Radically different
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 08 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02318-9
Driessen et al. show that core benefits of sleep—reduced local sleep pressure, renormalized synaptic strength and memory consolidation—can be reproduced in awake, behaving mice by inducing sleep-like on/off activity patterns in cortex.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Much is new about this month’s FIFA World Cup tournament. It hosts more teams than ever before. It’s the first to occur in three different host countries.
And, like every World Cup for over half a century, it will employ a football with a brand-new design.
Through wind-tunnel experiments, researchers found that long-distance kicks with Adidas’s new Trionda ball might not travel as far as they did in the past. The payoff is a more predictable flight path, something players have not always enjoyed from World Cup balls.
Find out how a few grooves and seams can change the way the game is played.
—Jenna Ahart
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into a ‘super app’ before its IPO
The revamp would combine coding tools and AI agents. (Financial Times $)
+ The super app ambitions first emerged last year. (Fast Company)
+ OpenAI is also building a fully automated researcher. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Trump wants the US government to take a stake in AI companies
He will meet AI leaders to discuss the plan. (BBC)
+ Which would create “a partnership with the American public.” (Reuters $)
+ He wants a slice of the AI boom. (Axios)
3 Google has agreed to pay SpaceX $30 billion for AI computing power
The $920 million-a-month contract runs through June 2029. (NYT $)
+ Google will use about 110,000 Nvidia GPUs owned by SpaceX. (CNBC)
+ It comes days after Anthropic struck a SpaceX data center deal. (WSJ $)
4 AI is set to make everyday life more expensive
Its insatiable thirst for resources is likely to push up inflation. (WP $)
+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Europe is accelerating its withdrawal from US Big Tech
New analysis reveals dozens of moves to alternative providers. (Wired $) + Last week, the EU launched a “made in Europe” drive. (Reuters $)
6 ICE plans to give local police a new facial recognition app
It would allow them to verify a person’s immigration status. (404 Media)
+ Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI? (MIT Technology Review)
7 Silicon Valley’s lure is fading for India’s tech talent
Due to Trump’s immigration policies and AI-driven layoffs. (Rest of World)
8 ‘Recursive self-improvement’ has sparked fears of AI escaping control
Nobody is sure about the consequences of RSI. (The Economist $)
+ Here are five ways that AI is learning to improve itself. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Gene-edited embryos are getting closer, but a key safety gap remains
Current techniques still fail to edit every cell. (New Scientist $)
+ “Base-edited baby” is one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2026. (MIT Technology Review)
10 NASA astronauts will wear high-tech Prada underwear on their moon trips
Ventilation tubes are knitted into the garments. (The Verge)
Quote of the day
—A senior OpenAI employee tells the Financial Times why the company is shifting focus from chatbots to AI agents.
One More Thing
The digitization of historical records is making it possible to study the past in new ways. Historians are now using machine learning—particularly deep neural networks—to analyze everything from centuries-old astronomy textbooks to ancient Greek inscriptions.
The technology is helping researchers uncover new patterns in the historical record. But it also introduces risks, including the possibility that machine learning will slip bias or outright falsifications into our understanding of the past.
Read the full story on how AI is transforming the study of history.
—Moira Donovan
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Take a tour of extinct everyday objects to travel back to pre-smartphone life.
+ This a cappella cover of “I Want To Know What Love Is” nails the power-ballad drama.
+ Korea’s ingenious “one-a-day” banana packs are designed so each one ripens sequentially.
+ Casino dialogue has been synced over Looney Tunes footage in this unexpectedly perfect mashup.
Revolution Medicines’ experimental pancreatic cancer drug has been the star of the oncology field in recent weeks, with new data showing the medicine produced unprecedented outcomes for patients.
Its next act — this time as a co-lead — was revealed Monday.
Tango Therapeutics said that in an early-stage clinical trial, a combination of its drug vopimetostat along with Revolution’s daraxonrasib led to a durable responses in the large majority of pancreatic cancer patients who received both medicines.
Much is new about this month’s upcoming FIFA World Cup tournament, which will be held in the US, Canada, and Mexico. It hosts more teams than ever before. It’s the first to occur in three different host countries. And, like predecessor cups for over half a century, it will employ a soccer ball with a brand-new design.
