Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 09 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03172-7
Hybrid solid–liquid optics improve light-sheet imaging of intact biological samples.
Bundibugyo Ebola without vaccines or therapeutics: why public health fundamentals matter more than border closures
Nature Medicine, Published online: 09 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04482-8
Bundibugyo Ebola without vaccines or therapeutics: why public health fundamentals matter more than border closures
Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial
Nature Medicine, Published online: 09 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04429-z
An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.
Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 09 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02311-2
Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeedback from cognitive brain regions.
Learning to lead in a hybrid human-AI enterprise
As adoption of AI agents looks set to surge by as much as 300% in the next two years, leadership teams are carefully considering the implications of a hybrid human-AI workforce.
Unlike existing enterprise-level automation that relies on manual input, AI agents are capable of autonomously coordinating complex tasks, interacting with multiple tools and environments across an organization. In early applications that center on customer service, HR, and sales, adoption of agentic AI has led to productivity gains of 30-50%.
Their autonomy positions agents more as collaborators than tools, working side-by-side with human employees in blended teams that look poised to upend traditional workplace dynamics.
More than three-quarters of HR leaders believe that the deployment of AI agents will transform existing workplace norms, driving a complete reappraisal of how roles and responsibilities are distributed, how skills are prioritized, and how workplace culture is shaped.
Though many admit they’re in the early or preparatory phase of this shift, 86% of chief HR officers predict that navigating digital labor shaped by agentic AI will be a central component of their role in the years ahead.
Fluency in the change management aspect of agentic AI adoption will be a crucial differentiator when it comes to unlocking the full potential of the technology going forward, believes Ateet Jayaswal, chief culture and employee experience officer at Wipro, a leading technology services and consulting company. This moment is one that he says, “calls for a mindset shift in how HR leaders would enable their organizations.”
Redeploying roles to enable higher-value work
As AI agents assume ownership of more complex and integral tasks, the distribution of roles and responsibilities within an organization will undergo significant change. It’s estimated that three-quarters of current roles will require redesign, reskilling, or redeployment by 2030 as a result of agentic AI.
For leadership, this shift should be about reskilling employees toward higher-value work in order to optimize the potential of an agent-human hybrid workforce, says Jayaswal.
For example, Wipro is a complex organization of 240,000 employees across 65 countries. It previously had multiple policies, documents, and knowledge fragmented across different systems, which delayed response to employee queries.
But the company has recently integrated a custom agentic AI assistant—an agent co-created in partnership with enterprise agentic AI platform Ema Unlimited—that can swiftly navigate this complex system, assuming responsibility for 50 HR tasks that had previously fallen to human employees. With the help of an AI agent, average response time to queries has lowered from 48 hours to five seconds.
Human employees have more time to focus on work “that requires a creative and imaginative mind and cross-functional collaboration, leveraging diverse ideas and thoughts to problem-solve,” says Jayaswal. The AI agent, meanwhile, handles rote administrative tasks like sorting timesheets or helping employees navigate policies and take actions in the flow of work.
When reallocating employee responsibilities, though, it is imperative that humans remain in the loop, Jayaswal caveats. When agentic AI is incorporated into enterprise technology, it must work with sensitive and personal data and therefore needs even more stringent guardrails and constraints than consumer applications. “When you expose an AI agent to organizational data, when you integrate it into multiple enterprise systems, then pathways around the AI agent become extremely important,” he says. “It’s an evolving space that leadership needs to have front-of-mind.” Governance should include robust data privacy rules and the establishment of governance layers, such as an AI council, he suggests.
At a fundamental level, the adoption of AI agents will force a re-evaluation of human roles, believes Jayaswal. Rather than employees primarily performing repetitive tasks or troubleshooting, a significant proportion of their time will shift to designing, teaching, and optimizing an AI agent that can do this work for them with far greater speed and predictability and without the agent getting bored.
“The nature of your job changes from being the hero who comes in to solve the problem to designing the hero who can solve the problem,” he summarizes. “The individuals who I have seen thrive in this environment are the ones who make this shift.”
An evolving employee skillset
Just as roles and responsibilities will be reconfigured to reflect the input of AI agents, the core skills of human employees will be reprioritized. More than four in five HR leaders say they’re planning to reskill workers to become more competitive in a market shaped by AI agents.
