https://danluu.com/benchpocalypse/ you can use RL and agents to iterate software until it dominates some benchmark (like speed) without it being meaningfully better in realistic environments, because of reward hacking.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4523 Autism genes screened for protein-protein interaction and tested on organoids and Xenopus to see how they actually alter brain development (eg reducing forebrain size, premature neuron differentiation, altered neural activity.) nice example of the modern biological toolkit getting us a step closer to understanding what's going on in autism.
unfortunately we can't get around the fact that "autism genes" are defined by correlation with autism diagnoses, and social factors affect diagnosis. a more skeptical viewpoint is that we are getting closer to identifying clusters of genes that disrupt brain development and how they do so, but how this relates to "autism" is shaky.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6215000/ we have earwax plugs from whales going back hundreds of years that show elevated cortisol levels during periods of intense whaling. being hunted will stress out a whale!