Radically different
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 30 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02263-7
The authors identify glucose-derived conversion of citrate to acetyl-CoA upstream of histone acetylation as modulating the regional dynamics of oligodendrocyte progenitors, with extranuclear acetyl-CoA from other sources being used for myelination.
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 30 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02258-4
High-density single-neuron recordings in patients with epilepsy revealed interictal discharges are generated by structured laminar circuits. These circuits overlapped with cognitive circuits and could predict discharges up to 1 s in advance.
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.
In the past, getting to the North Pole involved a treacherous trip through ice many meters thick. But last year, a research vessel encountered open water and thin ice, which created an easy passage. It provided a reminder of how quickly the Arctic is changing.
Now scientists are digging deep below the seabed to find out if the Arctic Ocean was ever ice-free—and what that could mean for the future of Earth’s northernmost waters. Here’s what they hope to discover.
—Tim Kalvelage
This story is from the latest issue of our print magazine, which is all about nature. Check out the full issue here, and subscribe to get the next one when it lands.
I was recently invited to join an app that would pay me to film myself doing tasks like putting food in a bowl and microwaving it. Another site asked if I’d like to remotely control a robotic arm to help improve its dexterity. What on earth is happening?
These examples are just part of a growing push by robotics companies to collect data on our movements for training humanoids. As the race for real-world data heats up, our everyday movements are being turned into training data. Read the full story.
—James O’Donnell
Humanoid data is one of our 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, a new look at the big ideas, trends, and technologies really worth your attention in the buzzy world of AI.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have all set AI spending records
Collectively, they’re up 71% on the same quarter last year. (NYT $)
+ Microsoft, Google and Amazon reported big payoffs from the splurge. (FT $)
+ But Meta’s shares slid after its plans spooked investors. (BBC)
+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review)
2 The White House opposes Anthropic’s plan to expand Mythos access
It’s concerned about the model’s cyber risks. (Bloomberg $)
+ And worried that the government will lose compute access. (WSJ $)
+ Anthropic is seeking funding at a valuation over $900 billion. (Bloomberg $)
3 Elon Musk has claimed OpenAI’s leaders “looted the nonprofit”
During testimony, Musk said he “was a fool” for trusting them. (Gizmodo)
+ But he had raised his own concerns about OpenAI’s non-profit status. (The Verge)
+ The case could reshape the AI landscape. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Autonomous vehicles may be worsening
According to emergency first-responders, glitches are increasing. (Wired)
5 OpenAI has abandoned much of its Stargate plan
It will no longer develop its own data centers. (FT $)
+ The project’s compute requirements have been questioned. (MIT Technology Review)
6 A convicted Harvard scientist is rebuilding a brain-computer lab in China
He had previously been named the world’s top chemist. (Reuters $)
+ But was then convicted for lying about payments from China. (NYT $)
7 Families have sued OpenAI over a mass shooter’s use of ChatGPT
They say OpenAI provided a dangerously defective version of the chatbot. (NPR)
8 Apple is reportedly close to giving up on the Vision Pro
After the latest model flopped. (MacRumors)
9 Senators are interrogating US AI firms on safeguards against China
Over fears of IP theft. (Axios)
10 Friendly AI chatbots are more likely to be inaccurate
A new study found kinder answers contained more mistakes. (BBC)
Quote of the day
—OpenAI instructs Codex to avoid critter talk in a system prompt for the coding agent, Ars Technica reports.
One More Thing
When engineers began designing an ultra-efficient home in the 1970s, they realized the trick wasn’t generating energy in a greener way, but using less of it. They needed to make a better thermos, not a cheaper coffee maker.
That idea helped inspire today’s passive-house standard: airtight buildings that can cut energy use by up to 90% through better windows, insulation, and ventilation.
Although they’re often considered a cold-climate approach, passive houses actually have universal benefits. Find out what makes them so efficient.
—Patrick Sisson
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.)
+ Finally, someone built a gaming PC inside a microwave that runs DOOM.
