Sunday Special: Brain implant wins FDA nod to treat depression

Welcome back, Superhuman. What if your home once sat underwater — or on a volcanic wasteland? Thanks to a new tool built by Dutch scientists, you can find out. The tool lets you trace any modern address back 320 million years to the age of Pangaea. Meanwhile, a new brain implant is moving into clinical trials and could be our best shot against treatment-resistant depression.

SCIENCE SUNDAY

The most interesting scientific and technological breakthroughs this week

1. A new tool lets you track where your home was 320M years ago: Scientists have launched Paleolatitude, a free online tool that traces the geological journey of any location on Earth to the era of Pangaea. Type in your address and you may find your home was once a tropical seabed, a desert, or a volcanic wasteland. Beyond the novelty, the tool helped confirm that the Netherlands once sat at the same tropical latitude as today's Persian Gulf, explaining fossil discoveries that had puzzled scientists for years. You can take it for a spin here.

2. A tiny brain implant is moving to clinical trials to treat depression: Motif Neurotech just got FDA approval to begin clinical trials of DOT, a wireless brain implant designed for treatment-resistant depression. Unlike traditional implants, DOT sits above brain tissue rather than penetrating it, delivering programmable electrical stimulation to circuits linked to depression. If successful, DOT could give new hope to nearly 3M Americans who live with depression that doesn't respond to standard treatment.

3. Wool could replace collagen as the go-to material for bone regeneration: Scientists have used keratin, a protein extracted from wool, to regenerate bone in living animals for the first time. Implanted into rats with skull defects, the wool-based scaffolds produced more structurally sound bone than collagen, the material surgeons have relied on for decades. Collagen is expensive to extract and breaks down too quickly under load; keratin is renewable, scalable, and often discarded as farming waste.

4. An underwater robot is now tracking sperm whale conversations in real time: Scientists have deployed an autonomous underwater glider that listens for sperm whale clicks, identifies their direction, and follows the same whale or group for months. It captures how calves learn vocal patterns from their mothers and how whales respond to human activity like shipping and construction. Researchers say it marks a shift from brief encounters to continuous relationships with another form of intelligence.

PRESENTED BY AWS

How to specialize AI agents for production (this is key)

When applied to specific domains, general-purpose agents are not optimized for edge cases.

Domain specialization fixes this with four levers: System prompt, knowledge corpus, tool selection, and guardrails. 

Learn how to correctly implement your AI agents for production in this workshop from AWS. In addition to the four levers, you’ll learn: 

• Customer engagement agents that personalize at the edge

• Location-aware logistics agents grounded in geospatial reasoning

• Voice-enabled agent pipelines with low-latency constraints

Register for the workshop on May 12th.

NEW TECH

Our favorite new tech gadgets this week

1. Eight Sleep Pod Pillow Cover: A cooling and heating layer for your pillow. It adjusts from 55°F to 110°F and adapts to your sleep stages — all without changing the feel of your pillow.

2. Taya: An intelligent necklace that doubles as a private AI journal. It records and transcribes conversations, attaches time and location, and organizes everything into searchable notes.

3. Jiffy 75 Split Keyboard: A split ergonomic keyboard that reimagines the familiar 75% layout, letting users separate the two halves to promote a more natural typing posture and reduce wrist strain.

4. Elfin Fountain: A pumpless pet water fountain with smart motion sensing. It only runs when your pet is nearby and has no exposed wires, slashing the risk of electric shock.

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending in science on socials this week

📸 Rover Rewind: This is probably the closest most of us will ever get to a road trip on another planet. NASA has compressed six years of Curiosity crawling across Mars into two surreal minutes, racking up thousands of likes on social media. Watch it here.

🌧️ Rain Inc: For most of human history, making it rain was a metaphor. Now one startup claims to have done it literally, routinely manufacturing millions of gallons of man-made rainfall on command. Here’s how they say they do it.

🕰️ Blast from the Past: Video footage of Henry Ford taking the very first car he ever built for a spin in 1896 is doing the rounds on Reddit. It’s fascinating to see how far the technology has come.

🎞️ No Big Deal: IBM once made a movie so small it had to be filmed atom by atom. Back in 2013, researchers used a 2-ton microscope chilled to move 65 individual atoms frame by frame, creating the smallest movie ever made.

PRESENTED BY HARDSKILL

Traditional GTM stacks are going extinct (and that’s a good thing)

GTM stacks only capture partial data after the fact, missing key context. 

What’s the future? Systems of Action that operate in real time, improving pipeline velocity, forecasting, and execution speed. Learn how to create Systems of Action yourself in a virtual workshop led by execs from leading AI-native GTM orgs. 

Register here (May 7th, costs nothing).

ONLY GOOD NEWS

A healthy dose of optimism to kickstart your week

Sun Surge: German startup Photreon has built a solar panel that produces hydrogen using just water and sunlight. Where conventional green hydrogen requires two steps (solar capture and electrolysis), Photreon's photocatalytic panels collapse that into one, cutting cost and complexity. The modular design works at rooftop scale or in large solar hydrogen farms, opening up on-site fuel production for manufacturers, food producers, and industrial sites that have found green hydrogen out of reach until now.

Second Opinion: A Harvard study has found that OpenAI's o1 reasoning model correctly identified diagnoses more often than human physicians across a range of real-world cases, including one where the model flagged a dangerous flesh-eating infection that the treating doctor initially missed. The AI included the correct diagnosis roughly 80% of the time. Researchers stress the goal is assistance, not replacement, and clinical trials are planned to work out how to integrate AI safely into patient care.

SUNDAY SCIENCE TRIVIA

Delivery in Space

Don’t Cheat: You can read more about the crazy incident here.

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Until next time,

Zain, Faiq, and the Superhuman AI team