One group of researchers that has been testing the physics of World Cup balls for the past 20 years recently studied this new entry, called the Trionda. Made by Adidas, the Trionda features four red, green, and blue panels textured with deep grooves and maple leaf, green eagle, and star emblems to represent the three host countries. Through wind-tunnel experiments, the research team found that this ball improves over previous versions in some ways, but long-distance kicks might not go as far as they did in the past.
“The simple picture is that Trionda may very slightly punish extreme distance, but it should reward clean technique and predictable flight,” says team member John Eric Goff, who researches sports physics and is an incoming professor of engineering practice at Purdue University. “Goalkeepers, defenders hitting long passes, and long-range shooters are where I would look first for visible differences.”
Adidas has been designing new balls for each World Cup since the 1970s. Some of the design changes in the first few decades were aesthetic: The 1986 ball featured graphics inspired by Aztec temples for the Mexico tournament, and 1994’s had space graphics in honor of the moon landing’s 25th anniversary. There were some structural differences too, such as upgraded foam cores and improved water resistance. But by and large, the balls used the same design of 32 pentagonal panels stitched together.
That changed in the 2006 World Cup in Germany, when Adidas introduced the +Teamgeist ball. It featured just 14 curved panels, which were thermally bonded together rather than stitched. The design helped keep moisture out so the ball wouldn’t grow heavier throughout the game, Goff says. It was around this time that he started studying soccer balls. In the years since then, he and his colleagues have followed the transformations as Adidas has released balls with different surface textures and even fewer panels—design changes significant enough to affect game play.
Goff discovered early on that by analyzing a ball’s trajectory data, he could derive its drag coefficient—a number that determines the air resistance it experiences midflight at a given speed. Shortly after, he began working with a team in Japan to analyze how the World Cup ball’s in-flight behavior changes with each new design.
The experiments, carried out at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, have been purposely consistent over the years because “maintaining continuity is important for comparing new data with historical data sets,” says Takeshi Asai, a professor there who works on the experiments. They entail attaching the ball to a metal rod connected to an instrument called a force balance, which measures aerodynamic forces such as drag and lift as the ball is exposed to the same wind speeds it would experience in a real soccer game—seven to 35 meters per second.
The team tests the ball in different orientations, “but you can only do a few because the Trionda ball is $170,” Goff says, and each new test effectively destroys it. The experiments show the team how the drag coefficient changes with speed, and Goff then writes code to simulate the ball’s overall trajectory as it flies through the air.
The team’s analysis has shown how recent World Cup balls evolved since the eight-panel Jabulani ball for the 2010 event. The Jabulani faced much criticism from players—particularly goalkeepers, who said it had a deceptive trajectory that “dipped wickedly,” as one player told the Guardian.
The 2010 Jabulani ball (left) had eight panels and a smooth texture that translated into unpredictable performance. Later balls, like the 2014 Brazuca (center) and this year’s Trionda (right) have fewer panels but more roughness.
The ball had one key flaw: It was too smooth. Even though its drag coefficient was relatively low at high speeds, once the ball slowed to a certain point the coefficient would ratchet up, causing it to lose speed quite fast and behave as the 2010 players complained. This sudden transition—called the drag crisis—occurs at higher speeds for smoother balls, but with added texture like seams and grooves, the transition can be avoided until a ball reaches lower speeds. This allows the ball to travel farther and generally behave in a more predictable way during typical play.
“It’s the same reason why golf balls have dimples and baseballs have those nice 108 double stitches. If those rough features of those balls were not there, you would not get anywhere near the kind of distance when those balls are thrown or hit that you see now,” Goff says. “There has to be some kind of a roughness on the ball to move this transition to a smaller speed.”
Subsequent designs have been able to push the drag crisis to lower speeds, according to the analysis by Goff and his colleagues. The Brazuca ball used in 2014, for instance, has only six panels, but their total seam length is much longer, adding to the surface’s roughness. And this year’s Trionda ball contains just four panels, but each panel also has three deep grooves for more texture.