Technical skills will be increasingly important. Leading employers such as Salesforce, Danone, and Walmart are already rolling out dedicated AI and digital skills programs that aim to equip everyone from frontline workers to C-suite executives with a baseline level of AI literacy in response to the pervasiveness of the technology.
But desirable soft skills will also evolve, Jayaswal points out. Employees who assign tasks to an AI agent need to plainly articulate what modular steps may be needed to accomplish a task, what the desired outcome should be, and what parameters or guardrails need to be in place to ensure the agent doesn’t access or share confidential data.
As HR executives adapt to a blended workforce, three skills are emerging as top priorities during recruitment, according to a recent survey: relationship building, like forging constructive partnerships and account management; collaboration; and adaptability.
Maintaining a healthy workplace culture
In freeing up human employees to focus on higher-value tasks, the hope is that AI agents can elevate the employee experience, deepening fulfilment and satisfaction in the workplace.
“At Wipro, our vision is to improve the life of Wiproites,” says Jayaswal. “We are taking away non-value added work by embracing modern ways of collaborating, engaging, and transacting, leaving associates with higher order work content.”
But leadership teams embracing agentic AI will also need to plan for the new pressures and stressors that the technology can place on a workforce.
There is already confusion and knowledge gaps, with 73% of HR leaders reporting their employees don’t yet understand how digital labor will impact their work. Many organizations have opted to define AI agents as teammates or colleagues on org charts, but new research says this could erode trust and a sense of professional identity. It also raises new questions around accountability and ownership.
The role of management in addressing these concerns is critical, says Jayaswal. To maintain healthy dynamics, managers need to become skilled at orchestrating blended systems, splitting their focus between supervising AI agents and motivating human employees as they also build and supervise AI agents.
Upgrading employee well-being programs will be a core part of maintaining a robust workplace culture. “As there are more interactions with AI agents, you are losing some of the human touch that was provided by service delivery partners or leaders, or often even by colleagues and peers,” Jayaswal says. Employee services that encourage social connection and empathetic communication may help teams navigate this.
A breakneck transformation
Agentic AI looks set to scale at breakneck speed across many enterprises, and it will significantly transform how these organizations operate.
Carefully considering and deciding how to adapt to this newly blended workforce is now a top priority for leadership teams. Reviewing and refining organizational strategies is essential for optimizing both technological gains and the employee experience.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
Genome Wide Analysis Broadens Genetic Knowledge of Anxiety
A large European meta-analysis led by King’s College London has revealed 39 new areas of the genome linked to symptoms of anxiety and provided new estimates of heritability of this common condition.
Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers explain they found 80 variants linked to anxiety in 74 specific areas of the genome, but 35 were already known to be linked to the disorder from previous research.
“These correlations highlight the interconnection between mental and physical health,” said Brittany Mitchell, PhD, a senior researcher at the QIMR Berghofer medical research institute and co-first author on the study in a press statement.
“Importantly, while some shared genetic variants may increase risk for both a physical health condition and more severe anxiety symptoms, it’s also true that living with chronic pain or illness can contribute to anxiety symptoms. Our findings don’t reveal causation or the direction of effect, but they do open up important questions for future research.”
Anxiety disorders are very common mental health conditions across the globe with large variations in severity from mild to debilitating. Previous research has attempted to assess the genetic heritability of anxiety but estimates of how heritable this condition is vary widely.
In this study, genetic data from 14 cohorts of people with generalized anxiety symptoms assessed via self-report questionnaires between 2007 and 2023 was combined to carry out a large meta-analysis of 693,869 people. Most of the cohorts were largely made up of people of European ancestry, for example, the UK Biobank, and mostly came from Europe or North America.
In addition to finding the new variants, the team also created a polygenic risk score for anxiety aggregating genome-wide SNP effects. Overall, the estimated SNP-based heritability was around 6% and the team estimated that about 1-3% of variance in anxiety symptom severity could be attributed to genetics according to the polygenic risk score.
Notably the research also highlighted some links between the genetics of anxiety and other conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, coronary artery disease, and migraine.
“Given the high and rising rates of anxiety, especially in young adults, it is more important than ever to improve our ability to identify and understand sources of risk,” write the authors.
