In the summer of 2007, in a lab at Stanford, someone switched on a laser and a mouse started walking in circles. Always the same direction, steady, like a speed skater on a bend. The laser went off and the mouse went back to sniffing around, with no sign that anything odd had happened.
The mouse had a thin optical fibre in its head and a gene from a pond alga inside some of its neurons. Blue light on, circles. Blue light off, normal mouse. On 5 October 2026 the science behind that trick won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann, and it has a name: optogenetics.
If you grew up on Futurama, you have seen a version of this. In “The Inhuman Torch”, fires keep breaking out wherever Bender goes, and everyone assumes he is the arsonist. The real cause is a creature made of solar fire, hiding inside him. The fires look like his doing. The switch is somewhere else, and it runs on light.
When the news broke, I went back to the papers behind the prize, and for almost every idea a Futurama scene came to mind. So I will use the show as a map. The Nobel Committee has not approved this.