A recent study by Epp et al. uses advanced, quantitative functional MRI measures to demonstrate that the ‘canonical’ interpretation of blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) — that increases and decreases in brain activation are accompanied by corresponding changes in blood flow and oxygen metabolism — does not strictly hold across the human brain. Although the authors provided a balanced interpretation, this has been viewed by others as undermining fMRI. We discuss whether the findings bring into question the validity of fMRI-based measures of brain function.
The authors reveal entorhinal cortex dopaminergic and behavioral dysfunction in Alzheimer’s model mice, suggesting the possibility that entorhinal dopamine loss may contribute to aspects of Alzheimer’s disease.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s acting attorney general on Thursday signed an order reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug, a major policy shift long sought by advocates who said cannabis should never have been treated like heroin by the federal government.
The order signed by Todd Blanche does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law. But it does change the way it’s regulated, shifting licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I — reserved for drugs without medical use and with high potential for abuse — to the less strictly regulated Schedule III. It also gives licensed medical marijuana operators a major tax break and eases some barriers to researching cannabis.
Rise and shine, everyone, another busy day is on the way. Already, the Pharmalot campus has been bustling as the official mascots have been busy chasing assorted creatures in search of their breakfast. As for us, yes, we are firing up the trusty kettle once again and brewing another cuppa stimulation. Our choice today is Earl Gray. Now, though, the time has come to get still busier. On that note, here are some tidbits. Have a lovely day and do keep in touch. …
As links between pharmaceutical companies and telehealth providers grow, health policy experts and legislators are raising concerns over the large fees that telehealth companies can receive from drugmakers each year, STAT explains. Critics have questioned whether those partnerships break federal laws prohibiting financial kickbacks to induce prescribing, highlighting their potential to promote uncoordinated care and overprescriping of unnecessary, and often expensive, branded medications. The same questions apply to coupons extended for a drug-specific telehealth visit. Drugmakers have long used discount coupons to encourage patients to use their high-cost medications. But coupons can influence not just the out-of-pocket price for the drug, but the cost of consulting with a clinician who can prescribe it.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Senate hearing on Wednesday that he had nothing to do with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration decision to not approve Replimune’s advanced skin cancer drug, saying it was in the hands of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary,Reuters writes. Earlier this month, the FDA declined to approve the drug after taking issue with the company’s reliance on a single‑arm study for the drug without a control group. In its letter, the FDA said the company must provide data from a well-controlled trial demonstrating adequate evidence of effectiveness. “This decision comes out of FDA, and we trust the process there. And I’ve been told by Marty Makary that every panel that looked at that drug unanimously voted against it … because it does not appear to work,” Kennedy said. An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal maintained Kennedy’s comments were not true and cited cancer doctors who have worked on trials of the drug and said it was effective.
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.
Introducing: the Nature issue
When we talk about “nature,” we usually mean something untouched by humans. But little of that world exists today.
From microplastics in rainforest wildlife to artificial light in the Arctic Ocean, human influence now reaches every corner of Earth. In this context, what even is nature? And should we employ technology to try to make the world more “natural”?
In our new Nature issue,MIT Technology Review grapples with these questions. We investigate birds that can’t sing, wolves that aren’t wolves, and grass that isn’t grass. We look for the meaning of life under Arctic ice, within ourselves, and in the far future on a distant world, courtesy of new fiction by the renowned author Jeff VanderMeer.
After ChatGPT launched in late 2022, the OpenAI chatbot became an everyday everything app for hundreds of millions of people. It led to LLMs being heralded as the new future. The entire tech industry was consumed by the inferno, with companies racing to spin up rival products.
LLMs+ is on our list of the 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, MIT Technology Review’s guide to what’s really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI. We’ll be unpacking one item from the list each day here in The Download, so stay tuned.
Will fusion power get cheap? Don’t count on it.
Fusion power could provide a steady, zero-emissions source of electricity in the future—if companies can get plants built and running. But a new study published in Nature Energy suggests that even if that future arrives, it might not come cheap.
The research team aimed to improve predictions of fusion’s future price by estimating the technology’s experience rate—the percentage by which its cost declines every time capacity doubles. Their findings offer new clues on the technology’s path to deployment. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate newsletter. Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Trump signaled he’s open to reversing the Anthropic ban What that really means in practice remains to be seen. (Reuters $) + Anthropic says there’s no “kill switch” for its AI. (Axios) + “Humans in the loop” in AI warfare is an illusion. (MIT Technology Review)
2 SpaceX plans to manufacture its own GPUs To support the company’s growing AI ambitions. (Reuters $) + Musk is shifting SpaceX’s focus from Mars to AI ahead of its IPO. (NYT $) + SpaceX and Tesla may be on a collision course. (FT $)
3 Chinese tech giant Tencent has unveiled its first flagship AI model A former OpenAI researcher is at the helm. (SCMP) + Chinese open models are spreading fast. (MIT Technology Review)
4 High earners are racing ahead on AI, deepening workplace divides The division in adoption risks widening inequality. (FT $) + Startups are bragging they spend more on AI than staff. (404 Media)
5 Thousands of Samsung workers are demanding a new share of AI profits Chip-division employees want 15% of the operating profit. (Bloomberg $) + Here’s why opinion on AI is so divided. (MIT Technology Review)
6 AI is helping mediocre Korean hackers steal millions They’re vibe coding their malware. (Wired $) + AI is making online crimes easier. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Kalshi suspended three political candidates for betting on their own races Including a Democrat and a Republican running for Congress. (CNN) + And an independent candidate who said he did it to make a point. (Gizmodo) + Lawmakers argue that prediction markets are a loophole for gambling. (NPR)
8 A ping-pong robot is beating elite human players for the first time The Sony AI system was trained with reinforcement learning. (New Scientist) + Just days earlier, a humanoid smashed the human half-marathon record. (AP)
9 Crypto scammers are luring ships into the Strait of Hormuz By falsely promising safe passage. (Ars Technica)
10 ‘Age tech’ could help us grow old comfortably at home Apps, wearables, and remote monitoring could fill caregiving gaps. (NYT $)
Quote of the day
“It’s a hallucinogenic business plan.”
—Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX shares, tells the New York Times that he’s unimpressed by Musk’s changing goals for the aerospace company.
One More Thing
AP PHOTO/LINDSEY WASSON
This grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters
After hundreds went missing in Maui’s deadly fires, victims were identified with rapid DNA analysis—an increasingly vital tool for putting names to the dead in mass-casualty events.
The technology helped identify victims within just a few hours and bring families some closure more quickly than ever before. But it also previews a dark future marked by the rising frequency of catastrophic events.
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 wore my Tottenham Hotspur hoodie while shopping at Market Basket last Sunday. One fellow shopper laughed at me. He must have been an Arsenal fan. But another guy commiserated.
If none of this means anything to you, I’m sorry. My favorite soccer team is circling the drain and I feel sad.
The promise of a better pan-RAS inhibitor
Erasca has been described as the poor man’s Revolution Medicines. Impoverished doesn’t exactly fit, not with Erasca’s market value nearing $7 billion on the promise of a better pan-RAS inhibitor for pancreatic cancer. But RevMed’s value now tops $30 billion, so you can see why biotech investors are motivated to find the next big thing.
Whether Erasca is worthy of that description will become clearer in May when the company reports initial results from an early stage study of its drug, called ERAS-0015.
“RevMed has been a real pioneer in this space,” Erasca co-founder and CEO Jonathan Lim told me when we spoke on Tuesday. “What a day it was last week seeing their data with 13.2 months of median overall survival. It’s great for patients with pancreatic cancer.”
Fusion power could provide a steady, zero-emissions source of electricity in the future—if companies can get plants built and running. But a new study suggests that even if that future arrives, it might not come cheap.
Technologies tend to get less expensive over time. Lithium-ion batteries are now about 90% cheaper than they were in 2013. But historically, different technologies tend to go through this curve at different rates. And the cost of fusion might not sink as quickly as the prices of batteries or solar.
It’s tricky to make any predictions about the cost of a technology that doesn’t exist yet. But when there’s billions of dollars of public and private funding on the line, it’s worth considering what assumptions we’re making about our future energy mix and its cost.
One crucial measure is a metric called experience rate—the percentage by which an energy technology’s cost declines every time capacity doubles. A higher figure means a quicker price drop and better economic gains with scaling.
Historically, the experience rate is 12% for onshore wind power, 20% for lithium-ion batteries, and 23% for solar modules. Other energy technologies haven’t gotten cheap quite as quickly—fission is at just 2%.
In the new study, published in Nature Energy, researchers aimed to improve predictions of fusion’s future price by estimating the technology’s experience rate. The team looked at three key characteristics that can correlate with experience rate: unit size, design complexity, and the need for customization. The larger and more complex a technology is, and/or the more it needs to be customized for different use cases, the lower the experience rate.
The researchers interviewed fusion experts, including public-sector researchers and those working at companies in the private sector. They had the experts evaluate fusion power plants on those characteristics and used that info to predict the experience rate. (One note here: The study focused only on magnetic confinement and laser inertial confinement, two of the leading fusion approaches, which together receive the vast majority of funding today. Other approaches could come with different cost benefits.)
Fusion plants will likely be relatively large, similar to other types of facilities (like coal and fission power plants) that rely on generating heat. They will probably need less customization than fission plants—largely because regulations and safety considerations should be simpler—but more than technologies like solar panels. And as for complexity, “there was almost unanimous agreement that fusion is incredibly complex,” says Lingxi Tang, a PhD candidate in the energy and technology policy group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and one of the authors of the study. (Some experts said it was literally off the scale the researchers gave them.)
The final figure the researchers suggest for fusion’s experience rate is between 2% and 8%, meaning it will see a faster price reduction than nuclear power but not as dramatic an improvement as many common energy technologies being deployed today.
That means that it would take a lot of deployment—and likely quite a long time—for the price of building a fusion reactor to drop significantly, so electricity produced by fusion plants could be expensive for a while. And it’s a much slower rate than the 8% to 20% that many modeling studies assume today.
“On the whole, I think questions should be raised about current investment levels in fusion,” Tang says. (The US allocated over $1 billion to fusion in the 2024 fiscal year, and private-sector funding totaled $2.2 billion between July 2024 and July 2025.) “If you’re talking about decarbonization of the energy system, is this really the best use of public money?”
But some experts say that looking to the past to understand the future of energy prices might be misleading.“It’s a good exercise, but we have to be humble about how much we don’t know,” says Egemen Kolemen, a professor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
In 2000, many analysts predicted that solar power would remain expensive—but then production exploded and prices came crashing down, largely because China went all in, he says. “People weren’t exactly wrong then,” he adds. “They were just extrapolating what they saw into the future.”
How fast prices drop depends on regulations, geopolitical dynamics, and labor cost, he says: “We haven’t built the thing yet, so we don’t know.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
For the moment, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems quieter and more positive on vaccines than many, us included, ever expected he could be. Public messaging has shifted — at least superficially — toward nutrition, chronic disease, and the Make America Healthy Again agenda. Kennedy even acknowledged in a recent congressional hearing that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is safe and effective “for most people.”
But this lull in anti-vaccine rhetoric and action should not be mistaken for a durable pivot in federal vaccine policy. It is a cynical, political pause: the eye of a storm shaped more by electoral timing than public health strategy.
