Pure Science

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The AI generates gaming “fan fiction” to expand a game’s virtual world. I admit, since middle school, I’ve spent most of my downtime immersed in video games. There are the quintessential epics: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, World of...

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The company believes devices with a million topological qubits are possible. Many years ago, Microsoft committed itself to an exotic, high-risk approach to quantum computing. Now, as the company unveils its first prototype chip, it says...

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If true, then we’re more likely to find evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence in the future. A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial...

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Going beyond genetic letters, the results could transform medicine. Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do?...

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Artificial Intelligence Sam Altman Lays Out Roadmap for OpenAI’s Long-Awaited GPT-5 ModelBenj Edwards | Ars Technica “On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a roadmap for how the company plans to release GPT-5, the...

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The new tool, NanoCas, could extend gene therapies throughout the body. When the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 rocketed to fame more than a decade ago, it transformed biotechnology. Faster, cheaper, and safer than previous methods, the...

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Inefficient AI models guzzle energy. Then again, so do efficient ones—just for different reasons. DeepSeek has upended the AI industry, from the chips and money needed to train and run AI to the energy it’s expected to guzzle in the...

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The path to recent advanced AI systems has been more about building larger systems than making scientific breakthroughs. For most of artificial intelligence’s history, many researchers expected that building truly capable systems would...

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A watery past may have spurred the formation of life’s basic molecules. Life on Earth relies on molecular building blocks to make DNA and proteins. Scientists have long wondered how prevalent these precursors were at the birth of our...

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These were our favorite articles in science and tech this week. DeepMind Claims Its AI Performs Better Than International Mathematical Olympiad Gold Medalists Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch “AlphaGeometry2 perhaps demonstrates that the two...

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The company offered hackers $15,000 to crack the system. No one could. Despite considerable efforts to prevent AI chatbots from providing harmful responses, they’re vulnerable to jailbreak prompts that sidestep safety mechanisms....

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DeepSeek’s AI completes “reasoning” tasks in a flash on alternative chips from Groq and Cerebras. Champions aren’t forever. Last week, DeepSeek AI sent shivers down the spines of investors and tech companies alike with its high-flying...

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DeepSeek’s AI completes “reasoning” tasks in a flash on alternative chips from Groq and Cerebras. Champions aren’t forever. Last week, DeepSeek AI sent shivers down the spines of investors and tech companies alike with its high-flying...

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Ninety percent of drugs fail clinical trials. Can AI help? The potential of using artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development has sparked both excitement and skepticism among scientists, investors, and the general public....

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A new study swapped DNA letters inside mitochondria, paving the way for new gene therapies. The energy factories in our cells contain their own genes, and genetic mutations in them can cause deadly inherited diseases. These oblong-shaped...

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These were our favorite articles in science and tech this week. OpenAI in Talks to for New Funding at Up to $300 Billion Value Shirin Ghaffary, Rachel Metz, and Kate Clark | Bloomberg “The ChatGPT maker is in discussions to raise funds at...

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Drones that fly themselves, and don’t crash, are improving fast. Autonomous drones could revolutionize a wide range of industries. Now, scientists have designed a drone that can weave through dense forests, dodge thin power lines in dim...

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It’s a new way to create same-sex biological offspring—but the approach is not ready for humans. At first glance, the seven mice skittering around their cages look like other mice. But they have an unusual lineage: They were born with DNA...

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There’s a solid consensus among scientists on the question, according to a new survey. News stories about the likely existence of extraterrestrial life, and our chances of detecting it, tend to be positive. We are often told that we might...

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The study sheds light on one way these pesky particles may be detrimental to brain health. We’re not Barbie girls, but we live in a plastic world. Microplastics, tiny specks of broken-down plastic, are all around us. They hover in the...

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These were our favorite articles in science and tech this week. Open-Source DeepSeek-R1 Uses Pure Reinforcement Learning to Match OpenAI o1—at 95% Less Cost Shubham Sharma | VentureBeat “Based on the recently introduced DeepSeek...

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Analysis of 29.8 million cars found the median EV lasts 124,000 miles—8,000 more than a gasoline car. One of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of electric vehicles is concern about their shelf life. New research suggests the...

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Cancer cells steal from and poison the cells tasked with fighting them off. Cancers are sneaky infiltrators highly adept at cellular warfare. As they expand, the malignant cells chip away at the body’s immune defenses. How cancer cells...

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Our digital legacies don’t just preserve memories; they can continue to influence the world, long after we’re gone. Imagine attending a funeral where the person who has died speaks directly to you, answering your questions and sharing...

