Eye drops start restoring sight, and AI cracks a 200-year puzzle

The equations have stood since the mid-1800s, and whether they could ever spin off into nonsense was one of seven Millennium Prize Problems the Clay Mathematics Institute set in 2000, each worth a million dollars, only one of which had ever been solved before today 67. OpenAI says the computation took 88 hours 139 and would cost about $15 million to reproduce for a customer 36, and the result has already been checked line by line in the formal proof language Lean 67. It landed twelve hours after NYU's Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge, using publicly available models, announced they had cracked several of the stepping-stone problems on the way there, building on a strategy from mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa that broke from a century of conventional approaches 67. Charles Fefferman, who wrote the Clay Institute's original description of the problem, called Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa the real heroes of the story 67.

In blinded zebrafish larvae, the compounds restored the reflexive eye movements a sighted fish makes as the world moves past it. In mice modeling macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, animals that had lost their instinct to avoid bright rooms got it back within days, at light levels no stronger than an overcast afternoon, with no training required 245. Two of the molecules, prosthe6-12 and prosthe6-15, worked simply dropped onto the eye: no injection, implant, or gene therapy needed 245.

The pattern echoes calorie restriction, the most reliable way scientists know to extend a lab animal's life, minus the part where the animal actually has to eat less.

A technology that sidesteps that entirely, in-ovo sexing, is now running at commercial scale: machines look inside a fertilized egg during incubation and identify its sex before it ever hatches, pulling male eggs for animal feed and returning female eggs to grow 207. The best systems test up to 25,000 eggs an hour, run about 98.5 percent accurate, and add less than a cent to the cost of an egg in Europe 207. Done before day 13 of incubation, when the embryo is unlikely to feel pain, the method has already reshaped law: Germany prohibits chick killing outright, France has largely replaced it, and Italy's ban takes effect at the end of 2026 207.

Using a statistical model built to account for both the noise inside each study and the differences between them, they found a moderate but consistent negative correlation between meaning and depression across the entire body of research. Breaking meaning into its parts, the strongest protective piece wasn't purpose or having goals; it was coherence, simply being able to make sense of your own life and surroundings 112. Believing your life has inherent worth ran a close second.

What makes the number more striking than the growth rate is where the lions actually are: only 394 live inside Gir National Park and its core protected areas. The other 497, more than half the population, now range across nine satellite territories outside the reserve, including farmland, grazing ground, and stretches of the Bhavnagar coast, with three of those satellite populations documented for the first time in this survey 236.

Swapping in the biochar made the concrete meaningfully stronger rather than weaker, with the team reporting a 42 percent improvement in key properties in a paper accepted by Scientific Reports 72. The biochar came from a real fecal sludge treatment plant in Warangal, India, one of the facilities already built to safely process the roughly 400 grams of waste a person produces every day.

Over one summer break, the nonprofit Zero Gravity, working under the Dr Shrikant Jichkar Foundation, fixed the roof, repainted the classrooms, added a science lab, and covered the walls with illustrations pulled directly from the students' own syllabus, turning the building itself into a teaching tool 239. Founder Maitri Jichkar traces the whole effort back to one memory from around 2010: watching a girl erase her notebook because she had no other paper to write on the next day 239.