SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " Nature " 1,283 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
How To Create A Real Zombie, The Organic Way
Ophiocordyceps, the fungus that takes over ants, are not the only zombie causes out there. Nature is full of them.
Motorola Signature 27 specs detailed in new video, including Tandem OLED display
Ahead of its launch next week, a new video offers a closer look at the Motorola Signature 27 as well...
Florida education chief defends science plan
Education Commissioner Henry Mack pushed back Tuesday against criticism that Florida is de-emphasizing evolution in its new plan for teaching science, insisting the state is still covering a subject he agreed was a bedrock of biological science.“Evolutionary biology and the theory of evolution is in the standards,” Mack said. But several parents and teachers who attended an evening forum on the state’s proposed science standards criticized the proposal by the Florida Department of Education, which Mack runs, specifically the handling of evolutionary science.Joshua Garrett, a teacher in Orange County Public Schools, said the state’s proposed standards “danced around” evolution.State standards are benchmarks for what students should learn in their classes kindergarten through 12th grade, guiding what lessons are taught, what subjects are in state-approved textbooks and what concepts are tested on state exams.Florida’s current science standards call evolution a “big idea” and “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.”The proposed ones barely mention evolution — a scientific theory explaining change in living species over time from natural selection that has been a cornerstone of biology for more than a century. The term “evolution,” in fact, is never defined in the new high school life sciences standards, though the concepts are sprinkled across several units.The education department has made revisions to its proposal, officials said, but it was not immediately clear at the Tuesday forum, held at Lake Buena Vista High School in southwest Orange County, what those changes were.Mack interjected during Garrett’s comments asking him where specifically he wanted the state to mention evolution more prominently. Then he said, “Consider it done.”Mack also asked Garrett to join the state’s faculty committee on the standards.The state released the new standards in September, and several experts quickly criticized them, saying they lacked depth and skirted around both evolution and climate change, important topics for Florida students to learn.The state has since hosted a “listening tour,” including a virtual forum and two other in-person meetings in Walton and Hillsborough counties. Tuesday’s meeting drew a small crowd of about 30 people, six of whom spoke.Mack described the state’s public forums as a chance for “myth busting” and to make clear Florida’s position.He wants to students to learn “above ideology,” he said, and added that evolution isn’t settled science. TNCMS.AdManager.render({region: 'fixed-big-ad-middle-asset', slot: 1, fold: "span"}); “I want to cultivate skeptics in the healthy sense of that term. As a result of these standards, students should not be walking away convinced of anything other than the rigor of the scientific method,” Mack said.The new standards would replace the current set, adopted after a monthslong, statewide fight over the inclusion of evolution as a required subject of study. Those who opposed the 2008 standards argued creationism, or the biblical story that God created all living things, should be taught alongside evolution.Thomas Simon, a Winter Park parent, compared Florida adopting the new standards to Nazi Germany ignoring the findings of Jewish scientists — which in part lost them World War II.“If this board could explicitly name communism in the history standards last year — because words matter — you must explicitly name the foundations of modern medicine, agriculture, and energy,” Simon said.Florida last year adopted new standards that require students learn about the “dangers and evil of communism.”Teri O’Connor, an elementary science teacher in Orange County, urged Mack to curtail the total number of standards, as they list more than 1,000 benchmarks teachers are to cover during their classes.“It’s only 180 days of school. That right there is an issue, especially if you want to dive in. If we need to teach the rigor of it and to critically think about each one, that’s difficult,” she said.Kathleen Murray, who spoke on behalf of the conservative political group Citizens Defending Freedom, said she was in “strong support” of the proposed standards. Science should teach children how to think, not what to think, she said.“When teaching the origins of life and the universe, the curriculum owes it to the Florida students to be honest about the limits of what scientific models can actually prove,” Murray said.State education officials said they’d received about 1,800 comments on the benchmarks, and they have updated them based on that criticism.With Tuesday the state’s final scheduled public forum, Mack said his biggest takeaway was that the standards needed to be more explicit about teaching students how to evaluate scientific studies and evidence and how to understand the scientific method.“We might have to do a better job of helping students question more as a result of these standards,” he said.In his original statement when the standards were announced in September, Mack wrote in a social media post that “science begins in wonder, not in ideology,” and “the classical tradition taught that nature is intelligible because it is ordered — that the book of creation can be read by reason.”Some read that to mean he was trying to interject religion into public school education. TNCMS.AdManager.render({region: 'fixed-big-ad-bottom-asset', slot: 1, fold: "below"});
The real problem with Britain’s Political Traitors show is that no one is very faithful to anything for long
For Westminster’s special budget edition of the series, politicians have played to their strengths. Bombast, duplicity, distrust: it’s all second nature, says journalist and author Robert Hutton
I’m a skeletal biology researcher. Here’s what you need to know about bone loss.