“Despite its public health impact, progress in anxiety genetics lags behind other major mental health conditions. We hope our findings encourage genome-wide investigations leveraging existing but potentially underutilized anxiety severity data in genotyped cohorts, accelerating our progress in understanding the genetic architecture of anxiety.”
The post Genome Wide Analysis Broadens Genetic Knowledge of Anxiety appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
David Sinclair plans to test whole-body rejuvenation drugs in the XPrize competition
The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger.
Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation.
The foundation is offering cash awards to teams able to “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function.
The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment.
Reached by phone, Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, confirmed that he plans to give an oral drug mixture to volunteers in a bid to seek “evidence for age restoration in humans.”
The trial, if it goes forward, will be a significant new development in the race to harness so-called epigenetic reprogramming. That technology is based on the discovery, 20 years ago, of powerful genes able to turn an adult cell into a stem cell similar to those found in embryos.
The age-reversal effect is believed to occur via a resetting of molecular controls on DNA known as epigenetic marks, which help determine a cell’s overall metabolism and identity.
Companies are now racing to use that phenomenon for a new form of rejuvenation medicine. Only this January, one of Sinclair’s companies, Life Biosciences, made news by winning approval to launch an initial human trial using a set of powerful reprogramming genes. The company announced today it had treated its first patient.
But that test involves a complex gene therapy and is limited to patients’ eyes, where it could treat conditions like glaucoma.
Sinclair’s new plan is bolder: a reprogramming drug you’d swallow in order to promote such effects across the body.
“What we’re aiming to do is to epigenetically restore the animal and eventually the person,” he says. “It is true that we’ve been doing extensive animal studies with the oral agent and are looking to compete in the XPrize.”
This alternative method, chemical reprogramming, uses drugs to mimic the effects of the embryonic genes. That is significant because drug compounds can travel through the bloodstream, reaching most or all cells in a person’s body.
Some experts expressed caution, saying the chemical process, at least as used in labs, is extremely harsh and not even particularly effective. “Who doesn’t dream of whole-body rejuvenation? I think it’s a great goal,” says Sergiy Velychko, founder of Soxogen, a stealth reprogramming company in Boston. “But these chemicals are used in very, very high concentrations for cell reprogramming.”
Sinclair declined to describe the exact makeup of the drug candidate, code-named SL-100, calling its contents “highly, highly confidential.”
However, he has previously published lab studies of what he called “epigenetic age-reversal cocktails,” which mixed powerful chemicals with known supplements and commercially available medicines.
It’s those latter components that would be easiest to test on people, since doctors are free to prescribe them, even for unusual objectives like age reversal. James Clement, head of Betterhumans, an organization that specializes in life-extension studies using existing drugs, said in a message that he is “running clinical trials” of an oral reprogramming cocktail for Sinclair’s XPrize team.
Sinclair’s team is competing in the XPrize Healthspan Competition, launched in 2023. It follows several previous competitions that focused on commercial spaceflight, lunar landings, and other goals. The XPrize Foundation is led by executive chairman Peter Diamandis, also an active promoter of longevity research.
“If two teams are equivalent, they would split the award,” says Jamie Justice, a doctor and executive director for the contest, which was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation, “But it will be incredibly hard to even get to one winner.”
Justice says a judging panel is now in the process of picking 10 finalists from 65 teams that have been exploring health foods, lifestyle interventions, digital trackers, and drug compounds.
Sinclair’s team, Justice says, was a late entrant to the contest, but like all teams, it would be required to move into wider human tests starting this year. “You have to be ready and in trials,” she says.
The race to harness the reprogramming phenomenon and apply it to living people is heating up, even outside the XPrize competition. On June 2, a startup called NewLimit, founded by the crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong, said it had raised a further $435 million, from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, to support what it calls “age reprogramming.”
The company says it is working toward delivering genetic reprogramming instructions to the liver, to treat diseases of that organ.
But Sinclair has been saying that whole-body rejuvenation is a possibility too. And for that, chemicals, rather than gene therapy, could be the most practical strategy.
Sinclair says his lab has been searching for such compounds and is starting to use AI “to improve the oral agents that we’re testing.”
Chemical reprogramming cocktails, as used in labs, typically involve a mix of vitamins, approved drugs, and experimental molecules. For instance, one recipe Sinclair filed a patent on includes the supplement forskolin, the antidepressant tranylcypromine, and an experimental chemical, laduviglusib, which has been tested against Alzheimer’s, among other ingredients.
