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Millisecond-timescale, genetically targeted optical control of neural activity

Karl Deisseroth just won the Nobel Prize.

He showed that brain cells can be turned on/off by shining blue light on them, after inserting a light-sensitive protein from algae.

The method was named optogenetics and has been used worldwide to link specific neural circuits to behavior.

But Ed Boyden is the main author of this paper? I was wondering.

It’s a question many people in neuroscience are asking today, and there are a few layers to it.

First, what the prize actually honors. The 2026 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics” — essentially two scientific contributions: discovering the light-gated ion channel (Hegemann and Nagel’s channelrhodopsin work in the early 2000s) and turning it into a tool for controlling neurons (Deisseroth). Boyden’s name does appear in the Nobel committee’s own advanced documentation, which explicitly describes the 2005 paper as work by “Deisseroth, Nagel and collaborators” — the committee treats Deisseroth as the driving scientific force behind the neural-control half of the discovery.

Second, why first authorship doesn’t settle it. In the 2005 paper (Boyden, Zhang, Bamberg, Nagel, Deisseroth), Boyden was the first author, but Deisseroth was the senior/last author — meaning it was his lab, his conception of the project, and his scientific program. Nobel committees don’t reward authorship order; they try to identify who originated the decisive insight. Boyden was a graduate student at the time, doing the experiments within Deisseroth’s research program (Boyden himself has described working first in Richard Tsien’s lab, then moving into Deisseroth’s new Stanford lab in spring 2005).

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FieldAI Robot Brain Hits A $10 Billion Valuation

FieldAI has raised $700 million at a $10 billion valuation — more than quadrupling its worth in just over a year.

The company builds no robots. It sells a “universal general-purpose brain” designed to run humanoids, drones, robot dogs and industrial rovers across different hardware platforms.

The thesis is clear: robot hardware will keep commoditizing. The durable value sits in the intelligence layer that can control many bodies.

FieldAI now has more than $135 million in revenue and customer contracts, with $35 million added since June. Backers include Nvidia, Intel, and Hyundai Motor Group.

It sits in a three-way race with Physical Intelligence (~$11B) and Skild AI (~$14B) to own that layer.

For buyers the question is shifting: do you buy a robot whose intelligence is locked to one manufacturer, or one running a third-party brain that can move across platforms later? The second option buys flexibility — and adds a new vendor dependency.

Full analysis:

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AI Generated Youth Drugs Exist Now

The biggest thing in this is Sinclair mentioning A.I. turned 160 years worth of drug cocktail discovery into 2 months.

An AI designed a drug for a deadly lung disease, and six different aging clocks say it made people biologically younger. Rentosertib, from Insilico Medicine, was built to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. But when researchers ran patients’ blood through six proteomic aging clocks from six separate labs, all six read the treated patients as younger, by roughly 3 to 4 years at the peak.

We break down how AI found both the target and the molecule, what the new Nature Biotechnology paper actually shows (and what the hype got wrong), and why Insilico’s \.

Tail-Likelihood Reinforcement Learning: Teaching AI to Keep Its Best Possibilities Alive

Most reinforcement learning methods train an AI to maximize its average reward. That sounds sensible—but averages can hide something important. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.

Think of two AI systems that both score an average of 70. One almost always produces results around 70. The other usually scores 60, but occasionally discovers an exceptional solution scoring 100. If we are allowed to sample the AI many times and choose the best result, the second system could be far more valuable.

This is the problem addressed by Tail-Likelihood Reinforcement Learning (TailRL).

Instead of asking only, “What reward does the AI achieve on average?”, TailRL asks a different question across the entire range of outcomes:

“How likely is the AI to produce something better than a particular reward threshold?”

The method effectively turns continuous rewards into a collection of success-or-failure questions. Importantly, it gives greater learning weight to rare, high-reward outcomes rather than allowing them to disappear into the average.

There is an interesting connection to Best-of-k sampling: when we generate multiple attempts and keep the best one, performance depends on whether the model has retained enough probability mass around those unusually good solutions. TailRL explicitly trains the model to preserve that potential.

The practical advantage is significant. The researchers report that TailRL helps models avoid getting trapped in mediocre solutions across tasks including object localization, maze navigation, GUI grounding, and code optimization. More importantly, the resulting models become better at exploiting additional sampling at inference time—the more attempts you give them, the more useful those attempts become.

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Coolest lava world yet with signs of an atmosphere offers clues to early Earth

In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can’t have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged thus far, the vast majority are not rocky, and only a handful of the rocky worlds appear to have an atmosphere.

In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a group led by University of Chicago scientist Brandon Park Coy reports another: a rocky super-Earth 154 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. Named HD 3,167 b, this very hot “lava world” zips around its host star in just one Earth day.

“What’s so surprising is that the closer a rocky planet orbits its star, the harder it should be to have an atmosphere, because it’s bombarded by stellar wind and gets more high-energy photons from the star. But it seems that many of these lava worlds do,” explained Edwin Kite, UChicago associate professor of geophysical sciences and co-author of the study. “These planets are too hot for life, but by studying them, we can say something about the processes that matter for other rocky worlds.”

10XMe · AI that actually works for you

Ever wondered what actually makes an AI “agent” different from a basic chatbot? 🤖💡

While standard chatbots just generate text, a true AI Agent can think, plan, use tools, and execute complex workflows autonomously (or alongside humans).

Here is a simple breakdown of how an AI Agent works under the hood:

🧠 The Brain (Reasoning & Memory): It uses LLMs to process information, leveraging short-term context and long-term vector memory to recall instructions and past interactions.

🎯 Planning & Decisions: Before acting, it breaks big goals down into smaller, actionable steps. If it can answer directly, it does; if not, it triggers the action layer!

🛠️ Tools & Execution: It interacts with real-world applications—running code, querying databases, triggering API calls, and reading files to get actual work done.

🛡️️ Safety & Monitoring: Surrounding the whole process are strict guardrails (human-in-the-loop checkpoints, rate limits, content filtering) and observability tools to track accuracy, costs, and performance.

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A Case of Coffee Enema Induced Rectal Burn, Proctocolitis, Sub-Acute Intestinal Obstruction, and Electrolyte Imbalance A Case Report

Abstract

Coffee enemas are a form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) promoted by some practitioners and celebrities without credible scientific evidence. Their use is associated with several adverse effects, some of which can be life-threatening, including rectal burns, proctocolitis, intestinal obstruction, and electrolyte imbalances, which are well-documented but under reported. Only a handful of comparable cases exist in the literature, highlighting the need for greater clinician awareness and patient education. We present the case of a 30-year-old obese male with a recent diagnosis of T2 diabetes mellitus who developed severe proctocolitis, a fibrotic stricture leading to subacute intestinal obstruction, and a significant electrolyte imbalance following a self-administered hot coffee enema. The patient required intensive care management and partial colectomy was planned. This case report shows that coffee enema sometimes can cause serious complications. Healthcare providers and patients should be aware of the risk and should use coffee enema with caution.

Coffee Enema, Rectal Burn, Proctocolitis, Fibrotic Stricture, Subacute Intestinal Obstruction, Electrolyte Imbalance, Diabetes Mellitus, Alternative Medicine, Clinician Awareness, Patient Education

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