The new baldness pill all over the news today is a 1970s blood pressure drug that made patients grow hair all over their bodies. You can already get it for about $15 a month, and the company that just finished testing its own version is worth more than $5 billion. There's a real reason for that price, and it starts with a drug company in Michigan getting swamped by bald guys. Back in the 1950s, chemists at Upjohn in Kalamazoo were trying to make an ulcer drug. The stuff they came up with turned out to open up blood vessels, so they turned it into a pill for really severe high blood pressure. The FDA approved it as Loniten in 1979, black box warning and all. And then the patients started getting hairy. Something like 60 to 80 percent of the people taking it grew new hair on their faces and arms. Once word got out, Upjohn's headquarters got flooded with bald men volunteering for its trials. Doctors spent the 1980s quietly writing Loniten prescriptions for their balding patients. Upjohn wanted a piece of that, and you can't advertise a drug for something it isn't approved to do. So they put the exact same molecule into a liquid you rub on your scalp and ran it through trials, and the FDA approved it for hair in 1988. You know it as Rogaine. Veradermics is basically running that same play almost 40 years later, except this time it's going back into a pill. The pill version had its own comeback first. About a decade ago, a dermatologist in Melbourne named Rodney Sinclair started putting women on tiny doses of oral minoxidil and reported regrowth in 100 patients in a row. It's caught on since, and today you can get it through a telehealth app like Ro. But on paper it's still a blood pressure drug being used off-label, so nobody's allowed to market it for hair, and a lot of doctors just won't prescribe it. Veradermics surveyed 198 dermatologists and primary care doctors who see tons of hair loss and found them hesitant to write for anything that's out there now. Their version is an extended-release tablet that lets the drug out slowly through a gel inside the pill, so you don't get the big spike in blood levels a regular tablet gives you. In this trial they gave it to 536 men for six months. Hair counts went up by as much as 36.4 hairs per square centimeter, compared with 6.6 for the guys on placebo. About 69% of the twice-a-day group said their hair looked better, versus 15% on placebo, and nobody had a serious side effect tied to the drug or a heart problem flagged. So what are investors paying $5 billion for? Mostly, they're paying for the label. If the FDA approves it, it's the first new hair-loss pill since Propecia back in 1997, and the first version of minoxidil anyone can legally put in a TV commercial aimed at the 50 million American men losing their hair. It hasn't been tested head to head against the $15 generic yet, and that's the first thing dermatologists are going to ask about. I'd also really like to see how many of those 536 guys grew hair on their foreheads and backs, since that side effect is how this whole thing started. If the FDA signs off, a drug that's been sitting on pharmacy shelves since 1979 is about to get the biggest marketing push of its life.

A fly that died years ago is flying around a harbor that doesn't exist. Here's what's going on. Scientists took one female fruit fly and sliced its brain into about 7,000 pieces, each roughly 2,000 times thinner than a human hair. They photographed those slices 21 million times under an electron microscope. Then hundreds of people spent years tracing every connection by hand until they had the whole thing, all 139,255 neurons and 54.5 million synapses. That map is called FlyWire. Odyssey hasn't said exactly which map it used, but FlyWire is the one most of these projects build on. Earlier this year a startup called Eon ran that map as a simulation with zero training and got a virtual fly that walks and grooms on its own. Now Odyssey has put the brain somewhere new. The harbor in this clip isn't sitting on a server as a 3D model or a game level. Odyssey-3 is a 14-billion-parameter AI that learned how water and light behave by watching a ton of video, and it invents each frame as the fly steers through it. This is kind of a big deal for a nerdy reason. For as long as people have tried to build a mind, there have been two camps. One says copy a real brain. The other says train a giant model on tons of data. Those camps have mostly fought each other, and in this clip one is living inside the other. And here's a fun bit of math. The fly has 54.5 million synapses. The AI dreaming up its world has 14 billion parameters. Line those up and the world is about 250 times bigger than the brain living in it. That's what happens when one approach rides on GPUs and the other rides on grad students with microscopes. The trained side ballooned in a couple of years. The copied side took the better part of a decade to get one fly. What really got me is how little it takes to fool a fly. A fruit fly sees through about 800 tiny lenses per eye, so its whole view of the world is around 1,600 pixels. Each of your eyes sends about a million nerve fibers to your brain. Keeping a fly convinced means the AI only has to look right across 1,600 pixels, which is a pretty low bar, and it's clearing it. The fake world will look good enough for human eyes long before anybody can slice up a human brain and rebuild all 86 billion neurons.