🍻 The $1.60 pill that makes alcohol boring (and 788 species we're about to obliterate)

Happy 2026 properly, fellow science enthusiasts🤓! We're kicking off the year properly with proof that sometimes the best solutions are the ones nobody talks about, a pill that's been FDA-approved for 30 years and costs less than your morning coffee is suddenly having its main character moment. Meanwhile, scientists are discovering hundreds of new species while simultaneously testing how to destroy their homes (because of course they are), worms are flexing evolutionary tricks we didn't know were possible, and clinical trials are somehow getting less diverse despite everyone agreeing that's a problem. We've got a lot to cover, so let's dive in.

RESEARCH & NEWS

Remember when everyone was excited that Ozempic might reduce alcohol cravings? Turns out there's been a drug doing exactly that since before most of us were born. Naltrexone has been FDA-approved to treat alcohol use disorder since 1994 and costs about $1.60 per pill when purchased in bulk. The "Ozempic of alcohol" was Ozempic before Ozempic.

The mechanism is straightforward. Naltrexone blocks opioid receptors in the brain, reducing the dopamine reward you get from drinking. Alcohol just stops feeling as satisfying. Research shows that 80% of users who took naltrexone an hour before drinking (known as the Sinclair Method) drastically reduced or eliminated their alcohol intake altogether.

The telehealth company Oar Health has built a business around making the drug accessible, delivering prescriptions directly to your door for those who qualify. Their approach mirrors the playbook used by companies selling Viagra and, yes, Ozempic. So why isn't everyone talking about this? Probably because there's no billion-dollar patent to protect. Nearly 28 million Americans struggle with alcohol use disorder, and most have never heard of the main FDA-approved medication for it.

The side effects are relatively mild, mostly nausea and headaches that typically subside as the body adjusts. Unlike some alternatives, it won't make you sick if you slip up and drink. It's not a magic bullet; experts recommend pairing it with behavioral support, but for a 30-year-old drug, it's having quite the renaissance.

RESEARCH

In a move that perfectly encapsulates humanity's relationship with nature, scientists recently cataloged 788 species of crustaceans, mollusks, bristle worms, and other creatures living 4,000 meters below the Pacific Ocean, most of which have never been described before, while testing equipment designed to scoop them up for precious metals.

The study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution examined the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a vast area between Mexico and Hawaii that's basically an underwater nodule field loaded with manganese, nickel, and cobalt. These are the metals your electric car battery craves. The research followed International Seabed Authority guidelines and took 160 days at sea over five years.

The good news: mining wasn't quite as catastrophic as some predicted. The bad news: it was still pretty bad. Within the mining vehicle's tracks, animal populations dropped 37% and species diversity fell 32%. Interestingly, areas affected by sediment plumes showed no decrease in animal abundance, suggesting the immediate physical disturbance is the main problem.

"Since most species have not been described previously, molecular (DNA) data were crucial in facilitating studies of biodiversity," explained Thomas Dahlgren from the University of Gothenburg. The team even discovered a new solitaire coral attached to polymetallic nodules, naming it Deltocyathus zoemetallicus. Because nothing says "welcome to the Anthropocene" like naming a species after the rocks it lives on that we're about to remove.

The researchers estimate 90% of species in the CCZ still remain unknown to science. We're just getting started on the catalog.

RESEARCH

When you picture animals with sophisticated vision, you probably think of humans, octopuses, maybe hawks. Not bristleworms. But Platynereis dumerilii, a tiny marine worm you've definitely never heard of, has camera-type eyes remarkably similar to ours, and they keep growing throughout its entire life.

Researchers at the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute discovered that these worms maintain a ring of neural stem cells at the edge of their retina, similar to the "ciliary marginal zone" found in fish and amphibians that grow throughout their lives. The findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that despite evolving completely independently, worms and vertebrates landed on nearly identical solutions for building and maintaining eyes.

The kicker? These stem cells are light-responsive. The proliferation of new eye cells actually depends on ambient light, controlled by a protein called c-opsin, which was previously thought to be a vertebrate-only innovation. "It was remarkable to find dividing cells at the edge of the worm's retina – the same place where some groups of vertebrates maintain their retinal stem cells for life-long eye growth," said first author Nadja Milivojev.

This opens some uncomfortable questions about artificial lighting. If these stem cells are tuned to natural light cycles, what happens when you expose organisms to 24/7 LED illumination? The researchers are appropriately concerned. "Basic research to uncover the unexpected is essential to understand the biological complexity of life and the possible consequences of anthropogenic impacts," the senior author, Kristin Tessmar-Raible, concluded. Translation: we're probably messing up more things than we realize.

RESEARCH

Move over Neuralink. Researchers at Columbia, Stanford, and Penn have developed a brain-computer interface so thin it can slide between your skull and brain "like a piece of wet tissue paper." It's called BISC (Biological Interface System to Cortex), and the specs are genuinely impressive.

