SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026) Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love. We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway. America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire. His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen. Ian McKellen 29 October 2026 Photo: University of Huddersfield

Let the light shine on.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to: Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund    alzresearch.org/giving/ Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources     alzfdn.org/donate/ Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia

Nearly nine years ago, @TJParker and I went to Bentonville to talk to @Walmart about building a different kind of pharmacy. While we were there, we visited The Walmart Museum. If you haven’t been, go! I loved seeing the history of a company that started with a single store and changed what people everywhere could buy and afford. We were building PillPack at the time, and spent much of that trip talking about what healthcare could learn from retail. Today we’re launching the new Walmart Better Care Services, a healthcare store powered by General Medicine. Starting today, customers can browse more than 900 products and services across a dozen different provider groups, compare cash and estimated insurance prices, and get what they need. Walmart defined the experience, chose the products, services, and providers. Our technology makes it all shoppable. A lot has happened since that first trip. We sold PillPack, built Amazon Pharmacy, and started @GeneralMedicine. We’ve spent most of our working lives trying to make getting healthcare easier. And somehow it still feels like we’re just getting started. We have incredible clinicians and treatments in this country. But finding the right care, figuring out what something costs, and actually getting it remains convoluted and complicated. Something that should have been a quick purchase becomes a project. Too often, people just put it off altogether. And when the problem is serious, all that hassle lands on top of what’s already hard. When transactions are easy, you take a whole layer of complexity off the table. We launched General Medicine a year and a half ago. A few weeks ago, we wrote about the idea behind it: healthcare needs a store. Helping Walmart build one for its customers is that idea reaching the scale we’ve been aiming at since PillPack. I love that we have our own store. We get to build things we’ve wanted to exist for years, hear directly from customers, and keep making them better. But I’m just as excited about helping other companies build theirs. We learned at PillPack how much more you can do when you work with companies that already serve millions of customers. Tech platforms, retailers, health systems, payers, and manufacturers all bring something different. There’s a lot more we can do together than any of us could do on our own. With Walmart, we get to work with a retailer and pharmacy that’s part of everyday life all across the country. This one is particularly special to me. We walked into Bentonville nine years ago hoping to build something together. It took a little longer than we expected, but here we are. Build the store. Then build more stores.

Meet X-Scientist: our step toward a self-improving virtual drug hunter! Today, we’re introducing Xaira’s agentic AI platform for drug discovery: 🧠 Beats Codex using the same Astra model by 7.4 percentage points on DrugDiscoveryBench. 🧬 Nominates targets ~10× faster than human curation, with a comparable wet-lab hit rate. 🔁 Conducts autonomous research, outperforming AutoResearch and AutoScientists in the PerturbQA benchmark. Here’s what we built, what we tested, and where we’re going. 🧵

Introducing Omnii-1, our most powerful genome language model, and a major step toward general biological intelligence In a world first, Omnii-1 designed the first AI-generated bacteriophages to be administered to a human patient with an antibiotic-resistant infection under compassionate use

Glad this news is out! Excited to be a backer of @RadicalNumerics

SITUATION DETECTED: Bio startup Radical Numerics has used AI-generated viruses - bacteriophages designed by its multimodal genome model Omnii-1 - to treat an antibiotic-resistant infection in the first clinical use of AI-generated phages on a human patient.

Big day for @RadicalNumerics: Omnii-1 is out – one multimodal model across DNA, RNA, proteins and more. And in a world first, Omnii-1-designed phages were given to a patient with an antibiotic-resistant E. coli infection. Excited to back @exnx & team! radicalnumerics.ai/ radicalnumerics.ai/blog/omni…

Today I smiled for real for the first time in more than 5 years. Thank you to the jury, judge, court officer and clerk. And of course to my rockstar legal team. I truly wish the best for everyone involved.

This man (Brendan "Shooter" Cuni) and his friends swarm your car and point guns at you. Quick! Are you being carjacked by gangsters or arrested by plainclothes federal agents? You have about ¼ second to decide. Trick question! It's both! He's already shot you.

How do I explain to my non-technical friends and family how insane “math day” is? I’m having trouble putting into words that don’t make it sound like I’m in a cult. 1/2

Hey, look, it’s a healthcare store…

The what now?! arxiv.org/abs/2610.06783v1

Why I Changed My Mind About AI Risk open.substack.com/pub/persua…

It's both funny and sad that, even as AI is solving Millennium problems, we're still having trouble with PDF parsing. Feeling much better about my failure to write a good special purpose parser in the 2010s. surgehq.ai/benchmarks/gdp-pd…

It's now legal to shoot people, lie about it, and flee to another state in the US (if you're a Fed)

I made it (well, almost) in this video from my @reason days. In the video I used gin, but I prefer rye. Recipe below!

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.? Because we gave them that L in 1776.

Thomas Jefferson submits the final draft of his Declaration of Independence to Continental Congress.