Weekly Dose of Optimism #210

Weekly Dose of Optimism #210

Navier-Stokes, AlphaGenome Atlas, Ramjet-X, Ingressing Minds, Neko + Extra Doses

Sep 11, 2026

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 210th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Today is the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I still remember exactly where I was, in my first week of high school on my way to the school chapel, when the news hit. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed.

I’m sending at exactly 8:46am, 25 years to the minute when the first plane hit the North Tower.

I’m not going to outwrite Colston Whitehead on this one, so instead, I’m going to share the essay he wrote two months after the attacks: Lost and Found . I read it every year on September 11th, and it’s the best thing I’ve read on what it means to be a New Yorker. This short ESPN documentary on Welles Crowther, who sacrificed himself to save 12 lives, is a sober reminder of the real people who died in, and survived, the attack.

The world changed forever 25 years ago. In some ways, it’s gotten worse, and in many, the world in 2026 is better. We focus on those. But never forget.

Let’s get to it.

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#### (1) OpenAI Publishes Its Navier–Stokes Proof

OpenAI

Navier-Stokes is no Navier-Joke.

While some frontier lab employees were telling us that there’s a good chance they’ll kill us all , OpenAI announced that a group of roughly 10,000 AI agents had produced a proposed solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. The agents worked for about 88 hours using an unreleased model more capable than GPT-6 Astra. Formalizing and verifying the result in Lean, a math programming language and theorem prover, took another 17 hours.

The question is whether the equations describing a smooth, three-dimensional fluid can develop a singularity: a point where the math blows up. OpenAI’s construction starts with fluid at rest, applies a smooth external force, and produces unbounded velocity while keeping total energy finite. It addresses the forced version of the problem. You can read the 166-page proof and inspect the Lean code yourself, if you are incredibly bored this weekend.

Of course, there was controversy. Anthropic was working on its own Navier-Stokes solution with a mathematician, and they accused OpenAI of using the logs from their Codex conversations to come to their own solution. Sam Altman denied the charge but said that rumors that Anthropic was close did spur OpenAI to give it the ol’ college try themselves.

Whatever happened, this is a glimpse into the future: AIs doing all of our work for us while we spend time doing more human things, like arguing for credit.

#### (2) Google DeepMind Maps Nine Billion Possible DNA Changes

Pushmeet Kohli and Žiga Avsec for Google DeepMind

It’s safe to say that Google DeepMind is getting its butt kicked on the frontier LLM side, but it’s still doing some of the coolest work in science AI.

On Tuesday, it released AlphaGenome Atlas, a one-petabyte database of predicted molecular effects across the human genome. It includes the 98% of our DNA that doesn’t directly encode proteins, where changes can still affect when, where, and how genes get used. Researchers can look up variants through a website and use a combined impact score to figure out where to look more closely.

Basically, the human genome contains about three billion letters. At each position, you could swap the existing letter for one of three others. That gives you roughly nine billion possible single-letter changes. GDM predicted what all of the changes might do.

Like at the Broad Institute, the Atlas helped researchers identify a DNA change predicted to disrupt RNA splicing, providing supporting evidence in an unresolved rare-disease case.

To be clear, it’s not a replacement for actual experiments, but those take a lot of time and money and Atlas gives researchers a better sense of where to spend their limited resources.

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” now extends to life’s … alphabet.

Speaking of cool stuff GDM has done, check out all of the things that people have been doing with its complete map of fruit fly neurons:

Google AI

@GoogleAI

Oh, so this is why we mapped out all 166,000 of the male fruit fly's neurons. Check out the big community effort to show just how much these tiny fly brains are capable of 🪰🧵

6:00 PM · Sep 10, 2026

·

54.5K Views

36 Replies

46 Reposts

778 Likes

#### (3) Hermeus Uses Fast Planes to Go Faster

Hermeus

As we covered way back in our Deep Dive on Astro Mechanica , the challenge with ramjets is that they need to be moving very fast before they start working. Forward motion compresses the incoming air, which means you need some other way to get the engine up to speed in the first place.