The entire implant is only 50 micrometers thick, thinner than a human hair, and contains 65,536 electrodes with 1,024 recording channels. That's a lot of brain-reading capability in something that takes up less than 1/1000th the volume of current clinical devices. The study was published in Nature Electronics.

Traditional BCIs require a bulky canister of electronics, either implanted by removing part of the skull or placed in the chest with wires running to the brain. BISC consolidates everything, radio transceiver, wireless power, digital control, data conversion, and the actual electrode interfaces, onto a single silicon chip. The external "relay station" communicates with the implant via ultrawideband radio at 100 megabits per second, about 100 times faster than any other wireless BCI.

Because it sits on the brain's surface without penetrating tissue, BISC is designed to minimize tissue irritation and maintain stable recordings over time. Human studies for short-term recordings during surgery are already underway. The team has launched Kampto Neurotech to commercialize the technology.

"This could change how we treat brain disorders, how we interface with machines, and ultimately how humans engage with AI," said Ken Shepard, the project lead. The future of brain-computer interfaces might not be about drilling holes. It's about slipping in sideways.

RESEARCH

For years, understanding how a tumor interacts with the immune system required expensive multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) imaging, think thousands of dollars per sample and days of lab work. Now Microsoft Research, Providence, and the University of Washington have created GigaTIME, an AI that generates virtual mIF images from cheap, routine pathology slides.

The model was trained on 40 million cells with paired imaging data across 21 proteins, then applied to samples from 14,256 cancer patients across 51 hospitals. The result? A virtual population of approximately 300,000 mIF images spanning 24 cancer types and 306 subtypes, uncovering 1,234 statistically significant associations between protein activations and clinical outcomes like biomarkers, staging, and patient survival.

This matters because the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for predicting whether immunotherapy will work. Is the immune system actively fighting the cancer, or has the tumor figured out how to hide? GigaTIME can help identify "cold" tumors that might be reprogrammed to become "hot" and responsive to treatment.

Fun fact: the concept of studying tumor microenvironments on chips isn't new to us. Our own work on organ-on-chip cancer models explored similar questions about how tumors interact with their surroundings, though using actual cells rather than AI-generated images. GigaTIME is essentially doing computationally what researchers have been trying to do physically, just at a scale that was previously impossible.

The model is now publicly available on Microsoft Foundry Labs and Hugging Face. Welcome to the era of virtual oncology.

RESEARCH

Here's a frustrating one. A new study in Communications Medicine examined 341 pivotal trials, the final-stage studies used to gain FDA approval, between 2017 and 2023. The findings: just 6% of clinical trials reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the United States. And it's getting worse, not better.

Black and Hispanic enrollment has declined since 2021, even as everyone from the FDA to NIH has called for greater diversity. Asian representation increased, while white participation remained stable. The problem isn't theoretical; people from different backgrounds carry different gene variants that affect how the body responds to medications.

"Precision medicine relies on understanding how genetic differences influence treatment outcomes," said Sophie Zaaijer, a geneticist at UC Riverside and UC Irvine. "If clinical trials under-sample large segments of human genetic variation, critical signals for safety and efficacy may be missed."

The geography doesn't help. Trials following International Council for Harmonisation standards concentrate in the US, Europe, China, and Japan. Sub-Saharan Africa and much of Latin America host less than 3% of pivotal trials. Though this might be changing, Brazil joined ICH in 2016, Mexico in 2021, and Argentina in 2024.

The researchers offer concrete recommendations: set diversity goals at the preclinical stage, choose testing locations that reflect local health needs and genetic backgrounds, and collect biological samples that help researchers understand how different populations react to drugs. "Precision medicine becomes possible only when clinical trials map the biology of all patients, not just a subset," said co-author Simon Groen. Turns out personalized medicine isn't very personal if it only works for some of us.

So here we are, starting 2026 with a 30-year-old hangover cure going viral, hundreds of newly discovered species facing extinction by mining equipment, worms teaching us about eye evolution, brain chips thin enough to slip under your skull, AI reading tumors at a population scale, and clinical trials somehow becoming less representative despite everyone agreeing that's terrible.

The theme? Science keeps delivering incredible discoveries while we collectively struggle to do anything sensible with them. Classic humans.

Did the naltrexone story make you wonder what other blockbuster drugs have been hiding in plain sight? Curious about whether your genome is actually represented in the trials that approved your medications? Opinions on whether we should mine the sea floor for EV batteries? Hit reply, we read everything (while nervously checking if our neural stem cells are still light-responsive).

Forward this to someone who thinks biotech news is boring to start off the new year.

Keep questioning everything (especially 30-year-old drug marketing strategies),

Prateek & Jere

P.S. If you're wondering why we had six stories instead of five, consider it our New Year's gift. We'll try to restrain ourselves next week.