Week In Review The Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting in Boston set the agenda this week, and the headline from it was commercial rather than academic. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, whose GLP-1 drugs are among the best-selling medicines in history, each presented molecular evidence that their products slow
Week In Review The most consequential story of the week came from inside a brain implant company’s engineering blog rather than a journal. Neuralink reported that pretraining neural encoders on 50,000 hours of unlabeled recordings from its trial participants produced decoders that stay usable for weeks instead of
Week In Review The week’s most striking results came from mathematics and the physical sciences, where the question shifted from whether models can do research to which research they are shaped for. Meta’s research group published six papers solving open mathematical problems with Muse Spark, each marking which
Week In Review The week’s most telling stories were about robots being measured in hours rather than seconds. Dyna Robotics ran its new wheeled semi-humanoid, Taku, through an hour-long autonomous laundry workflow that spanned washer, dryer, folding, and shelving with no human touch. Nucleus, a European startup, went further
Week In Review The week belonged to Starship. On September 28 the vehicle reached orbit for the first time and released 26 third-generation Starlink satellites, its first operational payload, before both stages came back down under control (Starship returns to Earth; rocket splashes down north of Hawaii after three-hour flight)
Week In Review The week belonged to large nuclear. South Korea and the United States signed a framework that, according to ANS Nuclear Newswire, commits $120 billion to eight gigawatt-class reactors on federal sites, six Westinghouse AP1000s and two Korean APR1400s, with a $10 billion advance payment due before year’
Week In Review The week’s strongest thread is the ground beneath us being re-read as a richer source than it looked. The US Department of Energy put $29.5 million into 17 national-laboratory mining projects that share a single premise: the cheapest new mine is often the ore we
Week In Review The week’s strongest thread is that aging is a property of the whole body, not of any single organ, and that the body pulls its parts toward its own age. The clearest demonstration came from Harvard, where transplanted hearts shifted toward their recipients’ molecular age: young
Week In Review The week’s strongest thread was an unusually concrete look at how humans and AI systems divide up intellectual work, with science as the test bed. The largest single result came from a study pitting 25 language models against 73 human researchers on the full cycle of
Week In Review The week of September 21 to 27 offered the clearest example yet of AI agents producing a scientific result on their own. Anthropic’s new life sciences group reported that roughly 950 Claude agents, running for 21 hours over a database of more than 200,000 reverse
Week In Review The week’s robotics news was dominated by the factory floor, and for once the factory floor was where the substance was. The International Federation of Robotics reported that five million industrial robots are now at work worldwide, more than double the count of seven years ago,
Week In Review The strongest thread this week is origins, read from chemistry. A Webb transit spectrum of TOI-6894 b, a temperate sub-Saturn orbiting the lowest-mass star known to host a transiting giant, found an atmosphere whose elemental ratios match Jupiter and Saturn, which argues that giant planets form by