Luckily, Hermeus has a really fast plane, the Quarterhorse.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled Ramjet-X, an expendable test vehicle designed to launch from its reusable Quarterhorse aircraft. Quarterhorse gets it to the necessary speed and altitude, releases it, and returns for another mission, then Ramjet-X keeps flying under its own power.

The company plans to sell access to this setup as Flight Test as a Service. Customers could test sensors, materials, autonomy software, communications equipment, and propulsion technology in sustained high-speed flight without having to build an entire test program themselves. Engine testing is underway in Florida, with integrated vehicle testing planned for 2027.

Hermeus is special because of its fast development of fast planes. Now, it’s using one of those planes to light up a ramjet platform that will let others develop faster, too.

#### (4) Michael Levin Publishes Ingressing Minds Paper

Michael Levin

We don’t include every Michael Levin paper in the Dose. Man is far too prolific. But we include a bunch, and this might be the most important of them all.

On Wednesday, Levin published the revised, peer-reviewed version of Ingressing Minds . He proposes that minds are patterns in a structured, nonphysical space, and that bodies provide interfaces through which those patterns enter the physical world. He argues that many things beyond humans and animals can be interfaces, including computers, which is the most compelling argument I’ve heard that AI might be able to become “conscious” or “alive.”

Platonic space is a little tricky to understand, but it’s simpler if you start with triangles. If you know two angles of a triangle, you get a third “for free.” In the paper, Levin asks whether that idea extends to much richer patterns, including patterns with agency. In his framework, some of the things inhabiting this “Platonic space” are minds, and biological or engineered systems let them become embodied.

Levin himself came to the idea from the biology side: cells can assemble into unfamiliar living constructs with capabilities that weren’t explicitly designed into them, before any replication or evolution happens. He’s now systematically investigating where those capabilities come from and how to access more of them.

In his announcement , Levin describes the pushback Ingressing Minds has attracted, then adds: “if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait.”

I can’t. I can’t wait. I think Michael Levin will go down as the most important scientist of this era, and this may be his most important paper. Worth a read.

#### (5) Neko Health Launches in New York City

On Tuesday, I got invited to a preview of the new Neko Health location in Soho.

Neko is a preventative health company founded by Hjalmar Nilsonne and Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek. I’d seen a bunch of tweets about the experience in the UK and Stockholm, where it launched in 2023, and I’ve been wanting to try it. As soon as I stepped through the front door, it delivered.

I don’t want to spoil it, but it feels like walking into the future, from the stairs to the waiting area to the screening room that felt like what it would feel like if friendly aliens invited you onto their spaceship and offered to make you right. There’s a full-body scan, some bloodwork, cuffs, and a bunch of lasers and lights designed to understand your heart, blood pressure, body composition, a bunch of markers, and more. The people were friendly, calm, and professional, and the screens kept you posted on the progress. The whole thing flew by, and as soon as it finished, they took me into a room to share and explain the results.

Luckily, everything was clear - there’s some inflammation to fix and I could do to lose a few pounds / points of BMI, but it was a relief to know my heart and cholesterol are in good shape. I haven’t been to a traditional doctor in a very long time.

The reason this is Dose-worthy is that they do it for $499, with a goal of squeezing as much into that price as they can over time. It combines people, design, and technology to pull it off. And with a medical system that’s focused on fixing things once they’re broken, a delightful, accessible network of preventative health locations will help catch things before they break, when it’s easier and cheaper to fix. Plus, it’s nice peace of mind.

It’s great to see people who’ve had success in tech like Daniel and Shak put their resources towards fixing one of humanity’s biggest problem in a way that serves a lot of people instead of just a few who could afford something more successful.

Big thanks to Shak and Sarah for the invite. They’re not a sponsor and I’m not an investor, but you can move up in the line using my link here .

#### EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Boring Company, UAPs, Woods & Johnson

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