Preliminary data are encouraging, albeit that the sample is small. In a trial of 55 patients the drug improved wakefulness by more than 20 minutes in people with NT1 and by more than ten minutes in those with NT2. Drugmakers are studying orexin agonists’ effects on more prevalent conditions. Alkermes is testing one in adults for the treatment of ADHD (though current medications are seen as pretty effective), based on the observation that an added benefit in narcolepsy patients is sharpened attention, suggesting they might help with ADHD as well. Others are exploring their use for treating sleep apnoea, which is a far more common disorder. There are more tantalising ideas, too, about the reward-and-motivation role of the other receptor, OX1R—though the science is less developed. Dr Yanagisawa says blocking OX1R shows promise curbing addictive cravings. Activating the receptor, rather than blocking it, is a more speculative approach, but he believes boosting the orexin signal into the brain’s reward circuitry might help treat some kinds of depression and even enhance motivation. These are hints, not proof, and will need robust tests before any drug reaches the market. Hunger and sleep, argues Dan Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer, are both “master homeostasis mechanisms”—systems that keep the body in balance. When they misbehave, illness follows. The broad usefulness of GLP-1-based medicine has shown what aiming an entire regulatory system can achieve. Drug companies are hoping orexin therapies will have similar success. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/08/11/the-brain-may-be-about- to-have-its-ozempic-moment

Science & technology | The science of science Maybe scientific progress isn’t slowing, after all A new paper takes aim at the claim that science has become less disruptive Aug 13th 2026 That science’s best days are behind it, and its rate of progress is slowing, is an old claim. And, since science itself is a perfectly good subject for scientists to investigate, many have looked into it. One notable contribution came in 2023, when Michael Park, then a PhD student at the University of Minnesota, and his colleagues published a paper in Nature. It analysed citation patterns in 45m scientific papers and 3.9m patents and concluded that the “disruptiveness” of both had fallen off a cliff since the 1950s. This was widely reported (including in The Economist). Its findings found their way into Congressional hearings and speeches by White House officials.

On August 12th came a twist. Nature published a follow-up paper arguing that Dr Park and his colleagues’ conclusions were mostly illusory, caused by problems with the data set they had analysed. Correct those, argues Vincent Holst, a PhD student at Vrije University, in Brussels, and his co-authors, and most of the decline in disruptiveness goes away (see chart). The original paper’s claim hinges on something called the consolidation- disruption index, or CD index, which aims to measure how much a given paper or patent shakes up its field. It compares a paper’s references with those of papers published later. A paper (or patent) is classed as “consolidating” if subsequent papers cite both the paper itself and the earlier research that it refers back to. It is deemed “disruptive” if future papers cite the paper itself but ignore its own references—the assumption being that a paper like that has shaken things up so much that older work has become irrelevant. The CD index runs from -1 (maximally consolidating) to 1 (maximally disruptive). Mr Holst argues that Dr Park’s original analysis includes around 970,000 papers and 142,000 patents with a CD of 1. Most achieved that high score by containing no references at all and themselves being referenced by at least one subsequent publication. But when he and his colleagues sampled a hundred such papers and patents at random, they found that 93% of the

papers and 98% of the patents did indeed contain references—they had just been misclassified by the database containing them. Further investigation suggested that the proportion of misclassified papers and patents has been falling over time. Strip out the earlier erroneously transformative-looking work, and most of the supposed drop in disruptiveness goes away. Dr Park and his colleagues are not convinced. In a rebuttal of their own, published alongside Mr Holst’s critique, they point out that, when doing as Mr Holst and his co-authors advise, they still see meaningful declines in disruptiveness. Part of the argument rests on data-sources. The centrepiece of Dr Park’s original analysis was a database called Web of Science. But Web of Science is not openly available. Mr Holst and his colleagues relied partly on a free alternative, called SciSciNet. Dr Park alleges that SciSciNet contains much more work claiming no citations than Web of Science. Mr Holst retorts that, despite Web of Science being closed, they had nevertheless managed to reconstruct Dr Park’s use of it, and that their critique holds. But in an email Russell Funk, one of Dr Park’s co-authors, claims the reconstruction was done improperly. What does it all mean? Mr Holst’s paper is not the only critique of Dr Park’s result. Last year Alexander Michael Petersen at the University of California, Merced, and his colleagues published a paper arguing that “citation inflation”—partly a result of the simple fact that, the more work is published, the more work there is to cite—means one should expect the average paper’s CD score to fall over time. When they reanalysed the data, they claimed that disruptiveness may even have increased between 2005 and 2015. But Dr Park’s paper, in turn, is not the only line of evidence suggesting progress really is slowing down: in 2020 Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, and his colleagues, analysed productivity figures and concluded that technological progress in many industries was becoming harder to buy with every passing year. The idea that the wellspring of science is running dry is certainly disruptive. Whether it is true remains moot. ■

