Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 208th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
While there was a ton of good news this week, the videos of the floods in Nepal and Tibet are some of the most heartbreaking I’ve ever seen. We’re going to cover the good stuff, but if you’d like to donate to the relief efforts, I’m giving to DirectRelief’s Nepal Flood Relief 2026, where 100% of donations support Nepal response activities.
Now, August rules: you should be outside as much as possible while you can, so we will just quickly tell you to check out “Matthew’s” Field Notes from China, and then…
Let’s get to it.
Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Create
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(1) FDA Approves Targeted Therapy for Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer
Xavier Martinez for WSJ
Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the deadliest and hardest to treat forms of the disease thanks to a mutation that sticks the RAS protein on and causes runaway cell growth.
In terrible news for cancer and great news for people, the FDA has approved a drug, Revolution Medicines’ Rasonque, that targets the mutation and helped subjects in a late-stage study live for more than 13 months instead of around 6.7 months for those who receive chemotherapy alone.
The drug does have side effects, and 13 months isn’t forever, both issues personified by “Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who went public in the spring with what he described as a significant reduction in his tumors while in a clinical trial of the drug, appeared on television with his face covered in red blotches.” Sasse lived longer than expected, but he still expects to pass away, as discussed in his incredible conversation with Leopold’s wedding officiant Ross Douthat, titled “How Ben Sasse is Living Now That He is Dying.”
Still, this is a massive win, one that drew a standing ovation at a cancer conference last spring when Revolution announced the results.
As one patient, former Disney exec Jay Williams, told WSJ, “What it does is buy you time, and that’s one thing you don’t always have with pancreatic cancer.”
And speaking of time, good on the FDA for approving this so quickly. Per the Agency, “The FDA granted Rasonque Breakthrough Therapy and Orphan Drug designations. Rasonque received Priority Review for this indication. The application was also reviewed under the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher pilot program, which is intended to help accelerate the review of therapies that address national public health priorities.” As a result, it was approved about 6.5 months faster than the standard PDUFA timeline, which means means it went through in roughly half the usual already-accelerated window for a priority oncology drug.
Patients, oncologists, all of us, and regulators are saying the same thing: get fucked, cancer.
(2) Airbound Announces $37M Raise and Drops Manifesto
Naman Pushp for Airbound
Last year, I invested in a company called Airbound founded by a young guy from India who taught himself physics and engineering on YouTube during COVID and used that knowledge to build better drones.
After we got introduced but before we met, I didn’t really think I’d invest - drones are a fairly crowded space and Zipline is awesome. Then I met Naman, and decided to invest immediately.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the chance to work with him on his Manifesto for Airbound, in which he did a great job laying out the future where all movement is in the air that got me so excited in our first conversation.
He published it this week, along with the news that he raised $37M from Greenoaks, Lachy Groom, and others.
Read it - and stay tuned for more.
(3) Radiant and Antares Selected for US Army Janus Program
U.S. Army Communication and Outreach Office
We love to see friends get contracts from the US Army to make a lot of nuclear reactors and hopefully save a lot of lives in the process, so we were very happy to see the Army choose Radiant Nuclear, who we wrote about in 2024, and Antares Nuclear, whose co-founder Julia DeWahl was my Age of Miracles co-host, sign deals as two of five companies selected for the $2.2B Janus program.
Radiant is getting $750M to make 15 Kaleidos microreactors, and while Antares didn’t reveal specifics on this contract, they tweeted that they “now have a contract value on the order of $1B that is growing rapidly.”
While the business side is awesome, the most important piece is what this might mean for warfighters. As Doug said in the deep dive, “Over 55% of US soldier casualties in the two Iraqi conflicts are from ambushed convoys. And convoys move ammo, water, and fuel. So if you could put a reactor in one of these locations, you completely remove all those fuel shipments, you save tens of thousands of lives.”
As a bonus, our portfolio company Standard Nuclear has signed a binding agreement to supply Antares with TRISO fuel through 2035 for microreactors built for defense and space missions, which means it’s now supplying both Janus-winning startups.
(3a) Actinide Becomes First Startup to Enrich Uranium to HALEU
And speaking of nuclear fuel, Actinide became the first startup to enrich uranium and produce HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium), the fuel that many advanced reactors use (it goes inside the TRISO pellets).
They did it using their particle accelerator, Endurance, designed and built in Texas, which had been producing “enriched Yb-176, a precursor for cancer therapies worth roughly $30,000 per gram,” just last month.
HALEU will be one of many isotopes the company makes in its attempt to “address humanity's greatest unsolved problem: control of the atom.”
(4) Anthropic Kicks Off Preview for Model Hardware Standard
MHS enables AI agents to operate multiple lab and manufacturing instruments, such as microscopes, liquid handlers, and robotic arms, in parallel, and perform intricate tasks ranging from routine drug discovery experiments to laser calibration on a quantum computer.
Ruxandra Teslo has some good quick thoughts here, which you should read, but which are basically: this is aiming to automate boring stuff, like laser alignment, so humans can do science, which is core to the human spirit.
David Hansen has some, too, on what humans at US manufacturing companies can already do with Claude and Codex.
Read more here.
(5) Hugging Face Quacks into Robotics with Microduck (and sells to Nvidia for $12.9B)
Two days ago, rumors swirled that Nvidia would be buying Hugging Face, the open source model repository, for $12.9 billion. Open source makes sense for Nvidia - commoditize your complements!
So when Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf tweeted on Thursday morning, he tweeted what was on everyone’s mind: “We have a huge news to share today!”
The news, though, was that Pollen Robotics, which the company acquired in 2025, was “unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot - welcome Microduck.”
The thing is cute, costs $399, and you can train it yourself with reinforcement learning. Before you do, it can do a bunch of stuff out of the box, like “walk, sit, crouch, roller-skate, pick up objects with its articulated beak, and recover on its own.”
Asked to comment on Hugging Face’s big week, Billy Madison said, “That’s quacktastic!”