+ Experience the rhythm of the city through this rapid-fire collage of urban photography.
+ Get a dose of pure cuteness as these tiny snow leopard cubs leave their den for the first time.
+ If you’re staring at a random assortment of groceries, SuperCook will find a recipe based on what’s already in your pantry.
Officials at Ecolab Life Sciences report that the company is expanding its bioprocessing business with the launch of a new bioprocessing applications lab (BPAL) in Dongtan, Korea. They say the goal is to provide biopharmaceutical manufacturers across Asia with better local access to downstream process development support.
The site is Ecolab’s first bioprocessing facility in Asia and joins an established applications network in the U.S. and U.K.
BPAL Korea supports process development from early-stage resin screening through studies designed to replicate commercial manufacturing conditions, according to Jenny Tan, vice president and general manager, Ecolab Life Sciences APAC and India. On-site scientists work alongside customers across Asia to help optimize chromatography steps, improve yield and productivity, and accelerate regulatory pathways, with the aim of reducing the need to ship resins and reference materials overseas for development work, she continues.
Asia has become one of the world’s most active biopharmaceutical manufacturing regions, with Korea, China, Japan, India, and Singapore all home to growing pipelines in biosimilars and monoclonal antibody processes that scalable downstream purification. With local technical support now in place, manufacturers across the region can shorten development cycles and maintain consistency with global operations while working to tight regulatory and cost targets, continues Tan.
“Biopharmaceutical manufacturers across Asia are under increasing pressure to scale with speed while meeting demanding regulatory and performance expectations,” she explains. “BPAL Korea strengthens our ability to work side by side with customers, bringing local expertise together with Ecolab’s global, integrated bioprocessing network.”
By combining local scientific support with Ecolab’s innovative Purolite
resin portfolio, Ecolab’s new BPAL was created to help enable manufacturers to address process challenges earlier, reduce development risk, and advance programs with greater confidence as they prepare for scaleup, says Tan.
The post Bioprocessing Applications Laboratory Opened in Korea by Ecolab Life Sciences appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
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This is the online version of Adam’s Biotech Scorecard, a subscriber-only newsletter. STAT+ subscribers can sign up here to get it delivered to their inbox.
I’m suffering from spring allergies + a nasty head cold this week. Not fun.
The runup to next month’s annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology has started, and a good bit of the Wall Street chatter and speculation is centered on the Akeso-Summit Therapeutics drug ivonescimab.
Body mass index has its limitations, but for now it’s the metric medicine often defaults to when predicting weight-related health problems. A new tool promises to better define who’s at risk for obesity complications, based on measures that include BMI but also family history, diet, current illness, and socioeconomic factors culled from medical records.
One aim of the research is to better understand who’s a candidate for an obesity drug, often prescribed based on BMI alone or BMI in combination with another disease. Over time, GLP-1 medications, whose initial target was type 2 diabetes, have revealed their power to ease cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver disease, sleep apnea, and osteoarthritis, in addition to promoting significant weight loss. But discerning who’s the best fit for the costly, lifelong treatment has been uncertain.
“We really wanted to have an integrated model that enables us to look at not one, but 18 different obesity-relevant complications,” Claudia Langenberg, co-author of a study about the new model published Thursday in Nature Medicine, said in a media briefing Tuesday. She is director and professor of medicine and population health at Precision Healthcare University Research Institute of Queen Mary University of London.
The likelihood of snagging National Institutes of Health grants has plunged to historic lows, forcing frustrated academic researchers to resort to a variety of tactics to try to obtain funding and, in some cases, keep their jobs, according to a nationwide STAT survey and follow-up interviews with respondents.
NIH data show that securing research awards has become more competitive under the second Trump administration than ever before, and more unpredictable. Just 13% of applications were funded in the past fiscal year, and even top-rated proposals aren’t a sure thing.
Our former colleagues in Congress recently heard from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the first time in more than half a year.
