Outpoll | Outpoll Weekly Recap: Science (February 16

Science

This week in science felt like a direct download from the future, with prediction markets buzzing over two seismic shifts at the intersection of biology and artificial intelligence. The biggest surge came from the AI-driven protein design sector, where a consortium led by DeepMind and a scrappy Swiss biotech startup both announced breakthroughs in de novo enzyme creation for plastic degradation.Markets tracking synthetic biology ETFs saw a 22% probability spike on Outpoll, reflecting a bet that we're months, not years, from a commercially viable, engineered organism that can digest polyethylene terephthalate at scale. This isn't just incremental; it's a paradigm shift in our approach to the microplastics crisis, moving from mitigation to active, biological remediation.The second major pulse was in neuroprosthetics. A team out of Stanford published a preprint detailing a novel brain-computer interface (BCI) that achieved a record-breaking 99.2% accuracy in decoding attempted speech from neural signals in a patient with locked-in syndrome. The prediction market for 'FDA approval of a consumer BCI for communication by 2030' jumped 18 points to a 65% likelihood.What's fascinating here is the convergence: the AI models interpreting the neural signals are now leveraging architectures similar to those used in large language models, treating brain activity as a novel language to be translated. This blurs the line between treating disability and enhancing human capability, raising immediate ethical questions that the markets are only starting to price in, with related policy prediction contracts seeing increased volatility. Meanwhile, on the climate front, a quiet but steady climb in contracts betting on the viability of next-generation perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells hints at a brewing materials science revolution that could redefine energy economics by decade's end.

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Outpoll Weekly Recap: Science (February 16 – 22, 2026)