“In those days it was a six-factor cocktail,” Sinclair says of his earlier research. “But we’ve come a long way. I can’t disclose what’s in it, but it’s an improvement and an advance on that, and we’ve done a number of animal studies. They are not published, but we’ve been doing them for a long time, and we want to make sure that we’ve done a full investigation of safety and efficacy before we release any of the data.”
While Sinclair’s results aren’t published, other teams say attempts to reverse the age of entire animals using chemical drugs haven’t worked yet. Last year, the lab of Vadim Gladyshev, another Harvard biologist and a member of a different XPrize team, reported on its attempt to rejuvenate mice by installing pumps in their bodies that released controlled doses of seven compounds.
Gladyshev says the procedure proved to be toxic. “The idea was to see if we could rejuvenate whole animals. Unfortunately, we have not found [the right] conditions,” he says. “At low concentrations there was no effect, and high concentrations were toxic.”
Gladyshev says he doesn’t know what is in Sinclair’s cocktail, but says that “trying to improve the combinations makes sense.”
Sinclair, who is the author of several books on aging and has a large social media following, has frequently been criticized by other scientists for making unproven rejuvenation claims.
In 2024, he resigned as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research after claiming that a supplement developed by a company his brother runs had “reversed” the age of dogs, a claim for which there was so little evidence that one scientist called it a “lie.”
Part of the problem is that scientists still disagree on how to measure aging. And they don’t have a reliable way to measure age reversal, either, should it ever be achieved.
Justice, the XPRIZE director, says a primary purpose of the competition is to solve that problem by encouraging the development of standardized measures of aging. That is so that anti-aging drugs can be assessed reliably, and, one-day, approved by regulators if they work.
“We as a scientific field have been forced to ask, ‘If a medicine improves how we age, how would we know?” Justice said during a public meeting with FDA officials in May. “If something worked, what would convince us as scientists, what’s meaningful to the general public?”
Finalists in the Healthspan competition will be announced in August.
Five things you need to know about AI
At SXSW London last week I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now.
I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the most important trends in this buzzy world, but I also veered off on a number of tangents. In my half-hour slot, I tried to cover the key talking points that I think help to make sense of what’s going on in tech—and thus the economy—today.
(I gave a talk with the same title at SXSW London last year with five different things you needed to know. A lot has happened since then!)
So: This is how I’m thinking about AI midway through 2026. Let me know if you would pick different points!
1. Strictly speaking, I didn’t need to show up to give this talk.
Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But generative AI tools have already become mundane, used by millions to automate everyday office tasks (including producing and delivering talks). It’s no surprise that one of the biggest questions out there right now is what this all means for jobs. People are confused and scared.
The frustrating answer is that despite the hype coming from the top about the potential for AI to join the workforce soon—and viral social media posts yelling that something big is happening—there is almost no data to say either way what kind of effect this technology will have on employment and the economy overall. That’s not to say it won’t have an impact, even a huge one, but it’s just too soon to tell.
In theory, teams of agents working together toward common goals could become assembly lines for white-collar work, doing to offices this century what Henry Ford’s innovations did to factories in the 20th century.
In theory. Because in order to know what will happen to jobs, we need to know what will happen inside the companies that create those jobs. But most companies are still figuring that out.
2. AI is getting scary (for real this time).
There have been scary stories about AI for years—claims that it will kill us all or bring about the end of civilization. There’s still a loud crowd of doomers, but those scenarios remain dystopian science fiction.
What’s happened instead is that many of the worst near-term, real-world fears have come true.
Take deepfakes, AI-generated images or videos of people doing things they didn’t actually do. Deepfakes have been used to incite violence, swing votes, and sow distrust. Trump’s White House is among those creating and publishing fake images.
Many deepfakes are also used to abuse women and girls. One study found that 98% of deepfakes are pornographic and 99% involve women.
Another concern is the rise of dangerous and delusional relationships with chatbots. Many people turn to chatbots to seek private advice and to feel heard. But there are now multiple lawsuits against AI companies alleging that the technology encouraged or aided suicides and other forms of self-harm.
AI is also being used in warfare in new and worrying ways. LLMs are now giving advice, not just being used for analysis. One US defense official told my colleague James O’Donnell that you could now give a military chatbot a list of targets and ask which one to hit first. Anyone who uses AI knows that its output needs to be reviewed carefully. In fact-paced, high-stress active conflict, the risk that corners get cut is high.
