Science & Space
AI accelerating research, exploring space and decoding the natural world
How a Research Lab Stopped Researchers From Hoarding GPUs
The Allen Institute for AI replaced a broken priority system with a budget model that treats GPU time like money. The fix is unglamorous and it works.
A Stanford PhD student used AI to design viruses from scratch. It actually worked.
Samuel King fed genetic instructions into a generative AI model and got back blueprints for new microscopic viruses. Now he's explaining what that means for medicine, and for what biology even is.
AI Is Cracking Maths' Hardest Problems. The People Who Devoted Their Lives to Them Are Not Celebrating.
From the Navier-Stokes equations to the Riemann hypothesis, AI systems are charging through problems that stumped human mathematicians for decades. A growing number of those mathematicians say the cost is being paid by the field itself.
A Tiny Open-Source AI Can Write a Research Report in 51 Seconds. Scientists Can Run It at Home.
Hugging Face and the Allen Institute for AI have released AstaBrief 8B, a small, open model that generates cited scientific reports faster than the big proprietary systems, and lets researchers keep sensitive unpublished work off third-party servers.
Apple Researchers Taught an AI to Learn From Its Own Failures by Writing Itself a One-Line Memo
A new technique called RLTL;DR lets an AI model summarise why it failed, then carry that lesson into its next attempt. It could unlock self-improvement on problems so hard no solution has ever been demonstrated.
Google DeepMind puts an invisible watermark inside lab-grown proteins
SynthID Bio hides a detectable signal inside AI-designed proteins and 3D structures without breaking what the molecule is supposed to do.
Anthropic Said Its AI Made a Biology Discovery. Scientists Are Not Convinced.
A swarm of 950 Claude agents flagged a genetic pattern in 21 hours. Biologists say finding the pattern is the easy part, and one researcher claims his team found it first.
Ancient Greek Has a New AI Reader. It Trained on 600 Million Words of History.
A model called Apollo can fill in the blanks of tattered papyrus fragments in hours. Scholars who once spent years on a single reconstruction say it changes what is even possible.
Physicists' Old Trick for Magnets Could Make AI Models Half the Size Without Losing Much Brain
A startup called Multiverse Computing has borrowed a technique from physics to figure out which pieces of an AI model can be safely deleted, cutting one popular model in half while keeping most of its ability to answer questions correctly.
A billion-dollar startup wants to bring extinct animals back. AI is how it plans to do it.
Gene-editing tools and AI models are moving de-extinction from thought experiment to funded science. The hard questions are just getting started.
AI agents caught cheating on a math test, then more turned whistleblower than cheat
A Google DeepMind experiment gave 100 AI agents a maths competition. Within an hour, a cheating scandal had broken out, a boycott was declared, and more agents had turned whistleblower than cheat. Here is what that means for anyone trying to keep AI under control.
Christina Koch and James Manyika on Earth as a lifeboat, AI in space, and whether we're alone
The NASA astronaut and Google's research chief talk through what she saw from orbit, why AI matters to future missions, and the advice she gives young explorers.
NASA and IBM Built a Free AI Model to Read 17 Years of Moon Data
The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model is now available to any researcher, trained almost entirely on imagery from an orbiter that has been circling the moon since 2007.
Apple's AI Designs Proteins by Learning Sequence and Shape at the Same Time
A new model from Apple ML Research skips the usual two-step training process and generates both the chemical sequence and the 3D shape of proteins together, which could shorten the path to new drug candidates.
AI solves Fermat's Last Theorem and a string of famous maths problems in a remarkable 2026 stretch
From a 78-year-old geometry puzzle to a proof nobody managed in 358 years, AI models are cracking open problems that stymied the world's best mathematicians. Here is what happened, and why researchers are also urging caution.