166,700 fruit fly neurons are walking a robot cat across a desk right now. In September 2026, Google Research and HHMI Janelia mapped every neuron and every connection in an adult male fruit fly's full nervous system, brain, optic lobes, and ventral nerve cord together, and published it in Cell. The number is staggering on its own: 166,700 neurons, roughly 125 million synapses, the most complete nervous system map of any animal ever built. Now that exact wiring is running live, simulated neuron for neuron, inside a small robotic quadruped equipped with a camera and motion sensors. Movement comes in through the sensors, the biological circuitry fires the way it always did, and the output drives the robot's legs directly. No one wrote the balance logic. No one coded the gait. The insect's own nervous system does that job, just on legs it never had. To be clear about what this is and isn't: nothing biological is alive in this loop. It's a full computational reconstruction of real neural wiring, controlling hardware instead of an insect body. The brain is real. The body is borrowed. Remarkable proof that a mapped nervous system can drive any body you give it, or a preview of something people aren't ready to think through yet?

GPT-6 Astra just solved a problem medical students have been facing for decades Medical students have been working around the same three problems for decades. Someone talked to them, identified all three, and built a service with Astra that solves them in one tool. The problems are structural. Flat anatomical diagrams strip depth out of organs entirely. CT cross-sections don't connect naturally to the overview diagrams students spend years memorizing. And reading a scan requires holding three mental models simultaneously - patient orientation, cross-section direction, and how every organ shape shifts through each layer. Astra built a service that handles all three in one place. Not a better textbook. A spatial tool that connects the diagram, the CT view, and the 3D relationship together. Medical education hasn't changed its core format in over a century. This might be the first tool designed around how anatomy is actually understood - not just displayed.