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Linking brains to machines has gone from science fiction to reality in the past two decades. When patient T5 suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed, his dream of flying a drone seemed forever out of reach. Now, thanks to a...

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These were our favorite articles in science and tech this week. OpenAI Has Created an AI Model for Longevity Science Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review “When you think of AI’s contributions to science, you probably think of...

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The bot does acrobatic double flips faster than a fruit fly and stays aloft 100 times longer than other robots. Rapid declines in insect populations are leading to concerns that the pollination of important crops could soon come under...

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It’s accurate and nearly as fast as expert human interpreters. The dream of a universal AI interpreter just got a bit closer. This week, tech giant Meta released a new AI that can almost instantaneously translate speech in 101 languages...

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Medog Hydropower Station, as it will be called, will blow other hydropower dams out of the water. China’s electricity use over the last 30 years is a hockey-stick curve, climbing steeply as the country industrialized, built dozens of...

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There’s a growing sense that developing practical fusion energy is no longer an if but a when. The way scientists think about fusion changed forever in 2022, when what some called the experiment of the century demonstrated for the first...

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Robots need an internal representation of the world and its rules like ours. If you’re not familiar with the concept of “world models” just yet, a storm of activity at the start of 2025 gives every indication it may soon become a...

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These were our favorite articles in science and tech this week. Google Is Forming a New Team to Build AI That Can Simulate the Physical World Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch “‘We believe scaling [AI training] on video and multimodal data is on...

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The company hopes to break SpaceX’s industry stranglehold with New Glenn. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin hopes to become a major rival to SpaceX in the private space industry. But those ambitions are on hold after the company...

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Scientists are grappling with the implications of a CRISPR-baby world. Bring up germline editing, and most scientists cringe. The idea behind the notorious CRISPR-baby scandal, editing reproductive cells or embryos tinkers with DNA far...

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When the boundary between us and the world softens, our sense of time expands. We all know that time seems to pass at different speeds in different situations. For example, time appears to go slowly when we travel to unfamiliar places. A...

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Interacting with AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be fun and sometimes useful, but the next level of everyday AI goes beyond answering questions: AI agents carry out tasks for you. Major technology companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft,...

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In the great AI gold rush of the past couple of years, Nvidia has dominated the market for shovels—namely the chips needed to train models. But a shift in tactics by many leading AI developers presents an opening for competitors. Nvidia...

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Breakthroughs in medicine are exciting. They promise to alleviate human suffering, sometimes on global scales. But it takes years, even decades, for new drugs and therapies to go from research to your medicine cabinet. Along the way, most...

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Every Saturday we post a selection of our favorite science and technology articles from the week. With 2024 nearing its end, we dug through all those posts again to surface 25 stories worth revisiting. Here you’ll find meditations on AI’s...

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Our hands are mirror images of each other. Unless you flip one hand around, they’ll never look the same. Scientists call this chirality, and the mirror-like property is fundamental to all life on Earth. DNA and RNA—life’s genetic...

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“We exist, and life exists on Earth, because of 12 to 14 inches of topsoil. When that goes away, we go away,” said James Ehrlich, director of compassionate sustainability at Stanford University. It was an offhand and exasperated tangent...

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This year, readers were again fascinated by stories about artificial intelligence. One algorithm learned to make short, playable video games from video footage; another cloned real people’s personalities; and yet another took on the role...

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Despite the hype around AI in recent years, the technology’s disruptive impact has been fairly modest. Experts say that’s likely to change next year as AI agents force their way into all aspects of our lives. Since the surprise success of...

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When human stem cells were discovered at the turn of the century, it sparked a frenzy. Scientists immediately dreamed of repairing damaged tissues due to aging or disease. A few decades later, their dreams are on the brink of coming true....

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We have only one example of biology forming in the universe—life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like? These questions are preoccupying...

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Brain implants have improved dramatically in recent years, but they’re still invasive and unreliable. A new kind of brain-machine interface using living neurons to form connections could be the future. While companies like Neuralink have...

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When Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122, her longevity had researchers scratching their heads. Although physically active for most of her life, she was also a regular smoker and enjoyed wine—lifestyle choices that are generally thought...

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Publishing is one of many fields poised for disruption by tech companies and artificial intelligence. New platforms and approaches, like a book imprint by Microsoft and a self-publishing tech startup that uses AI, promise to make...

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With a single shot, scientists protected pregnant mice from a deadly complication called pre-eclampsia. The shot, inspired by mRNA vaccines, contains mRNA instructions to make a protein that reverses damage to the placenta—which occurs in...

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Google’s New Project Astra Could Be Generative AI’s Killer App Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review “Last week I was taken through an unmarked door on an upper floor of a building in London’s King’s Cross...