Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 03 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03246-6
Author Correction: Improved RNA base editing with guide RNAs mimicking highly edited endogenous ADAR substrates
Lassa fever countermeasures gather pace
Nature Medicine, Published online: 03 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04478-4
Two early phase clinical trials represent progress in Lassa fever vaccine and therapeutic development, including the first interventional treatment trial in decades.
Generalizable AI predicts immunotherapy outcomes across cancers and treatments
Nature Medicine, Published online: 03 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04502-7
COMPASS is a pan-cancer foundation model that predicts immunotherapy response, across cancer types and treatments, from bulk tumor transcriptomes.
Immune aging biomarkers for clinical trials
Nature Medicine, Published online: 03 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04493-5
The authors present a framework for the selection of immune aging biomarkers suitable for clinical trials in geroscience, alongside a translational roadmap for biomarker development to support the next generation of clinical studies on immune aging.
The Download: a smoking “endgame” and a new Elizabeth Bear story
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.
The UK’s generational tobacco ban might not work. I’m supporting it anyway.
—Jessica Hamzelou
As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from mine. The seven-year-old is learning about AI at school. The five-year-old is given internet-based homework every week. And they are both absolutely repulsed by the idea of smoking.
That was not the prevailing sentiment when I was young. Smoking was a central part of our culture. Which is why the UK’s recent passing of a generational sales ban on tobacco products feels like such a big deal.
This is what’s described as an “endgame” approach. While many tobacco control strategies—such as taxation or gory imagery—aim to reduce consumption, policies like the UK’s are designed to eliminate it entirely. It’s a new approach, and no one knows whether it will work. But it’s an enticing prospect—and it’s starting to look a lot less radical.
Find out why generational tobacco bans are gaining support.
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
You do your own time
—You do your own time is a short story by Elizabeth Bear, an award-winning speculative fiction author.
There we were, a regular murderers’ row of librarians. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn’t respect sanctuary.
I pulled down a solid-state drive full of biographies and case studies of people who had spent time—and sometimes their whole lives—in labor camps or chattelhood. It was illegal to possess, and the feds used smart agents to track down and obliterate any copies. Which was why we were sending one to the stars.
What’s left behind when a name is erased from the system? No legacy, no memory—that is the point of media and narrative control. So that was our plan: to preserve it, for later generations, or just as a silent record of our existence.
Read the rest of this short story in full.
—Elizabeth Bear
This story is from the latest edition of our magazine, which is all about engineering. Subscribe now to get a copy, plus all our other issues and a range of subscriber-only content.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 An EU lawmaker investigating spyware was hacked by that spyware
Citizen Lab found Pegasus spyware on Stelios Kouloglou’s phone. (Wired $)
+ It said the EU “looks the other way” on spyware abuses. (Guardian)
+ Meet the director of Citizen Lab. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Anthropic is closing loopholes that allow Chinese access to Claude
It’s targeting VPNs, relay services, and overseas accounts. (FT $)
+ Users in China keep finding new workarounds. (Wired $)
3 A Tesla driver has been charged with manslaughter after a fatal crash
Court records show he was using automated driver-assistance. (WSJ $)
+ Tesla sales have surged 25% after a rebound in Europe. (NYT $)
4 Trump bought lots of tech stock the day he unveiled his AI Action Plan
He acquired up to $5 million in stock from Amazon and others. (Engadget)
+ His AI Action Plan was a distraction. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Companies are throttling employees’ AI use because it’s too expensive
They’re pleading with workers to use less powerful models. (404 Media)
+ Tesla has capped their AI spending at $200 per week. (The Information $)
6 The Energy Dept wants data centers on backup power in heat waves
It wants them to free up power for AC. (NYT $)
+ People near data centers are dreading heat wave pollution. (Politico $)
+ No one wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
7 A Meta glasses feature just went from free to a subscription service
“Conversation Focus” will now cost $19.99 per month. (BBC)
+ The move heralds a new era of consumer tech subscriptions. (Wired $)
8 Random wobbles in time could solve gravity’s greatest mystery
A new idea could reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. (New Scientist $)
9 Peter Thiel claims the pope is “working for the Chinese Communists”
By pushing for stricter AI rules that may benefit Chinese interests. (CNN)
+ Pope Leo XIV said AI must be “disarmed” in his first major teaching. (BBC)
+ His encyclical offered a template for steering AI. (MIT Technology Review)
10 Supersonic flight over land could finally be legal again
Regulators want to lift a ban—so long as the planes are quiet. (Ars Technica)
Quote of the day
“We don’t have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat.”