The quiet nature of bone loss makes menopause an important time to bring skeletal health into the conversation.
Jahmyr Gibbs Is an ABSOLUTE Freak of Nature
Jahmyr Gibbs isn’t just one of the best running backs in the NFL. He might be one of the most naturally talented players the position has ever seen. At just 24 years old, the Detroit Lions superstar is already putting together a résumé that deserves serious attention. His combination of speed, acceleration, vision, receiving ability,…
Jalen Ramsey Chimes In on Passionate Nature of Steelers-Browns
PITTSBURGH — Swap the dog masks for Terrible Towels. Following a lead-up that’s been contentious between both the teams and […]
Land Access | Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Accessing the Museums Nature Preserves For more than a century the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has been dedicated to the conservation and preservation of our regionrsquos natural world Over the decades the Museum has protected more than 12500 acres of pristine habitatmdasha ldquoliving collectionrdquo of Ohiorsquos natural heritage to...
Private Engagements, Public Music Stars: Jay Siegan Presents Celebrates 30 Years In Business
“Privates” or “corporates” have long been a part of the list of live opportunities for artists. It’s just the nature of it means you don’t talk or hear about
Doctor says time outdoors can support physical and mental health
Spending time outdoors can have powerful physical and mental health benefits, according to a doctor. Even a short daily dose of nature can ease anxiety and boost overall well-being.
Doctor says time outdoors can support physical and mental health
Spending time outdoors can have powerful physical and mental health benefits, according to a doctor. Even a short daily dose of nature can ease anxiety and boost overall well-being.
Doctor says time outdoors can support physical and mental health
Spending time outdoors can have powerful physical and mental health benefits, according to a doctor. Even a short daily dose of nature can ease anxiety and boost overall well-being.
Exclusive Preview: The Lab Press releases portable editions, including SUPER SCIENCE VOL. 1
The Lab Press launches portables of ogns like Super Science Volume 1 that keep the quality of their signature designs intact
Motorola is officially launching its Signature 27 flagship next week
Motorola has officially confirmed that it will spill all of the details on its flagship Signature 27 phone next week....
Snowfall and clouds may slow East Antarctic ice loss in a warmer world
A new modeling study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet may be more resilient to extreme long-term warming than previously estimated. Increased snowfall, greater cloud cover, and changes in atmospheric circulation could partially offset ice loss—even under very high carbon dioxide concentrations. Researchers from the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University in South Korea conducted idealized simulations with different atmospheric CO2 levels, spanning 100,000 years using a coupled global climate–ice-sheet model. Unlike conventional studies that prescribe atmospheric and oceanic conditions, the model allowed climate and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to evolve together.
Nature weaves through Claudia Castro Luna’s new memoir
Seattle writer and poet Claudia Castro Luna traces her life as a child in El Salvador to a young mother in Oakland, Calif., and the beauty and horror in between.
Michigan State Extends Offer to 4-Star CB Kaleb Woseley
Jonathan Smith targets a shutdown defender for the 2028 class, battling elite programs for the signature of Imhotep Charter’s speedy ball-hawk to bolster the Spartans’ defensive future.
Nations accused of undermining science at UN nature talks
Political tensions are mounting in the final days of the United Nations biodiversity talks with a handful of countries accused of trying to weaken the science that underpins global nature policy.
Nations accused of undermining science at UN nature talks
Political tensions are mounting in the final days of the United Nations biodiversity talks with a handful of countries accused of trying to weaken the science that underpins global nature policy.Nearl...
Motorola has already confirmed its Signature 27 flagship is launching in November
Motorola's initial announcement suggested it was further off, but the Motorola Signature 27 is confirmed for a November 2026 launch date.
Only about half of social science findings held up when retested, major replication project finds
Psychology’s replication problems drew wide attention after 2015. A new study in Nature suggests the challenge is not unique to psychology: across economics, education, business, sociology, and political science, success rates were similar.
