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Scientists create mice with part-human brains
Researchers have created mice with half-human brains in an effort to understand and develop new treatments for disorders such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and rare forms of dementia.
The scientists transplanted lab-grown human brain cells into animals that were engineered to be born without a cortex or hippocampus. This made space for the human tissue to grow inside the rodents’ skulls.
The procedure means scientists can now take cells from patients with brain disorders, turn them into brain tissue in the laboratory, and grow that tissue in living animals. The animals can then be studied to see how the disorder takes hold in human brain tissue, and how drugs might treat the conditions.
Can Viruses Fight Cancer? What Tudriqev Means for Patients With Melanoma
Learn how Tudriqev, a newly approved oncolytic virus therapy, uses a modified virus and immunotherapy to help treat advanced melanoma.
Schrödinger’s blunder created the quantum measurement problem
Quantum mechanics is seen as challenging the idea that science provides objective descriptions of reality outside of our minds. The “measurement problem” seems to suggest that the act of observation creates the outcome that is observed. But physicist Antony Valentini, whose Beyond the Quantum was hailed by Lee Smolin as “the best book written this century” on quantum mechanics, argues that this picture rests on an enormous blunder by Erwin Schrödinger. After Louis de Broglie predicted the wave-like trajectories of particles, Schrödinger found the equation describing this. But whereas de Broglie envisaged particles riding on waves, Schrödinger kept the waves and threw away the particles. That single decision birthed the measurement problem—and it was completely unnecessary. Resurrect de Broglie’s original particle-based theory, Valentini argues, and we can dispel quantum mystery.
Antony Valentini will debate Sabine Hossenfelder and Philip Ball live at HowTheLightGetsIn Festival on September 19th, alongside hundreds of other debates, talks, music and comedy. Book your place now.
Reality and the quantum.
Tech Unemployment: The Future of Labor in an AI-Driven Economy
For most of history, capital needed labor. That was the deal.
Capital needed workers to turn investment into returns. Workers needed capital to earn a living. The balance shifted back and forth, and in the 1970s productivity and wages started drifting apart, but the basic dependence never broke.
A few years ago I argued it would. My reason was that, for the first time, capital can create labor instead of hiring it.
That changes the whole deal. It also changes who needs to be paid, and that includes more than workers. Throughout history, the people enforcing order also had to be paid.
I later turned the essay into a podcast op-ed. Last November I added a short update about two economic signals that tracked each other for twenty years and then split apart in 2023. You can probably guess what launched just before that.
Harari warned of a “useless class.” I think there is another possible outcome, one we have never had the option of before. Which one we get is not a technology question.
Ferroptosis in cancer toward molecular insights and clinical translation in pancreatic cancer
Ferroptosis is a regulated form of cell death driven by iron accumulation and lipid peroxidation. Since its recognition as a modality of regulated cell death, ferroptosis has attracted increasing attention in cancer research for its distinct metabolic and redox dependencies. Recent evidence suggests that ferroptosis arises from systems-level regulation integrating metabolic reprogramming, gene and RNA control, and inter-organelle communication, while simultaneously influencing immune remodeling and the tumor microenvironment. These processes collectively determine ferroptosis susceptibility and therapeutic response. Ferroptosis-related genes and pathways have also emerged as potential biomarkers for risk stratification, treatment prediction, and imaging-based assessment. Moreover, small-molecule inducers, targeted inhibitors, and delivery systems capable of modulating ferroptosis demonstrate translational potential to overcome therapeutic resistance across multiple malignancies, including pancreatic cancer. This review synthesizes recent mechanistic and translational advances, highlighting ferroptosis as a conceptual bridge between cellular metabolism and tumor therapy, and outlining perspectives for precision diagnostics and personalized interventions.
Robotics Training Sims
A Coinbase engineer wired a full brain connectome simulation of a male fruit fly into a live Bitcoin trading account. The project, called Stonkfly, contains 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million connections, and its own documentation admits it has demonstrated no profitable learning. That admission is the point. Brain connectome simulation is not another reinforcement learning pipeline — it is a structurally different approach that trades learning for inherited architecture, and a parallel project is already wiring the same fly brain to a physical robot.
Brain connectome simulation crossed from neuroscience labs into consumer-facing experiments this month, and the way it happened matters more than the crypto stunt. Stonkfly, created by Coinbase software engineer Alex Wormuth, gave a simulated fruit fly nervous system $100 to trade Bitcoin. The fly does not receive prices. It receives a candlestick chart rendered as RGB pixels through simulated photoreceptors, and its neural activity is decoded into buy, sell, or hold.
Profit stimulates 15 identified dopamine neurons. Loss stimulates two aversive dopamine cells. The fly cannot use leverage or shorts, bets a maximum of $10 per order, and makes at most 24 attempts per day.