There’s a trade-off to this roughness, though. While Goff and his colleagues found that the Trionda ball experiences the drag crisis at the slowest speed since 2010, its drag coefficient is also higher than that of the other balls at high speeds. That means that even though the most dramatic change doesn’t happen until the ball is moving quite slowly, the ball will still slow down faster than its recent predecessors during the faster portion of its flight. So the trajectories of long kicks may be a few meters shorter, Goff says. Adidas did not respond to a request for comment.
Fortunately, players in the upcoming World Cup should already be familiar with these added nuances, as they’ve had access to the new ball for at least a few months. The ball, Goff notes, is quite similar to Nike’s Flight ball in design, so players who’ve spent more time with that ball may have an added advantage.
Meanwhile, Goff continues sending the group’s papers to his colleagues FIFA and Adidas in hope of providing some new insights, and he’s been sent balls by Adidas in the past. Adidas does perform its own unpublished tests of each new ball. The New York Times reported last year that the Trionda’s 3.5-year testing process included robotics designed to kick the ball at specific speeds as well as testing in seven of the 16 host locations.
But as Goff sees it, soccer is “the world’s most popular sport, [this is] its most important tournament, and the most important piece of equipment in that tournament is this ball right here,” indicating the the Trionda ball that he had on camera with him during our Zoom call. “I think they’re interested in what some external testing looks like.”
BOSTON — Carlton Haynes hugged his left knee, pulling it toward his shoulder as hard as he could. He was desperate to blunt the pain shooting from an open, oozing wound on his right shin. Anahita Dua, a vascular surgeon leading an unusual clinic created by Massachusetts General Hospital that Saturday, told him he was going to the ER and then the OR, where she would remove damaged skin and treat the wound.
Without this stopgap measure, she warned him, he’d almost certainly need amputation. OK, he said, but first he wanted a smoke.
The horses in America are getting fat. They are trying to tell us something.
Fifty-one percent of mature light-breed horses in the United States are obese — a rate that ranks among the world’s highest, slightly above Britain and nearly twice that of Australia or Denmark. That figure comes from a peer-reviewed prevalence study, and it sits alongside a number that should give any clinician pause: The U.S. also leads the G7 in human obesity. The same country. The same epidemic. A completely different species.
A new class of medicines is transforming health care. Gene therapies can now cure diseases like sickle cell with a single treatment, but they come with a price tag that would have been unthinkable a decade ago — often $2 million or more per patient.
In a way, this cost makes sense: These are potential cures that can avoid years of hospitalizations, complications, and lost productivity. In many cases, they concentrate decades of value into a single intervention.
Nature Medicine, Published online: 07 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04479-3
As presented at the American Diabetes Association Meeting, in this phase 3 trial, weekly subcutaneous injections of survodutide, a glucagon receptor/GLP-1R dual agonist, lowered liver fat content and body weight compared to placebo in adults with obesity and at-risk metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).
More acutely than most companies, Abivax (Euronext Paris and Nasdaq: ABVX) felt firsthand the ups and downs of the proverbial stock market roller coaster this past week as investor fears over safety signals associated with the French biotech’s late-stage ulcerative colitis (UC) drug candidate briefly overshadowed its positive Phase III clinical results.
Shares of Abivax skidded on June 2, the first trading day after the company announced positive topline results from the Phase III ABTECT maintenance trial (NCT05535946), which is assessing obefazimod in adults with moderately to severely active UC.
Abivax’s stock plummeted after analysts from Jefferies, Morgan Stanley, Truist Securities, and Wedbush Securities raised as a safety concern a portion of data showing malignancies in nine patients among the 580 enrolled in the study. Jefferies reacted the strongest among the firms, downgrading Abivax’s stock rating from “Buy” to “Hold” and lowering its 12-month price target on the company’s shares 44%, from $160 to $90.
“Cancer signal complicates matters,” Faisal Khurshid, a managing director and equity research analyst with Jefferies, wrote in a research note. “Promise of the drug is to deliver strong efficacy w/ oral convenience and w/out JAK safety baggage. However, cancer cases seen in maintenance break our thesis. Even if proven to be not drug-related or v[ery] low incidence, we expect an overhang to investor interest, strategic optionality, and commercial uptake.”
Wedbush analyst David Nierengarten upgraded Abivax on the overall ABTECT data, from “Underperform” to “Neutral,” though he lowered the firm’s target price 18%, from $110 to $90. But he also cautioned, according to published reports, that the data increase the risk of obefazimod being approved with a black box warning on its label.