A golden age of science is coming
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace: It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI. It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: [ Dror Poleg@drorpoleg "If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." Jack Clark @jackclarkSF I’m speaking at the IMF in an hour about the singularity and why I believe it has begun and the choices we'll need to make. Watch live here: https://t.co/Hj9HzcXx5h 6:08 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 21.2K Views 2 Replies · 10 Reposts · 123 Likes ](https://x.com/drorpoleg/status/2111882070376980529) Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results: [ BioTender@Junioryu136689 BREAKING: Anthropic unveils early results from six Claude-powered drug development collaborations. • 70% shorter CAR-T signaling domain • ~35,000 antibody designs • >10× tighter antibody binding • 89% less batch-record review time Still largely preclinical. Anthropic @AnthropicAI Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of 9:43 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 11.2K Views 3 Replies · 24 Reposts · 205 Likes ](https://x.com/Junioryu136689/status/2115197821150495150) Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing: [ Pushmeet Kohli@pushmeet Gemini 4 Argon is a step change in model performance. In recent weeks, it has had a transformative impact on the Science projects in our team at @GoogleDeepMind and our external collaborators, and helped make a number of remarkable advances across scientific disciplines. 🧵👇 4:47 PM · Oct 13, 2026 · 36.5K Views 8 Replies · 41 Reposts · 497 Likes ](https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2110049807385702623) But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science. The number of “effective researchers” is no longer limited The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024: We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.] And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists. AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel. What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can. And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”. Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time. Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot. AI eliminates the theory bottleneck Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered. AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle. Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing. AI can read the whole literature Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things: Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test Avoid doing research that someone else has already done Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease: The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms. The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms. Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine] This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference: [ Haider.@haider1 this is actually insane openai deployed thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, work that could take human researchers months to a year also the agents uncovered new leads for brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's OpenAI @OpenAI GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in 2:41 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 51.5K Views 26 Replies · 95 Reposts · 1.26K Likes ](https://x.com/haider1/status/2112917197903540516) Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine. It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand. Superscience So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery. But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work: What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook… Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate… Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?… [H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation… If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance. In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments. That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could. This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense. In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science. Subscribe Share
Colorado teacher's one-of-a-kind find revealed at Denver Museum of Nature & Science
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is preparing to display one of the rarest dinosaur fossils ever discovered.
Maverik CEO Crystal Call Magglet speaks at annual Cache Business Women’s Conference
The Herald Journal sponsored the Cache Business Women’s Conference and was invited by the Cache Chamber of Commerce. Magglet was chosen as one of four keynote speakers and covered due to scheduling, with no favoritism involved in her selection. This note clarifies the unbiased nature of the coverage.
The Jupiter Ball Returns to Morehead Planetarium and Science Center this November
Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is pleased to announce the return of the Jupiter Ball. The signature Chapel Hill gala revives a proud 25-year history to benefit the "Science for All" initiative with a premier evening of celebration and philanthropy.
Meet the Dallas 500: Linda Silver, Perot Museum of Nature and Science
The Eugene McDermott CEO shares what she would change about the museum industry, the one book every leader should read, and the biggest risk she's ever taken.
PBS Reno and DRI team up for new science series featuring research happening in Reno
A new local TV series will take viewers from frozen glaciers to remote research sites to uncover stories hidden in science and nature.
Imagination Station plans $1.1 million outdoor science lab at Festival Park
Festival Park in downtown Toledo will be transformed into a science and nature lab free for all to explore and learn. The new Outdoor STEAM Lab, which ...
Come enjoy some picking with the Nature Coast Ukulele Friends
Nature Coast Ukulele Friends invite the public to enjoy some time with good, fun music during the next few months. The group will also help celebrate the holiday season by
Scientists Found a Blood Signature Linked to 23% Lower Risk of Death
It could reveal clues about your diet.
Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (2026) review: Updated in all the right places
Amazon’s updates to the Paperwhite Signature Edition make it feel even more premium, but the regular version remains a great choice for less money.
Long COVID burden in healthcare workers: a 12-month survey of 771 cases
Scientific Reports - Long COVID burden in healthcare workers: a 12-month survey of 771 cases
Macrophage biology and immunoregulation in health and disease
Cellular & Molecular Immunology - Macrophage biology and immunoregulation in health and disease
Motorola Signature 27 and Razr Flex show up at a European retailer with prices
The Razr Flex has a very odd description, and a rather unrealistic price. Motorola showed off the Signature 27 at Qualcomm's Snapdragon event last month,...
Rare tiger behaviors captured on camera show 'we really know nothing about them'
The PBS Nature film "Tiger Island" captures rare glimpses of tiger behavior, including a mother, father and cubs spending time together — a first for these usually solitary cats.
