19 Jul 2026
Signal Headquarters

Field Notes · 19 Jul 2026

Best explained

The glymphatic system clears Alzheimer-linked proteins beta-amyloid and tau specifically during deep sleep, giving a causal mechanism connecting sleep loss to dementia risk.

By the numbers

Curative's Anthropic API spend grew 6x per month for six to seven consecutive months, scaling from tens of thousands to millions of dollars per month.

New today — Evidence added

The Stowers Institute discovered a mechanism for bone regeneration using research on African killifish and subsequently sold the discovery to Amgen.

Jonathan Thomas

Andromeda Surgical built and launched a surgical robot in 3 years on roughly $15 million total spend, claimed as the fastest zero-to-launch timeline in surgical robotics.

Nick Damiano

New today — Sharp calls

Nick Damiano on Andromeda Surgical's speed and capital efficiency from zero to launch.

Nick Damiano

The compute cost of migrating the 300 marketing campaigns was $14.28.

Amelia Lerutte

Curative canceled their $600,000/year Salesforce contract after replacing it with an internally vibe-coded CRM that integrates AI agents.

Fred Turner

New today — Useful context

AI improvements in video models come primarily from language model gains and data/pipeline bug fixes, not from novel video architecture advances.

Zeev Farbman

Still tracking

Big tech companies are on track to spend $720 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, with AI compute workloads growing 10x per year.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk

Tool watch

Experimental memory-consolidation tools now allow researchers to selectively determine which waking memories are retained or lost during sleep, with potential therapeutic and cognitive-enhancement applications.

Worth quoting

“It's not the stress that burns us down, it's the response to stress.”
Martin Picard
“The transformers can't plan but they can do a very good job of pretending essentially that is in a sense.”
François Chollet
“Something like 46% of the emperors of Constantinople are overthrown through violence. 46%. And that's almost half.”
Anthony Kaldellis
“If we just talk specifically about 300 million ARR, most of that's like almost 70% are agencies.”
Alex Mashrabov
“Every good AI is good in the same way. Every rogue AI is rogue in its own way.”
David Dalrymple
“From Bitcoin's code perspective, it didn't bend the knee. The institutions bent the knee to bring Bitcoin into it.”
Dan Held