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5 min readIn October 2026, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences responded to a video on Instagram from the podcast From First Principles—not to debate a big idea, but to thank the hosts for catching an error in the Nobel chemistry committee's own popular information materials. The Academy had posted a diagram of a reaction intermediate with a missing dotted bond and a misplaced isopropyl group. Krishna Chowdhury spotted it, posted about it, and the Academy corrected the figure. Then they invited the podcast to Stockholm for the 2027 Nobel ceremonies. It was a small moment that captured something larger about the episode's throughline: science at its best is a collaborative, iterative, and deeply human enterprise, and the Nobel Prizes are less about final verdicts than about recognizing the long, winding paths from basic discovery to unexpected application.
Optogenetics: From Algae to Vision Restoration and Memory Control
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What you'll learn
- 1 Nobel Prize 2026: The Science Gets Stranger
- 2 Timestamped Outline
- 3 (00:11) **Opening: Memory, Metabolism, and Neutrinos** - The hosts introduce the episode as a follow-up to their Nobel Prize coverage, previewing four recent papers that build on this year's winning science in optogenetics, neutrino physics, and chirality.
- 4 (01:32) **How the Nobel Prizes Actually Work** - Krishna explains the nomination and selection process across the different prize committees.
- 5 (04:38) **Optogenetics Recap: The Remote Control for Neurons** - A refresher on the medicine prize, which recognized Carl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for light-gated ion channels.
- 6 (10:23) **Paper 1: Restoring Vision with Optogenetics** - A clinical trial from the University of Pittsburgh published October 2026 in the New England Journal of Medicine treats retinitis pigmentosa.
- 7 (18:46) **Paper 2: Activating Memory Changes Metabolism** - A 2025 Nature paper from Trinity College Dublin shows that reactivating cold-associated memories triggers physiological responses without the actual stimulus.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Can light restore aspects of sight? Can recalling a cold experience change an animal's metabolism? And what can ghost particles and mirror-image molecules tell us about the universe?
Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary follow up on our 2026 Nobel Prize episodes with research building on optogenetics, IceCube and molecular handedness. We unpack an early human vision-restoration trial, cold-memory experiments in mice, cosmic neutrino flavors, and a tiny electrical sensor for distinguishing left- and right-handed amino acids.
Plus: how the Nobels work, our follow-up on the Nobel chemistry illustration, a brief look at neutrino Earth tomography, and why fundamental research matters. Which discovery would you like us to explore next?
CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open: memory, neutrinos and mirror molecules
00:28 Hello Internet and how the Nobels work
04:32 Optogenetics recap
10:23 Restoring aspects of vision
25:43 Controlling movement in worms
29:31 Cold memories and metabolism
41:07 Memory, trauma and ethical questions
45:44 FFP housekeeping
48:17 IceCube recap
56:23 Measuring cosmic neutrino flavors
1:10:30 A brief look at neutrino Earth tomography
1:12:20 Why fundamental physics matters
1:26:58 Chemistry and molecular handedness
1:29:08 Correcting the Nobel illustration
1:39:30 Measuring chirality in tiny samples
1:46:42 Testing the sensor on meteorite and desert samples
1:51:22 Why these questions matter
1:57:20 Closing thoughts and signoff
RESEARCH & FURTHER READING
Optogenetic therapy for visual function (NEJM, 2026):
https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2602215
Cold memories and thermoregulation (Nature, 2025):
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08902-6
Three-flavor composition of cosmic neutrinos (PRL, 2026):
https://doi.org/10.1103/vntd-m133
Chiral discrimination in meteorite and desert soil extracts (Nature Communications, 2026):
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77947-6
Further reading, briefly mentioned: neutrino Earth tomography (preprint):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02644
EDITORIAL NOTES
The vision trial was small and exploratory. The cold-memory findings discussed are from mice.
On-screen clarifications:
16:53 Both eyes were profoundly visually impaired; the worse-seeing eye was treated.
19:57 The untreated eye was patched during testing, not a normal-vision control.
54:41 Neutrino event rates depend on energy and selection, not just detector volume.
1:05:47 Flavor identification efficiency is distinct from interaction probability; both depend on energy.
1:13:35 Other astronomy-related Nobels include 2017 (LIGO) and 2019 (cosmology/exoplanets).
1:18:00 The LHC at CERN enabled the Higgs discovery; CERN itself was founded in 1954.
1:44:25 Both enantiomers produce current signals; waveform features distinguish them.
1:46:42 Murchiso
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