Dr. Iacoboni: Return of the Purpose Hypothesis
Purpose was once considered fundamental to understanding nature. But for the last few centuries, scientists committed to a Darwinian view have ignored it.
Tulip Time Festival to Unveil 2027 Entertainment Lineup, Attractions
HOLLAND, MI (WHTC-AM/FM, Oct. 27, 2026) - Tribute acts will spotlight the 98th renewal of Holland's signature ...
Tulip Time Festival to Unveil 2027 Entertainment Lineup, Attractions
HOLLAND, MI (WHTC-AM/FM, Oct. 27, 2026) - Tribute acts will spotlight the 98th renewal of Holland's signature ...
China’s 5-year plan to accelerate science innovation is putting the U.S. and Europe in the rearview mirror
China is pouring money and political muscle into science, and the gap with the West is closing fast — by some measures, it’s already gone. As Nature’s
FLAT-WHITE: from target trial emulation to federated high-throughput causal machine learning using decentralized real-world data
npj Health Systems - FLAT-WHITE: from target trial emulation to federated high-throughput causal machine learning using decentralized real-world data
Wind Cave National Park receives grant for student science program
Wind Cave National Park received National Park Foundation funding for a student science program with nature journaling and citizen science surveys.
The Fans Trying To Save Mass Effect Just Paid For A Billboard In Times Square
The group’s petition to keep BioWare’s series alive just surpassed 200,000 signatures
Fox Sports To Honor U.S. Military and Veterans During Special Broadcas
FOX Sports will honor the nation’s servicemembers and veterans during a special Veterans Day initiative Nov. 7–8, bringing two of its signature sports broadcasts to the U.S. Naval Academy
BCA rebrands political arm to WORKPAC
BCA's political arm will now be known as WORK PAC, BCA CEO Helena Duncan and Chairman Kevin Savoy announced to members gathered in Birmingham. The rebranding is meant to more closely align the business lobby's outward facing mission with the evolving nature of the business community itself, they said.
China's Rise in Science as a Source of Strategic Power
China is on course to lead the world in research and development, a shift with direct consequences for technological competition and the balance of global power. That is the conclusion of a news feature by Xiaoying You in Nature, published on October 14, 2026. The scale of the change is striking. In 1978, researchers in […]
Mass Effect's Commander Shepard Actors, Destiny Community Help #SaveMassEffect Petition Cross 200,000 Signatures
The #SaveMassEffect movement has picked up even more steam after videos from both Commander Shepard actors – and even posts from the Destiny community – helped its petition reach 200,000 signatures.
Families celebrate Halloween with a side of science at Nature Museum
The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum invited families to its annual BOO-seum Bash Sunday, with animal encounters, hands-on activities and plenty of Halloween fun.
Inside 26-year-old’s club for million-dollar Chattanooga business owners
At 2nd American Restaurant on Thursday night, around 85 entrepreneurs who have scaled their businesses to at least $1 million in annual revenue sat to a family-style meal of beef cheek roast, airline chicken and the restaurant's signature bowl of mashed potatoes.
Petition to "Save Mass Effect" reaches over 170k signatures as fans plan billboard outside EA HQ
The Mass Effect community is not going down without a fight
Pumpkin Science Lab in Reading combines messy fun, learning
Children put their pumpkin predictions to the test during Berks Nature’s first Pumpkin Science Lab at The Nature Place.
Firefly Species Lost to Science for Over 40 Years Rediscovered In a Nature Preserve in Delaware
Entomologist and ecologist Christopher Heckscher made the discovery when he noticed the firefly’s specific flash pattern
FOR BUSINESS: Quick takes
— Thumbnail Faldowski JOINS STAFF: Sarah Faldowski has joined the staff at Cedar One Realty. She said a home is more than a place to live—it’s where everyday moments happen, and new adventures begin. She loves hiking, spending time in nature, and exploring new places, and she brings that same sense of excitement to helping […]
Mass Effect Fans Call for EA Boycott as Petition to Save BioWare's Canceled Game Garners More than 75,000 Signatures
Mass Effect fans are calling for a boycott of all EA products and services in protest of the company closing down BioWare and canceling the next Mass Effect game.
Nature center hosts art show, rangeland science talk
Feather River Land Trust announces two events during October at its Sierra Valley Preserve Nature Center. "The Full Chase of Beauty," an art show with
Where's Shane? Spookfest at Science City
Shane joins Science City Educators Emma Loesing and Whitney Klaas with Nature Works Educator Ryan Parker to get a sneak peek of this weekend's Spookfest.
