Science & Space · Page 4
AI accelerating research, exploring space and decoding the natural world
OpenAI's AI Solved 10 Hard Maths Problems. Now Mathematicians Are Asking What Their Jobs Are Worth.
A new OpenAI model cracked decade-old maths puzzles that stumped human researchers for years. The credit dispute around one of them is a warning about how AI labs talk about the people whose work they build on.
Forget Silicon: Scientists Are Building the Next Generation of Computing From Living Brain Cells
Lab-grown blobs of human neurons are playing video games, guiding robots through mazes, and hinting at a future where 'artificial' intelligence is made of flesh, not chips.
University AI researchers are being squeezed out of their own field
The cutting edge of AI has moved from campuses to private labs. Academics at a recent Schmidt Sciences gathering described a field that's harder to fund, harder to study, and harder to justify than before.
This startup uses AI to hunt for chip materials that run cooler
Discovered Materials raised $9 million to deploy AI agents that test thousands of potential new chip materials a day, aiming to cut the heat that makes data centres so expensive to run.
A Peer Reviewer Missed the Point of a Vaccine Study. AI Might Make That Worse.
When a health economist found that school HPV vaccine mandates barely move the needle on cervical cancer rates, his peer reviewer thought he was attacking the vaccine itself. That kind of misread is common. AI-generated reviews could make it routine.
Science's next AI leap will come from reasoning agents, not data-hungry models like AlphaFold
AlphaFold was a landmark, but the conditions that made it possible took 53 years and $21 billion to build. For most of science, a different kind of AI, one that reasons and experiments step by step, is already showing what comes next.
NASA-Backed GeoAI Package Lets Researchers Run Satellite Analysis With a Few Lines of Python
A free, open-source tool aims to bring AI-driven mapping and satellite image analysis to scientists who have no machine-learning background, with funding from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Google DeepMind's AI Gave Jamaica an Extra Day to Prepare for a Category 5 Hurricane
A new storm-forecasting model predicted Hurricane Melissa would strike Jamaica five days out, a full day earlier than older tools could manage. A paper in Nature says the AI works in ways even its own creators cannot fully explain.
AI Designed Working Viruses From Scratch. Here's What That Actually Means
Stanford researchers used a large genome model to generate functional bacteriophage viruses. The viruses work. They're not weapons. But the same researchers are asking whether we should plan ahead before someone builds a version that targets humans.
Google DeepMind's WeatherNext Gives Forecasters a Full Extra Day to Warn People About Cyclones
The lab is releasing code and model weights for a system that predicted Hurricane Melissa's rapid strengthening and Jamaica landfall during the 2025 hurricane season.
37 Researchers Say Science Should Stop Writing Papers for Humans and Start Writing Them for AI
A new proposal wants to replace the traditional scientific paper with a format built around AI agents. The researchers behind it say the 350-year-old PDF is holding science back.
Weather balloons meet AI: WindBorne raises $37 million to sell smarter forecasts
The startup runs 600 balloons around the globe to collect data that even satellites miss. Now it wants to sell that edge to private businesses, not just governments.
A start-up wants to replace undersea internet cables with space lasers
Endeavor Optical Networks has raised $10.75 million to beam data between continents using laser-equipped satellites, aiming for speeds that rival the fibre cables on the ocean floor.
Satellites Are Multiplying Fast. AI May Be the Only Way to Keep Them Running
With up to 70,000 new satellites possible in the next five years, human operators alone can't keep pace. A space industry veteran explains what AI can do in orbit, and why the rules haven't caught up yet.
Your AI Data Map Has a Hidden Layer. Researchers Want to Use It.
A study from Apple ML Research shows that a structure AI tools quietly build while organising data can reveal far more than the scatter plots researchers usually look at.