Several congressional committees held hearings with Kennedy as they examined the Trump administration’s budget priorities. It was a key opportunity for lawmakers to build on the administration’s significant health policy achievements — and for the most part, they seized it. While Democrats were predictably critical of the secretary’s every move, Republicans wisely pushed back on the administration’s proposal to reduce funding for the National Institutes of Health. And with good reason. Sustained NIH funding underpins the research and development pipeline that makes vaccines possible at a time when voter polling shows Americans want leaders that support vaccine access.
Degeneration of retinal ganglion cells can cause irreversible vision loss. Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) could, in theory, be used to replace lost ganglion cells. However, past attempts at injection of these cells have failed because the cells are not able to reach the retina.
Now, researchers have successfully demonstrated that disrupting an eye structure long suspected of blocking the growth and survival of transplanted nerve cells—the internal limiting basement membrane (ILM)—may help restore vision in people with optic nerve damage.
The work suggests that altering or removing the thin layer of tissue, which separates the light-sensing retinal tissue at the back of the eye from the gel-like vitreous fluid that fills the eye, was needed for the survival and migration of donor human PSC-derived retinal ganglion cells into the retina of mice, rats, and nonhuman primates. This technique could help transplanted retinal ganglion cells survive and grow in people with blinding optic nerve damage.
This work is published in Science Translational Medicine in the paper, “The internal limiting basement membrane inhibits functional engraftment of transplanted human retinal ganglion cells in vivo.”
Damage, or optic neuropathy, occurs when retinal ganglion cells die of disease, inflammation, or injury and stop carrying electrical signals to the brain. Common causes of damage include glaucoma, optic nerve inflammation (optic neuritis), and ischemic optic neuropathy (sudden loss of blood flow to the optic nerve).
Healthy, functional human retinal ganglion cells can be grown in a lab, but most die when transplanted, said Thomas Vincent Johnson III, MD, PhD, a professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. “Even when the retinal ganglion cells survive, they remain on the retina’s surface and do not migrate into the tissue or form the connections with other nerve cells necessary to detect light,” he noted.
Researchers have speculated that the internal limiting membrane, present in many vertebrates, including humans, may be causing transplant failures.
Starting with immunosuppressed rodents, the researchers injected lab-grown human retinal ganglion cells (hRGCs) into the vitreous humors of mice with an inborn gene mutation that caused an incomplete, patchy internal limiting membrane to form. They then injected the human retinal ganglion cells into a second group of mice treated with an enzyme solution known to partially digest the membrane without damaging the eye. Lastly, they injected a third, control group of mice treated with an inactive sterile solution. After two weeks, the team observed transplantation survival in 95% of eyes (45/50) with the inborn structural defect, 80% of enzymatically disrupted eyes (32/40), and 75% of control group eyes (12/16).
The researchers then traced where the surviving human retinal ganglion cells settled and grew in the mice, noting that a much greater percentage reached the retinal ganglion cell layer in mice born with a patchy internal limiting membrane and in those treated with the enzyme.
Capturing 3D images of the migrated cells, the researchers say they observed that 2% (plus or minus 0.6%) and 7.1% (plus or minus 1.6%) surviving cells in enzyme-treated and mutant eyes, respectively, matured to form dendrites. In contrast, migration and maturation only occurred in 0.01% plus or minus 0.01% of surviving control human retinal ganglion cells.
Conducting similar experiments in larger eyes and donated eye tissue replicated the group’s findings, establishing evidence that the inner limiting membrane is indeed a structural obstacle to neuron replacement, the researchers noted. They also established a surgical procedure for retinal ganglion cell transplantation that could be used in clinical trials, thus advancing potential methods for restoring vision in humans with optic neuropathy.
While the study’s results are promising, Johnson cautions that further work is still needed before their experimental findings can be applied to people. “We know our methods are effective, but we don’t know if completely removing the internal limiting membrane helps or harms the retinal ganglion cells in the long run,” he said. “It will likely take several years before our findings could become available as an experimental therapy, but the methods we developed will guide the field moving forward.”
The post Restoring Vision with Stem Cell–Derived Retinal Cells by Overcoming ILM Barrier appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.