoning” models like OpenAI’s Deep Research.

Based on a user’s request, the model will decide how much “thinking” is required before answering, rather than requiring the user to switch between different models.

Although AI enthusiasts who had been expecting GPT-5 to represent “artificial general intelligence [AGI]” will be disappointed.

Despite this being OpenAI’s stated goal, Mr Altman billed GPT-5 as a “major upgrade” to GPT-4 and a “significant step along the path to AGI”.

But they’re clearly not there yet.

A real test of GPT-5 will be whether it sells.

OpenAI is projected to spend $8bn (£6bn) this year, on top of $5bn (£3.7bn) last year, and while it is expected to make a profit this year, the business case for increasingly powerful AI models is still not clear to many investors.

Given a single training run for GPT-5 is rumoured to have cost $500m (£373m), there will be an expectation the new model is significantly more useful to business users.

Despite a very slick demonstration of its coding skills at the launch presentation, where it built an online language learning game in seconds, GPT-5 will have to prove its worth for professional coding.

Many in the tech industry prefer Anthropic AI’s Claude model to write code. OpenAI and its investors will be hoping GPT-5 changes that.

AI experts will also be testing GPT-5’s tendency to “hallucinate”, an issue OpenAI claims to have improved with GPT-5.

But erroneous or bizarre answers are a problem that dogs all large generative AI models.

“Shiny things are always fun to play with, and I fully expect GPT-5 to be the shiniest so far,” said Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist at New York University and AI commentator.

“But that doesn’t mean that it is a critical step on the optimal path to AI that we can trust,” Mr Marcus added in a post.