GoKawiil
Tech News
Filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spent time documenting Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans at home with their children, beginning around a month before she started serving her prison sentence in May 2023. The resulting film reportedly features extensive close-up footage of Holmes interacting with Fielder and her family, revisiting the Theranos founder's story after her 2022 fraud conviction.
Researchers led by Josef Parvizi at Stanford University have produced a detailed map of the insular cortex, a deep brain region long difficult to study. Published in Nature, the study identifies distinct zones handling pain signals from the body, sensations like nausea from internal organs, and a frontal region that connects to areas involved in cognition and emotion.
Researchers at Hopkins Marine Station observed that a bleached coral fragment regained its pigmentation after being placed touching a healthy fragment from the same coral colony. In a controlled experiment with ten fragment pairs of Pocillopora damicornis, five pairs were set to touch each other while five were kept apart, and the touching pairs showed transfer of symbiotic algae and rapid recovery of colour within days to weeks. The findings were published in Science Advances on 14 October.
Samuel King, a bioengineering PhD candidate at Stanford, employed a generative AI model in 2025 to create genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. His work suggests that AI could potentially be used to design new biological entities in the future. The interview with senior AI reporter James O'Donnell will explore the implications of this research for biology and AI development.
Researchers are increasingly using cell-free protein synthesis platforms to produce proteins without relying on living cells. This approach involves extracting cellular machinery and using it as a molecular factory, allowing for faster and more flexible protein production. The technology has roots in early genetic research and continues to evolve with various systems available, including bacterial, eukaryotic, and purified component-based methods.
Anthropic announced on September 23 that its Claude AI model, running roughly 950 agents simultaneously, identified a gene-editing enzyme system with properties similar to Crispr within 21.5 hours. The company says the system's function remains unknown, and only one physical experiment has been reported so far in a non-peer-reviewed technical paper.
Stanford University researchers led by Sergiu Pașca transplanted lab-grown human brain organoids into mice bred to lack most of their cerebral cortex. The transplanted tissue survived and formed functional connections to the animals' brains and spinal cords, according to a study published in Nature. The team describes it as the most extensive integration of human brain cells into an animal achieved to date.
A working paper from CESifo researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu concludes there is no significant evidence that AI has widely reduced hiring or increased displacement among recent college graduates, contradicting an earlier Stanford study that found weaker entry-level employment in AI-exposed fields. The researchers note firms have recently increased AI spending and task automation, suggesting graduates in 2026 could face different conditions than those studied so far.
Stanford researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience that the human brain forms from two separate progenitor cells, one giving rise to the forebrain and the other to the hindbrain, rather than developing from a single evolutionary lineage as previously assumed. Senior author Kyle Loh said the team can now grow hindbrain neurons in a lab dish to study their function separately from the forebrain.
Stanford University used AI to digitally replace Billy Ramirez, a Hispanic student, with a nonexistent Black woman in a photo used on 'Welcome Home' dining hall banners across campus. The same edited image also altered two other students' appearances to look thinner and more conventionally attractive. Stanford confirmed AI was used and said the edits violated its policy prohibiting AI alteration of images depicting Stanford people.
Stanford scientists genetically engineered mice lacking a functioning cortex, then implanted human neurons derived from reprogrammed skin cells into the empty space. The transplanted cells multiplied from a few hundred to several million and wired themselves into the mouse brain, with the animals behaving largely normally despite the human tissue making up nearly half their brain volume by some measures. The findings were published in Nature.
A Stanford team led by Sergiu Pașca genetically engineered mice to lack most of their cortex and hippocampus, then implanted human brain organoid cells into the resulting gap. The human cells expanded to fill much of that space within weeks to months, and mice with the human tissue performed better on memory maze tests than mice without it.