—Yann LeCun, the founder of AMI Labs and Meta’s former chief AI scientist, tells the BBC that AI isn’t as smart as many think.
One More Thing
MARCO GIANNAVOLA
How two brothers became go-to experts on America’s “mystery drone” invasion
On a Friday evening in December, every tier of US law enforcement was dispatched to a military research installation outside Boston after a squadron of 15 to 20 drones was spotted violating restricted airspace. The culprits could not be found.
It was the latest in a series of purported drone sightings along the US East Coast. Lacking coordination or clarity from the White House, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community, law enforcement officers turned to an unlikely source: twin brothers from Long Island who hunt UFOs.
The Tedescos have built a mobile field lab to investigate unexplained aerial phenomena. Now members of the FBI want their support.
Discover how the brothers are helping law enforcement investigate UFOs.
—Matthew Phelan
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.)
+ This record-breaking drone show is a mind-bending display of aerial light.
+ A Paris bakery is taking a bite out of food waste by repurposing croissants.
+ Relive your childhood with a classic episode from the Mister Rogers archive.
+ See graffiti through new eyes with this project that prettifies tags and makes them legible.
The UK’s generational tobacco ban might not work. I’m supporting it anyway.
As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from mine. The seven-year-old is learning about AI at school. The five-year-old is given internet-based homework every week. And they are both absolutely repulsed by the idea of smoking.
That was not the prevailing sentiment when I was young. My parents smoked. The customers at our family’s restaurant smoked. Cartoon characters smoked. My friends and I would buy little cigarette-box-shaped packets of sugary white sticks and pretend to smoke in the playground. Smoking was a central part of our culture.
Which is why the UK’s recent passing of a generational sales ban on tobacco products feels like such a big deal. As part of the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, retailers are prohibited from selling tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2009, in perpetuity. It doesn’t matter when those people turn 18—or 38 or 68, for that matter. It will always be illegal to sell to anyone born after that date.
This is what’s described as an “endgame” approach. While many tobacco control strategies—such as taxation or gory imagery—aim to reduce consumption, policies like the UK’s are designed to eliminate it entirely. It’s a new approach, and no one knows whether it will work.
The Maldives was the first country to implement a generational smoking ban, in November last year. It’s too soon to say how that has panned out.
Nor do we know if these laws will even last. In 2022, New Zealand passed a similar generational sales ban as part of a broader anti-smoking law. But it was never enacted—the law was repealed by a new government in February 2024.
In the UK, both major parties support the ban. But Nigel Farage, whose right-wing party has seen a recent surge in support, has promised that “the generational smoking ban will not last long if Reform gets the chance to start rebuilding our mismanaged country.”
Chris Bostic, an attorney and former policy director for the advocacy group Action on Smoking and Health, says he and his colleagues began promoting the idea of a generational ban in the United States 11 years ago. Back then, they struggled to win support, even from major health charities. “People said we were crazy … [and] that this was impossible,” he says. Opponents argued that bans would infringe on personal freedoms.
“The public health argument is: Well, what about freedom from addiction?” says Britta Matthes, a tobacco control researcher at the University of Bath in the UK. Most people who smoke began when they were teenagers, want to quit, and wish they’d never started. Tobacco is arguably the most harmful consumer product of all time. It will kill half its users who don’t quit, according to the World Health Organization.
