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Category: Science/mathematics

The new science that has oil companies running scared

The new science that has oil companies running scared

Jeff Goodell writes: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Suncor Energy, Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case that could give fossil fuel companies a get-out-of-jail-free card for the harms caused by climate change. That is not exactly how Kannon Shanmugam — who represents Suncor and Exxon Mobil, another petitioner in the case — framed the argument. He said that dozens of active lawsuits that use state tort law to sue fossil fuel companies…

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National Science Foundation diverted $1.4 billion in funds mandated by Congress

National Science Foundation diverted $1.4 billion in funds mandated by Congress

The New York Times reports: The National Science Foundation, one of the biggest sources of federal research funding, withheld $1.4 billion that Congress had intended for research over the course of the past year, according to internal data reviewed by The New York Times. The extraordinary move — holding back about one-fifth of the N.S.F.’s primary research budget — is the latest sign of how the Trump administration is finding creative ways to work around Congress. Lawmakers from both parties…

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A CERN for AI

A CERN for AI

Elliot Jones, Senior Researcher, Ada Lovelace Institute, writes: Efforts such as the UK’s AI Safety Summit, and the follow-up AI Seoul Summit, have aimed to start an international discussion around AI safety and have led to the creation of national AI safety institutes in the UK, the US, Japan and Canada. There is a shared ambition to create an international AI safety network, and these institutes have begun to sign bilateral cooperation agreements. However, there is not currently a single,…

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Did Anthropic’s AI genuinely make a scientific discovery on its own?

Did Anthropic’s AI genuinely make a scientific discovery on its own?

The New York Times reports: When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used A.I. agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology. Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years. Dr….

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In an $80 motel room, a discovery sheds light on the origins of life

In an $80 motel room, a discovery sheds light on the origins of life

The New York Times reports: On a spring day last year, Andrew Willoughby drove three and a half hours to a cheap motel in Nags Head, N.C. From the parking lot, he texted a stranger he had met online. Julia Van Etten appeared, ushering him past a “Do Not Disturb” sign into one of the motel’s $80 rooms, which she had secretly turned into a makeshift lab. Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh…

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Four Islamic polymaths prove breadth beats specialisation

Four Islamic polymaths prove breadth beats specialisation

Mariam Sabri writes: This semester, my students are learning about four polymaths who shaped Islamic science: al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different: one wrote his way out of scarcity; one was held under house arrest for a decade; one distilled an era’s medical knowledge into a text that ruled European universities for 500 years; and the last worked at the largest research institution of his age. But each shared the same underlying instinct:…

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Why rivers are so mathematical

Why rivers are so mathematical

Natalie Wolchover writes: A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for generations, as I have on countless summer days. The Blanco is a tributary of the San Marcos, which flows into the Guadalupe, and on into the Gulf of Mexico. You can probably…

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More than half of Earth’s migratory bird species are declining – here’s how we can still save them

More than half of Earth’s migratory bird species are declining – here’s how we can still save them

The spoon-billed sandpiper, a small wading bird, flies nearly 5,000 miles (8,000 km) on its annual migration. Tareq’s Photography/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Peter P. Marra, Georgetown University and Nathan W. Cooper, Smithsonian Institution Every year, billions of migratory birds connect the world’s continents, oceans and ecosystems as they undertake epic journeys between their foraging habitats and their breeding grounds. A bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) leaves its breeding grasslands of North America for the Pampas of South America. A Newell’s shearwater (Puffinus…

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OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

Scientific American reports: OpenAI’s newest chatbot may be a whiz at math, but it seems to be lagging far behind humans in its academic rigor. Last week the company announced 10 more artificial-intelligence-generated math advances that were found during internal development and testing of its next major large language model. This batch of results came from that LLM, Astra, and each one resolves or progresses a different “long-standing open problem” of “substantial interest” to the mathematical community. The company said…

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Can we stop AI from flooding scientific journals?

Can we stop AI from flooding scientific journals?

C&EN reports: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic,” begins a retracted paper in the Elsevier journal Surfaces and Interfaces. This is one of ChatGPT’s standard openers when responding to a user prompt. The researcher submitted the manuscript beginning with this line, and it passed peer review. No one noticed the mistake until after publication. Publishing is crucial for many scientists’ careers, especially those in academia, and a key part of securing jobs, funding, and tenure. The pressure…

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The extinction of dinosaurs, along with most other species, may have happened in less than two hours

The extinction of dinosaurs, along with most other species, may have happened in less than two hours

Popular Science reports: The reign of the dinosaurs undisputedly came to a dramatic conclusion 66 million years ago, after the six-mile-wide Chicxulub asteroid slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. However, the exact timeline of their extinction remains a matter of debate. Did most of the Earth’s species die a slow death of starvation after a dust-choked atmosphere blocked sunlight and ushered in a prolonged winter? Or did they quickly incinerate from globe-spanning wildfires sparked by falling, superheated space…

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How Trump’s ‘America First’ administration could shut U.S. scientists out of the next Nobel-worthy discovery

How Trump’s ‘America First’ administration could shut U.S. scientists out of the next Nobel-worthy discovery

By Lisa Song This story was originally published by ProPublica For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe. They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself. The leading theory stated that particles got their mass from interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field,…

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Is the wizard of AI ever going to pull back the curtain?

Is the wizard of AI ever going to pull back the curtain?

Science reports: Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research. Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never…

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Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

The Verge reports: The Trump administration unveiled the first “Genesis Mission” grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.” At roughly the same time, Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: “A New Golden Age” of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy and…

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‘Climate free fall’: Why the biggest risk to our economies is yet to be recognized

‘Climate free fall’: Why the biggest risk to our economies is yet to be recognized

Anders Levermann writes: I have studied climate tipping points for more than 20 years, and I’m increasingly concerned that scientists have overlooked the most dangerous aspect of these for societies. The potential collapse of major parts of the Earth system — from ice sheets to ocean circulations — will profoundly alter the warming planet and tip it irreversibly into a different state. But the greatest risks might not lie at that endpoint. How we get there — how the tipping…

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Here’s why weather forecasts have seemed so inaccurate lately

Here’s why weather forecasts have seemed so inaccurate lately

Gizmodo reports: Is there anything more annoying than leaving the house in shorts and flip flops, only to get caught in an unexpected downpour? The weather report is rarely spot-on, but if forecasts have seemed particularly inaccurate recently, it’s because they have been. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was among several agencies gutted by the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in 2025. That February, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management abruptly fired 880 NOAA employees. Two months…

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