Sumner L Norman
2.7K posts
@SumnerLN
co-founder @merge
Our second annual report is live! Two years ago, we launched @RenPhilanthropy to fuel a 21st century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists and innovators. Here's what we've achieved: 🧵
We are beyond excited to announce @ilangur as a Senior Fellow at @RenPhilanthropy. Ilan was the founding CEO of @ARIA_research, is the founder of Activate, supporting scientists and researchers to turn breakthrough research into world-changing products and businesses, a founding Program Director at @ARPAE, and the founder of two startups. At Renaissance Philanthropy, Ilan will scope new opportunities across neurotechnology and frontier science, driven by a deep belief in our collective potential to drive a step change in human flourishing. Ilan has been a long-standing collaborator and friend of our community and we couldn't be more thrilled to make it official. To explore this work, get in touch: info@renphil.org
For decades, biology textbooks have enshrined a simple rule: DNA is made by copying a template. After one enzyme unzips a DNA double helix into separate strands, another called a polymerase builds a complementary sequence, base by base, for each strand. Presto: two copies of the original DNA. But new research into how bacteria defend themselves from viruses now shows this synthesis rule isn’t absolute. Now, a team describes a bacterial enzyme that synthesizes DNA without a nucleic acid template, using its own structure as a guide. Learn more: scim.ag/4tTc5IA @NewsfromScience
Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
The final day of the 2026 One Mind Accelerator closing week marked the culmination of an incredible journey, bringing the cohort together for Demo Day! The day began with breakfast at Baylands Café in Palo Alto, followed by a group walk along the Baylands, offering a moment to connect, recharge, and reflect ahead of the day’s events. The afternoon opened with the Frontiers in Mental Health Summit, featuring remarks from CEO of @OneMindOrg, Kathleen M. Pike, PhD, and a series of forward-looking discussions on the future of the field. From market trends and opportunities with Hemingway Founder @thesteveduke, to emerging insights on metabolic psychiatry, brain-computer interfaces, and neuroadaptive intelligence from Drs. Scott C. Fears (@Amae_Health & @UCLA), @SumnerLN (@merge), @MaryamShanechi (@USC), and @NinaVasan, MD, MBA (@Stanford), the session highlighted the innovation shaping what’s next in mental health.
FAA banned parallel landings permanently, will be bad for SFO (max landings drop from 54>36/hr) Given the topography of SFO, we have 2 parallel runways 750’ apart. There was an accident at DCA last year, now the FAA is mandating staggered approaches :(
1/8 Our preprint is now a peer-reviewed paper :) Big thanks to our reviewers who pushed us to examine our results more carefully and Olivier Wyart (headquarter.paris) for the exquisite visual. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Preprint out arguing that we should build the techology to translate (compile) molecularly annotated connectomes into dynamics. I think this is incredibly important. arxiv.org/abs/2603.25713