It also kills people who don’t smoke. Of the 7 million who die from tobacco every year, 1.6 million are nonsmokers who were exposed to secondhand smoke, according to the WHO.
Generational sales bans are a long-term strategy that will only protect future smokers. Most experts agree that people who already smoke should be a main consideration for any policy, and that a multipronged approach is probably the best way to go. Janet Hoek at the University of Otago, who has explored tobacco control policies in New Zealand, believes that enforcing very low limits on nicotine levels and banning filters—an environmental scourge that does not make smoking safer, as many people believe—might be a “powerful combination,” for example.
But preventing teenagers from starting to smoke in the first place is an enticing prospect, even among the majority of people who smoke. And it’s starting to look a lot less radical.
The US has quietly been making progress on a smaller scale. Since 2021, Brookline, a town in the Boston area, has banned the sale of tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2000. The idea has spread. Today there are 23 towns in Massachusetts with similar bans, says Bostic. Nine towns across Minnesota, New York, and California have implemented other endgame policies.
The UK law has normalized the idea more than ever, he adds. His colleagues are already fielding calls from health agencies around the world. “People [are] saying, Wow I can’t believe the UK just did this—can we do this here?” he says.
Norms change. Like many other millennials, I vividly remember my first night out after a ban on indoor smoking took effect. My clothes didn’t stink! My hair still felt clean! And my throat wasn’t scratchy the next morning! Now that’s just normal. I hope a tobacco-free world can be the new normal for my kids.
Unlocking the chemical potential of filamentous fungi using prime editing
Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 02 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03219-9
We developed the prime editor fPE7max, which is optimized for filamentous fungi and enables precise genome engineering — from single-base substitutions to kilobase-scale insertions and multi-kilobase deletions, across diverse species. Editing of translation-regulatory elements for a pleiotropic metabolic regulator unlocked previously inaccessible biosynthetic pathways and uncovered new fungal metabolites.
Why high scores do not mean application readiness for health AI
Nature Medicine, Published online: 02 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04500-9
Large language models achieve high scores on health application benchmarks, yet adversarial stress tests now reveal prevalent brittleness — shortcut reliance, fragile visual grounding and fabricated reasoning traces — which exposes substantial gaps between benchmark performance and the robustness evidence needed to support claims of readiness for medical decision-support and patient-facing applications.
STAT+: Medicare takes another swing at 340B cuts to hospitals
Medicare wants to slash payments to hospitals for drugs acquired through the 340B drug discount program by more than a third beginning next year, after the agency said its surveys found some patients paid more for the drugs than the hospitals did.
Under a proposal released Thursday, Medicare would pay hospitals for 340B drugs at their average sales price minus 33.4%, dramatically less than they’re getting currently, which is that price plus 6%. The provision, part of a proposed rule on hospital outpatient payments, represents the latest swing at what’s become a hotly debated drug discount program, viewed by some as a lifeline for safety-net hospitals and by others as a profit center for wealthy health systems.
The proposal drew swift condemnation from groups representing nonprofit and academic hospitals, who said it would disproportionately harm safety-net providers. That’s because only these nonprofit facilities are eligible for 340B, while for-profit hospitals are not. Medicare’s proposed rule shows a 7.4% pay increase to for-profit hospitals under the 340B adjustment.
STAT+: Lawmakers urge HHS to force Eli Lilly to provide 340B drug discounts to hospitals
Dozens of congressional lawmakers are urging the Trump administration to force Eli Lilly to reinstate mandated price breaks to hospitals that participate in a federal drug discount program but have refused to provide the company with claims data.
In a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bipartisan group of lawmakers argued that Lilly is failing to comply with federal law by eliminating the price breaks. The drugmaker stopped offering discounts last month to reduce what it calls duplicate discounts paid to the hospitals.
At the time, Lilly targeted 50 larger hospital systems among approximately 1,000 hospitals that had not complied with a new policy that was announced this year. The company maintained that roughly 70% of the hospitals that participate in the discount program, or more than 2,300, had previously provided claims data.