This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/08/12/maybe-scientific- progress-isnt-slowing-after-all

Science & technology | Flame war NASA takes aim at fire storms These products of wildfires worsen their creators Aug 13th 2026 MOST AIRCRAFT try to avoid bad weather. Not so a Gulfstream V that taxied onto the runway of Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, in Colorado, on July 29th. Its flight path was set to take it directly into a rare and little-understood weather event—a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb)—in Oregon. Such towering, smoke-tinged storm clouds form above wildfires and generate weather that can multiply the damage of the fires that cause them. The Gulfstream’s journey was the first flight of the INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment (INSPYRE)—a joint mission between NASA, America’s aerospace agency, and that country’s Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). This project, led by David Peterson of the NRL, aims to

measure pyroCbs in unprecedented detail by collecting samples and monitoring a storm’s evolution from the inside out. The resulting data, the team hopes, will help pin down any role such storms play in Earth’s warming climate, and better equip firefighters as they battle wildfires of increasing size and intensity. The summer of 2026 has brought some of the worst to date in America and Europe. In July France recorded its first ever pyroCb. Thunderstorms happen when warm, moist air is driven rapidly upward. The air cools as it rises and its water vapour condenses, forming clouds. In the right conditions, these clouds grow into towering cumulonimbi, the roiling insides of which conjure strong winds, lightning and hail. For pyroCbs, fire drives this process. And it supercharges it. The intense heat causes air to surge upward, carrying with it moisture released from the burning vegetation. Smoke, too, is brought along for the ride. It clogs up the clouds that form above the fire, limiting rainfall while increasing the chance of lightning. The lack of rain means little water reaches the ground, allowing the fire to spread. PyroCbs are an indication that a wildfire has “gone berserk”, says Michael Fromm of the NRL. And the storm only amplifies the fire’s damage. The volatile conditions make it harder to contain wildfires and pose an additional threat to firefighters and civilians. PyroCbs can also ignite new fires as they discharge lightning and whip up showers of embers in ferocious, unpredictable winds. And the destructive effects of fire-generated storms are not limited to the ground. Their great height and intense updraft means they act like chimneys, wafting smoke directly into the stratosphere. There, the plumes spread more easily (see picture) and linger for longer than at lower altitudes. Smoke particles tilt Earth’s radiative balance by absorbing sunlight, and alter stratospheric currents. Chemical reactions on these particles’ surfaces also destroy atmospheric ozone, which may affect the shield against ultraviolet light from the sun which that gas provides. At the end of 2019, during a four day wildfire outbreak in south-eastern Australia, pyroCbs injected around 1m tonnes of smoke into the lower stratosphere—an amount equivalent to a moderate volcanic eruption.

“As much as we know, we still know very little” about pyroCbs, says Dr Fromm. INSPYRE aims to change this by tackling three big unknowns. The first is the question of which fires form pyroCbs and why. The second is what determines whether a storm will inject smoke into the stratosphere and how much it will deposit there. The third is how smoke changes the stratosphere’s composition and, in turn, Earth’s radiative balance. To do all this, Dr Peterson has assembled a team of around 150 researchers to track pyroCbs from all angles. On the ground, trucks equipped with lidar, radar and weather balloons probe a storm’s underbelly. They are joined in the air by the Gulfstream, which heads straight into the billowing clouds of the pyroCb in order to collect samples, and also by a second, purpose-built NASA plane, called an ER-2, that cruises above the storm clouds, about 10km into the stratosphere, where it can monitor the smoke plumes. The outing on July 29th successfully brought all of these pieces together. “It worked out remarkably well,” says Dr Peterson. And he should know, for he was on the Gulfstream. The smoke, he says, meant that, as soon as the plane entered the clouds, everything went dark. Then, on August 3rd, the team collected their first sample of a smoke plume injected into the atmosphere from a second pyroCb, in Utah. They will continue to fly around three times a week until September. The mission is well-timed. Wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity. Though INSPYRE’s focus is on America, Europe’s own large- scale wildfire science mission, EUBURN, has been going since 2025. If better measurements can make the extreme weather that comes with wildfires more predictable for those on the ground, then even in the clouds of pyroCbs, such missions will have found a silver lining.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/08/09/nasa-takes-aim-at-fire- storms