Science & Space
AI accelerating research, exploring space and decoding the natural world
Google is putting $40 million of AI credits into America's national science labs
The Genesis Mission gets access to AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve and Gemini, and one lab has already cut a 90-minute task down to 13 minutes.
US Government to Spend $5 Billion Using AI to Crack Chronic Disease and Drug Discovery
Fifteen federal agencies will share the funding and gain access to powerful government supercomputers to run AI experiments on some of science's hardest problems.
Apple Researchers Found a Smarter Way to Make AI Video Generation Much Faster
A new technique from Apple ML Research cuts the time it takes AI to turn text prompts into video, by teaching the model to skip calculations it doesn't actually need.
The secret ingredient keeping AI running: advanced materials science
Chips and software grab the headlines, but a quieter race is under way in the labs developing the physical materials that let AI hardware exist at all.
AI Could Mistake Dead Rocks for Alien Life, New Research Warns
Scientists tested an AI on simulated lifeforms and fooled it every single time. That's a problem if we plan to use AI to hunt for microbes on Mars or in the clouds of Venus.
Researchers Build a Test to See If AI Can Actually Summarise a 16-Minute Video
A new benchmark called LVSum reveals how badly today's AI video tools lose track of when things happen in long recordings.
Apple Researchers Build a Smarter Way for AI to Understand 3D Space
A new technique called RayRoPE helps AI models figure out where things are in the world by using rays of light, not just flat coordinates. It is a quiet but meaningful step toward AI that truly understands physical space.
Jeff Bezos and the UK Government Just Bet $450 Million on a Startup That Hunts for New Materials Using AI
Cambridge-based CuspAI wants to be the search engine for rare materials, cutting the time and cost of finding the physical stuff that powers chips, batteries and beyond.
First wildfire-detecting satellites reach orbit as fires rage across North America
Three purpose-built microsatellites launched on 7 July 2026, promising to spot small fires across every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice a day before the year is out.
Do AI Models Really Need to Forget Everything? Apple Researchers Say No
A new study finds that much of what we ask AI to 'unlearn' barely mattered to the model in the first place, which could cut the cost of privacy fixes dramatically.
Someone Used a Hairdryer to Fake a Weather Reading. AI Could Make That a Lot Worse.
A tampered thermometer at a Paris airport paid out $20,000 to a gambler. Experts warn that as AI takes over weather forecasting, this kind of data sabotage gets harder to catch and far more dangerous.
Babies Learn Faster Than the World's Most Powerful AI. Scientists Want to Know Why.
A new test pits cutting-edge AI models against toddler-level perception, and the toddlers win. Researchers say studying infant brains could make AI cheaper, greener, and smarter.
SpaceX Stock Slips Below Its IPO Price Just Weeks After Going Public
The company's shares dropped under $135 on Wednesday, and a Starship rocket test on Thursday could push them further in either direction.
Inside Shippy: How an Ocean-Monitoring AI Agent Was Built to Be Trusted, Not Just Smart
The team behind Skylight's maritime AI explains why reliability, not raw intelligence, was the hardest engineering problem they faced.
South Korean Researchers Used AI to Design DNA That Folds Itself into Tiny Shapes
A new AI model cuts the hardest part out of DNA origami, the decades-old technique for sculpting genetic material into nanoscale structures with medical and scientific uses.