3. A lot of people really hate AI.
I checked out an anti-AI protest in London earlier this year and found a very broad mix of complaints. Banners proclaiming the end times bounced along to chants of “Stop the slop! Stop the slop!” Protests are getting more organized and drawing larger crowds.
There’s pushback from fans of films and video games, who object to the use of generative AI in their favorite titles. In one notable case, the acclaimed 2025 game Clair Obscur was stripped of an award when the developers admitted to using AI in just one small, specific part of its production.
And there’s the data center backlash. The US has more than 5,400 data centers and counting. With the energy demands of AI growing, people are unhappy about the environmental impact and their rising electricity bills. Activists are managing to stall development in a number of places.
Regulation is becoming politically popular. Grassroots movements like QuitGPT have gained momentum. A small number have turned to violence; a few weeks ago somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house. It’s not clear where all this leads. But the apocalyptic hype from tech leaders is not helping people stay calm.
4. AI for science is a very big deal.
It’s early days yet, but the potential for AI to help make a genuine and important scientific discovery is greater than ever.
Google DeepMind has developed Co-Scientist, a multipurpose tool that can help researchers dig up and compare previous results, generate hypotheses, and devise experiments to test them. OpenAI told me this year that its North Star is the goal of building a fully automated researcher by 2028.
Mathematicians are excited too. Fundamental math underpins many everyday technologies, from internet security to video streaming. The last few months have seen a string of claims that AI has cracked unsolved math problems. And software that can solve really hard math problems will be able—so the argument goes—to solve more general-purpose real-world problems too.
What are the downsides? Some scientists are warning that an overreliance on AI tools could narrow the scope of research because scientists may choose problems that are most suited to AI assistance. There are also concerns that AI-assisted research will lead to a flood of inaccurate or fake results: science slop.
5. AI is everywhere all at once.
So where does that leave us? There are a lot of exciting things, a lot of worrying things, and a lot of hot air. It can be exhausting to keep up, and yet it all feels inescapable. Some people will tell you we’re in a race to the top; some will tell you we’re in a race to the bottom. But it’s really not clear where we’re headed.
AI companies want us to march to their tune and buy into the propaganda about artificial general intelligence, whatever that means. They are selling a vision that feels inevitable, but it isn’t.
We’ve built a technology that can do humanlike things, and I think that makes it hard to get our heads around the fact that it is still just a technology.
Something is happening. Maybe even something comparable to the invention of electricity or the internet. But technologies like that take time to settle and bring lasting change.
Get ready for a marathon, not a sprint.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
Opinion: Ending animal testing could set back xenotransplantation just as the field is poised for a breakthrough
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeks to end all federally funded animal testing after concluding that “the predictivity of animal models is very, very poor for human health outcomes.”
In November 2025, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff were told that the agency would be required to phase out primate studies, and they are in the process of transferring their animals to a primate sanctuary. The National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biological sciences in the U.S., has stopped issuing funding opportunities exclusively for animal models, sending a clear message that basic science conducted in animals small and large will no longer be a priority. Of the eight NIH-funded National Primate Research Centers in the U.S., one has been shuttered, and a second is exploring the possibility of converting to an animal sanctuary.
STAT+: Wearables, and the flood of data they generate, inch closer to entering the clinic
A major selling point for wearable devices is the promise that they’ll help identify hidden health conditions before they lead to major harm. But a nagging issue has been the connection to clinician guidance when a smartwatch or ring raises the alarm.
To help address this issue, wearable makers Oura and Whoop recently announced they’ll make it possible for users to connect virtually with doctors directly from their apps. While the move could represent the first step in the long-awaited adoption of consumer health data by traditional clinical care, experts cautioned that the bar for data in clinical decision-making is higher than for simple wellness purposes. The Food and Drug Administration has only authorized a handful of wearable features for clinical use, and the evidence base for using wearable data to inform medical care is nascent. Widespread use by clinicians will take considerably more work.
“This was an inevitable development,” said Ida Sim, a physician and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies how to make best use of consumer health data. “We’ve got these sensors that have ostensibly valuable data … but we haven’t even begun to tap into the real clinical value.”