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Artificial Intelligence

Third place: neurons in an expanded mouse brain

See the Scientific and the Mundane Become Surprisingly Dazzling When Viewed Through a Microscope, From Neurons to Ballpoint Pens

The Nikon Small World Competition has announced its photography winners for its 52nd annual contest. This comes weeks after its video winner was dethroned for use of generative A.I.

Researchers used artificial intelligence to read through old British port records.

A Vast New Database Shows How Britain Built a Global Empire by Trading Goods Like Coal, Wine and Wood Closer to Home

Using AI to comb through hundreds of thousands of handwritten pages of port records, historians have constructed an interactive map of Britain’s maritime trading routes. Even as it expanded in Asia and the Americas, Britain’s commerce with Europe remained overwhelming

Elephant rumbles include frequencies that are below the range of human hearing.

African Elephants Often Produce Choruses of Low-Pitched Rumbles. Now, Scientists Are Using A.I. to Decode the Joint Vocalizations

New research suggests the animals’ overlapping calls serve as coordinated group messages and may contain additional information beyond what’s encoded in individual rumbles

The view from low-Earth orbit

Google Wants to Send Data Centers to Space—and Just Launched an Experimental Satellite to Test Whether Its Ambitious Plan Will Work

The tech giant aims to use the near-constant sunlight available in low-Earth orbit to power data centers. The experimental satellite, launched October 1, holds four computer chips that can run Google’s Gemini A.I. for 15 minutes at a time

Researchers prompted around 950 A.I. agents to search through a massive DNA database.

Anthropic Says Its A.I. Discovered a New Enzyme System That Resembles the Revolutionary Gene-Editing Tool CRISPR

Experts at the company don’t know what the newfound system does, so its potential utility in biology—if any—remains unclear. But the work marks a major advancement because the A.I. made this discovery mostly on its own

MixFont's Decoy Font layers two messages on top of one another: The A.I. model reads "Sorry Robot," while the human can also read "Happy Human" behind it. 

Designers and Computer Scientists Create New Decoy Fonts That Humans Can Read but A.I. Bots Cannot

To prevent the trawling and theft of human writing, font-makers are employing both old and new illusions to outsmart large language models

Schizophrenia is difficult for psychiatrists to diagnose. Can artificial intelligence help do it better?

Could Artificial Intelligence Help With Early Diagnosis of Schizophrenia?

The tool may pick up subtle differences in the speech of people with the mental health condition better than human psychiatrists

The Navier-Stokes problem concerns equations of fluid motion, illustrated here as dye moving in liquid.

A.I. May Have Solved a Longstanding Math Problem With a Million-Dollar Prize. It Ignited a Controversy Over Who Gets Credit

OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem. But could its A.I. models have used data from two mathematicians working on a similar breakthrough?

Scientists studied the fossils of prehistoric relatives of katydids.

Scientists Recreated the Long-Lost Chirps of Jurassic Insects. Listen to the Simulated Soundscape of 165 Million Years Ago

With artificial intelligence and careful modeling of fossilized wings, researchers reproduced how some extinct, katydid-like insects might have made noise

Scientists used Evo, an AI tool that can suggest genome designs, to design new viruses. 

Scientists Used A.I. to Design New Viruses. The Technology Could Be a Boon for Medicine, but Experts Worry About Harmful Pathogens

The findings represent the first genomes, or complete genetic instruction books, designed entirely with generative A.I. The resulting viruses attack only bacteria, which could one day help overcome the problem of antibiotic-resistant microbes

Ambient Art London has seen an uptick in young adults joining the group’s mobile art events.

Why Gen Z Is Learning to Paint Like 19th-Century Artists

Paint groups are popping up in parks. Art schools are seeing a surge in applications. The rise of A.I. has people turning to more traditional art forms

The famed circular staircase at the Vatican Museums

Following Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical, the Vatican Announces a New Art Triennial Celebrating Human Creativity and Empathy in the Age of A.I.

More than 100 artists will showcase their art on four continents as the Catholic Church continues to emphasize human creativity and relationships over artificial intelligence tools

La Vista (1617), created by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, is one of the paintings held at The Prado that is reimagined in a new video.

A Total Solar Eclipse Is Coming to Spain. This Madrid Museum Is Celebrating With a Digital Artwork Illuminating Its Paintings ‘In the Light of the Eclipse’

A new animation from The Prado, called “El Prado a la luz del eclipse,” uses A.I. to imagine masterpieces by Goya and Velázquez as if their scenes occurred during a total solar eclipse

With Eco Purge, Arya Satheesh won the European category of the 2026 Earth Prize, the largest environmental competition in the world for young students. She was awarded $12,500 to continue to develop her prototype.

This High Schooler Invented a Plant-Based Plastic That Removes Microplastics From the Environment as It Biodegrades

Eighteen-year-old Arya Satheesh created her award-winning Eco Purge to help address the global problem of plastic pollution

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

A.I. Went to the Opera, Creating Images for an Anniversary Production of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ at the Theater Where He First Staged the Masterpiece

It took Richard Wagner a quarter-century to complete the four-part opera. The new production, called “10010110,” uses generative artificial intelligence to explore the artwork’s evolution

Three researchers from Santa Clara University hope their new A.I. chatbot makes it easier to research the provenance of art possibly looted by the Nazis, such as this painting at the Musée d’Orsay. 

To Recover Artworks Looted by the Nazis, Researchers Are Getting Creative, With New Strategies Including an A.I. Chatbot and a Campaign of ‘Wanted’ Posters

University researchers hope their new artificial intelligence chatbot makes provenance research easier and more accessible

Among medical fields, radiology has pioneered the adoption of A.I. tools. Yet combining the complementary strengths of human and machine intelligence is not straightforward.

How A.I. Will Reshape Radiology—Without Replacing Radiologists

Human experience and flexibility are still necessary even as digital diagnostic tools improve

An A.I. model from Anthropic helped disprove a longstanding conjecture in mathematics.

A.I. Disproves a Decades-Old Mathematical Idea, the ‘Biggest Conjecture’ That the Tech Has Played a Role in Yet

A mathematician announced that he used one of Anthropic’s A.I. models to find a counterexample to a problem called the Jacobian conjecture. While experts consider it a milestone, the work raises questions about the future of mathematical research

Hold music is an audible reminder that our time has value, just not always to the company keeping us waiting.

A Brief History of Hold Music, From Early Patents to the Soundtrack of Customer-Service Purgatory

Sixty years ago, Alfred A. Levy patented his “telephone hold program system.” Little did he know a teenager’s unearthed New Age practice tape would become its enduring anthem

Overall, the 16 participants of the study were “largely positive” about their interactions with griefbots, the scientists write in the paper.

Would You Chat With an A.I. ‘Ghost’ of a Deceased Loved One? New Research Suggests That the Tech Can Provide Comfort and Closure

Commercial “griefbots” are becoming more popular, and many experts have questions about their psychological and ethical impacts. A new study aims to ensure that the bots are designed responsibly

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