Science

17 entries

September 23, 2026Science The Frontier

AI Chatbot Company Says Its AI Spotted an Unknown Set of Genes in Viruses, and Its Lab Confirmed They're Active

Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude chatbot, says hundreds of copies of Claude combing through DNA databases noticed an unusual group of genes in viruses that infect bacteria, something no one had described before. Human scientists in the company's new lab confirmed that part of the system is active. What the system actually does is still unknown.

September 16, 2026Science

Researchers Build an AI That Matches Surgery X-Rays to a Patient's 3D Scan in Seconds

In many small-incision operations, doctors steer thin tools through the body while watching flat X-ray images, and working out exactly where a tool sits in three dimensions is hard. Researchers at MIT and partner hospitals describe an AI program that lines those X-rays up with the patient's earlier 3D scan in seconds, to within less than a millimeter. It has been tested on existing patient records, not yet in live operations.

September 11, 2026Science Conversations

Twenty-Five Winners of Mathematics' Highest Prize Warn That AI Companies Are Treating Their Field as a Scoreboard

In a joint declaration published today, 25 winners of the Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics, say the race by AI companies to solve famous math problems as proof of their programs' power is "detrimental to the science of mathematics." They are not asking for the tools to stop. Their argument is that solving problems was only ever a way to reach understanding, and that hurried AI answers, announced without proper write-ups or credit, risk breaking the chain by which ideas pass from one mathematician to the next.

September 8, 2026Science The Frontier

OpenAI Says Its AI Solved One of Mathematics' Seven Great Unsolved Problems

The company reports that 10,000 AI agents working for 88 hours produced a proof about the equations describing how fluids move — a problem open since the 1930s and worth a million-dollar prize. Mathematicians are checking it, and a dispute over credit has already started.

September 8, 2026Science

Google Publishes an AI Map Predicting the Effect of Every Possible One-Letter Change in Human DNA

Google DeepMind today opened a free website for researchers that predicts what would happen if any single letter of the human genetic code were swapped for another: about 9 billion possible changes in all. It could help scientists find the hidden genetic causes of rare diseases, but it is a research tool, not a medical test.

September 3, 2026Science

Google's New AI Weather Forecaster Updates Every Hour, Straight From Satellite Pictures

Google today released WeatherNext 3, an AI program that forecasts the weather for the whole planet. Instead of waiting on the big computer simulations most forecasts start from, it reads live satellite pictures and makes a fresh forecast every hour, in much finer detail than Google's last version. It will power the weather you see in Google Search and Google Maps.

August 9, 2026Science

Mathematicians Say They've Solved the Last Holdout in a 40-Year-Old Puzzle, With AI Helping Along the Way

Six mathematicians today posted a paper that finds an ordinary equation hiding a rare symmetry pattern called M23, the last of 26 unusual patterns that had never been matched to such an equation. They write that they used AI chatbots throughout the research, but checked the final answer with standard math software and no AI.

June 24, 2026Science

Science

AI Chatbot Company Says Its AI Spotted an Unknown Set of Genes in Viruses, and Its Lab Confirmed They're Active

Researchers Build an AI That Matches Surgery X-Rays to a Patient's 3D Scan in Seconds

Twenty-Five Winners of Mathematics' Highest Prize Warn That AI Companies Are Treating Their Field as a Scoreboard

OpenAI Says Its AI Solved One of Mathematics' Seven Great Unsolved Problems

Google Publishes an AI Map Predicting the Effect of Every Possible One-Letter Change in Human DNA

Google's New AI Weather Forecaster Updates Every Hour, Straight From Satellite Pictures

Mathematicians Say They've Solved the Last Holdout in a 40-Year-Old Puzzle, With AI Helping Along the Way

A Fusion Company Gets the World's First License to Build a Power Plant

A Satellite Runs AI in Orbit and Identifies What It Sees Before Sending Anything Down

AI Programs From OpenAI and Google Score Gold-Medal Level at the World's Hardest Math Olympiad

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry Goes to the Team Whose AI Predicts the Shape of Proteins

The Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to Two Researchers for the Foundations of Machine Learning

A Paralyzed Man Plays Chess With His Mind, Using Neuralink's Brain Implant

Elon Musk's Brain-Implant Company Says It Has Placed Its First Chip in a Human

DeepMind Releases the Predicted Shapes of Nearly Every Human Protein, Free

An AI Solves a Fifty-Year-Old Biology Problem: Predicting the Shape of a Protein

NASA Finds an Eighth Planet Around a Distant Star, With Help From Google's AI