The other two firms lowered their price targets as well:
Of the nine patients diagnosed with malignancies, seven received the higher 50 mg dosage of obefazimod, one the lower 25 mg dose, and one placebo. Squamous cell carcinoma cases were seen in three of the patients—one dosed at 25 mg, the others 50 mg. Basal cell carcinoma cases emerged in two 50 mg patients and one placebo patient, while cases of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and colonic dysplasia were seen in one patient each, all dosed at 50 mg.
In its announcement of the ABTECT data, Abivax stated that the prostate, breast, and colon cancer cases “were considered unrelated to treatment by investigators.” Among the squamous cell and basal cell cases, two of the four 50 mg patients were deemed “not/unlikely related to drug,” while of the remaining two cases, one had a medical history of skin cancer, the company added.
Yet the cancer and pre-cancerous cell cases nevertheless led investors to sell off their Abivax shares on June 2. Abivax’s ordinary shares traded on Euronext Paris plummeted 44% from €111.80 ($128.81) to €63.10 ($72.70), while the company’s American depositary shares (ADSs) traded on the Nasdaq Global Market also plunged 44% from $129.69 to $72.50.
No sooner did Abivax shares start to free-fall, however, than a more positive narrative emerged among another set of analysts. They cited the ABTECT maintenance study’s overall positive findings, which showed that both doses of the first-in-class miR-124 enhancer met the study’s primary endpoint by showing positive absolute clinical remission rates of 50.8% for the 25 mg dose and 51.3% for the 50 mg dose. Both results blew away the 10.4% absolute clinical remission rate of placebo.
When adjusted for placebo, obefazimod showed placebo-adjusted clinical remission rates of ∆39.3% for the 25 mg dose and ∆40.3% for the 50 mg (both p<0.0001).
Obefazimod also met all of ABTECT’s key secondary endpoints, including endoscopic improvement, endoscopic remission, histologic-endoscopic mucosal improvement (HEMI), corticosteroid free clinical remission, and sustained clinical remission.
In endoscopic remission, Abivax showed in an investor presentation, obefazimod showed placebo-adjusted endoscopic remission rates of 38% (50 mg) and 31% (25 mg), outperforming nine marketed drugs that carry indications in UC—which ranged from 8% by both Omvoh® (mirikizumab-mrkz) marketed by Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) and Skyrizi® (risankizumab-rzaa) marketed by AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV), to 20% shown by AbbVie’s Rinvoq® (upadacitinib), Tremfya® (guselkumab) marketed by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), and Velsipity® (etrasimod) marketed by Pfizer (NYSE: PFE).
“While most therapies cluster in the 8% to 20% range, obefazimod stands alone at 31% and 38%, demonstrating a level of efficacy that is well beyond the range achieved by other treatment classes. This finding is particularly important because achieving endoscopic remission has been consistently associated with lower relapse rates and better long-term patient outcomes,” Abivax CEO Marc de Garidel said June 1, addressing analysts during a conference call held to discuss the ABTECT study results.
He also cited Abivax’s Phase IIa/IIb open-label extension study (NCT05177835), designed to assess the long-term safety and the efficacy profile of 25 mg obefazimod given once daily in subjects previously enrolled in two earlier Phase II trials, ABX464-102 (NCT03368118) or ABX464-104 (NCT04023396). Data from the extension study announced in May showed that patients receiving 50 mg of obefazimod for two to four years and then transitioned to 25 mg for up to an additional three years maintained durable clinical remission and a favorable safety profile for up to seven years of treatment exposure.
Abivax said it plans to submit a New Drug Application (NDA) submission to the FDA for obefazimod late in the fourth quarter.
“Taken together, we believe these results validate the transformational potential of obefazimod and position us well as we advance toward our planned NDA submission in late 2026,” de Garidel said, declaring: “Today’s results firmly establish obefazimod as a potential new standard of care for the treatment of ulcerative colitis.”
Thomas J. Smith, senior managing director, immunology and metabolism, and a senior research analyst with Leerink Partners, appeared to agree with de Garidel in a research note.
