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Optogenetics revolutionized neuroscience, but its origins come from an entirely brainless organism--an alga. Nobel Committee Secretary General Thomas Perlmann speaks to the media about this year's laureates--Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel--during the announcement of the winners of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Karolinska Institute awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine to researchers Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University in Berlin, and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg. Their discoveries led to the development of optogenetics, a technique where scientists can turn individual nerve cells on or off using beams of light. According to Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Medicine, "Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of."

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German drone maker Helsing has enlisted Japanese e-commerce and finance firm Rakuten to help finalize a deal to sell its unmanned systems to Japan's army, a spokesperson for Rakuten said on Monday. Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force is currently testing Helsing's HX-2 strike drone, as Tokyo looks to modernize its military and counter an increasingly assertive China. The field tests will run until the end of September, the spokesperson said. Helsing struck an "initial agreement" for the Japanese government to use its systems earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Munich-based company said, adding that the move was made possible by an unnamed "local brokerage partner." Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

From branding irons to iris scans, the ancient business of proving who you are has never been stranger--or more lucrative. There are now more bots online than people. The challenge used to be telling who was a person from who was a bot; today, the challenge is telling good bots and bad bots apart--with humanity in the lurch. Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people--mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers--waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. "Crazy lines around the world," Altman wrote. "One person getting verified every 8 seconds now." In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human. That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco-and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O.

For the festival's 150th anniversary, the creative team have turned to AI to generate visuals reflecting Wagner's tetralogy's past, present - and future. U nveiled the same week in which tech company Anthropic admitted that its AI model Claude had gone rogue during testing, Bayreuth festival's new AI-generated staging of Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelungen is at least timely. But anyone who assumes that the cycle's obsession with knowledge, power and possession might make it an ideal forum for reflection on AI as a major contemporary frontier will be disappointed, as will anyone hopeful about AI's creative potential within opera. Commissioned to mark the festival's 150th anniversary, the production is "curated" - emphatically not "directed" - by a team led by German stage director Marcus Lobbes . He apparently spent weeks in dialogue with AI models about possible interpretations of the Ring.