“We believe obe[fazimod]’s results suggest a best-in-disease maintenance profile, especially among oral therapeutics in UC,” Smith wrote in his initial research note on Abivax’s ABTECT data. “We continue to believe that obe features the most compelling late-stage clinical profile for a novel oral agent in IBD [inflammatory bowel disease] amid heightened M&A/BD [business development] activity that underscores large pharma’s interest in the space.”
Several big-money merger-and-acquisition (M&A) deals in recent years have centered around pharma giants buying developers of drugs for UC, Crohn’s disease, and other forms of IBD. The biggest of these was Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK) acquiring Prometheus Biosciences for $10.8 billion in 2023, while Lilly bought out Morphic Therapeutic for about $3.2 billion in 2024; Roche Holding (SIX Swiss Exchange: ROP and RO; OTCQX: RHHBY) snapped up Telavant Holdings for up-to-$7.25 billion in 2023; and Pfizer acquired Arena Pharmaceuticals for $6.7 billion in a deal completed in 2022.
Abivax itself has found itself rumored as a potential candidate for being acquired—it made GEN’s A-List of Top 10 Takeover Targets of 2026—since last summer, when the company reported dazzling data from two Phase III trials, ABTECT-1 (ABX464-105; NCT05507203) and ABTECT-2 (ABX464-106; NCT05507216).
As for the reported malignancies, Smith commented in a follow-up research note: “We do not view the reported malignancies as an outsized or approvability-limiting safety risk, particularly given the absolute low event counts, investigator assessment that the non-NMSC malignancies were unrelated to treatment, IDMC [independent data monitoring commission] adjudication supporting the safety profile, lack of organ-specific clustering, and mitigating circumstances noted across each case.”
Obefazimod is a small molecule upregulator of miR-124, an anti-inflammatory microRNA. It enhances the selective splicing of a single long noncoding RNA to generate miR-124, which downregulates cytokines and chemokines shown to promote inflammation, including tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha, IL-6, monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), and IL-17, as well as Th17+ cells.
Under its former name ABX464, obefazimod was initially developed against HIV but was repurposed to fight inflammatory conditions based on its anti-inflammatory effect.
Also bullish on Abivax is Citizens JMP Securities, where Jason Butler, managing director, biotechnology equity research, raised his firm’s price target 43%, from $131 to $187, based on ABTECT’s positive data exceeding expectations. Butler maintained Citizens JMP’s “Market Outperform” rating on Abivax shares.
“We view efficacy (~40% placebo-adjusted clinical remission rate) as best in indication, easily surpassing drugs across all approved classes of UC therapies,” Butler wrote. “We believe the Phase [III] efficacy and safety results, together with its oral once-daily profile, support that obefazimod can be transformational to the UC treatment landscape, benefiting both earlier-stage and more severe/refractory patients.”
“Importantly, we also view the safety profile as compelling and are comfortable that the drug is not associated with a clear malignancy risk (which is the primary debate driving stock volatility post-market),” Butler added.
The more positive feedback from analysts apparently swayed investors, as Abivax’s stock price rebounded roughly 40% on both exchanges since the initial nosedive. The Nasdaq shares vaulted 24% to $90.15 on Wednesday, then rose another 16% to $104.93 Thursday before dipping 3% Friday, finishing the week at $101.53 and with a 23.5% five-day decline.
On Euronext Paris, Abivax shares bounced back 13% to €71.25 ($82.09) on Wednesday, jumped another 18% Thursday to €83.95 ($96.72), then finished Friday up 5% to €87.85 ($101.21) and a 22.5% five-day decline.
Butler said the maintenance study’s data suggested that Abivax could potentially generate more positive clinical results for obefazimod in its ongoing Phase IIb ENHANCE-CD induction trial in Crohn’s disease (NCT06456593), which is expected to read out in mid-2027. He added that ABTECT’s results were strong enough to support approval of both the 25 mg and 50 mg doses: “While we anticipate malignancies to be included in the label, we continue to believe in the differentiated profile of obefazimod.”
Speaking with analysts, de Garidel agreed with pursuing approvals for obefazimod at both 25 mg and 50 mg: “Our thinking is that both doses will be very helpful for patients, and we plan to file at year-end with those two doses for maintenance.”
The post StockWatch: Abivax Survives a Roller Coaster Week appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.