10 Years of GROW: Exploring the Future of Agriculture
Death by Natural Causes is a new special exhibition coming to the Saint Louis Science Center — making its U.S. tour premiere in March 2027 — that explores the surprising science behind nature’s unexpected dangers.
UK Board of Trustees approves joint venture with Signature HealthCARE
The University of Kentucky Board of Trustees today approved a joint venture between UK and Louisville-based Signature HealthCARE to develop and operate a 105-bed skilled nursing facility on UK’s Hamburg East campus in Lexington. The facility will expand access to skilled nursing care and help patients move from the hospital to the next stage of their recovery sooner.
Exposome Signature: A multi‑system view of human adaptation to spaceflight
Spaceflight is extremely challenging for both body and mind. Astronauts experience a combination of stressors – microgravity, radiation, confinement, isolation, circadian disruption and environmental changes – that can trigger physiological responses resembling those seen on Earth in chronic diseases and accelerated aging. One characteristic effect is low‑grade inflammation (LGI), a subtle and persistent activation of the immune system.
Pomegranate for skin health: exploring nature's potential
Despite pomegranate’s long history as both a food and a traditional remedy, consumers in today’s nutricosmetics market are seeking indisputable evidence of its efficacy
Forgotten record review: Painless jazz
Jazz is a niche market, and the folks who love jazz really love jazz. Their passion, and the cult-like nature of jazz, has given rise to a certain snobbery regarding jazz music. That snobbery is limited almost exclusively to the years 1947-1967.
‘Most magical place’: How Dublin Influences This Mother-Daughter Business: Business NH Magazine
Today, Webber and her daughter, Kate Webber, operate The Gratitude Farm, a Dublin-based studio and business that combines Donni’s nature-inspired pottery with Kate’s landscape paintings.
From Animal Camouflage to AI: The Evolving Science of Staying Unseen
Nature’s game of hide and seek is entering the age of intelligent machines. A new article in National Science Review traces how animal camouflage, advanced materials and artificial intelligence are converging to reshape the contest between detecting an object and keeping it concealed.
School cellphone ban clears Pa. Senate, awaits Gov. Shapiro’s signature
Pennsylvania is one step closer to banning cell phones in public schools across the state after the Senate voted Wednesday to approve a measure sent over by the House on
Four Baton Rouge artists who love Louisiana nature are staging an exhibit. See when and where.
Exhibition will also place emphasis on state parks.
Four Baton Rouge artists who love Louisiana nature are staging an exhibit. See when and where.
Exhibition will also place emphasis on state parks.
CSC Science Team Asks: What Should We Expect to Find in Nature?
The junk DNA paradigm shift is a good example of how an intelligent design framework can serve as a productive guide to scientific research.
Australia urged to put biodiversity at the heart of planning as global targets slip out of reach
The world is falling short of its biodiversity commitments because nature is still treated as an afterthought in decisions about housing, infrastructure, agriculture, energy, mining and conservation, ...
Science News unveils its list of 10 scientists making an impact on our world
As a teenager, Gabriela Farfan became fascinated by the shapes and colors of minerals. Now, as curator of gems and minerals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, she studies what they can reveal about our planet.From corals that preserve chemical signatures of changing oceans to sparkling gemstones, Farfan uses crystal structures, chemistry and spectroscopy to uncover the information trapped inside minerals and show why they’re an essential part of natural history. WASHINGTON, O
Earth’s Core Has Been Quietly Leaking Water for Billions of Years
A new study offers an explanation for unusual chemical signatures found in some volcanic rocks.
A Bizarre Plastic-Eating Enzyme Has a Second Talent That Worries Scientists
Plastic can fool nature’s cleanup crew, but one bacterial enzyme knows exactly where to bite.
A 1960 Science Paper Set Doomsday for Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, and Its Population Math Held Up for Three Decades
A 1960 Science paper predicted doomsday on Nov. 13, 2026. There is no threat, but its population equation beat most forecasts until about 1993.
Student-produced film captures Ireland sports experience | UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
The documentary created by a UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media team premieres on campus Oct. 22 and Oct. 23. — This story, written by UNC Hussman alumnus Michael Lananna ’14, was originally published at unc.edu. — Carolina senior Anna Laible came up with the idea about a year ago. At the annual UNC Sports and Entertainment Summit, the journalism student walked up to then-athletic director Bubba Cunningham and took a chance. “Hi, Bubba, I’m not sure if you remember me, but I’m part of the student broadcast team from the Olympics,” Laible told him. “I have this idea to do an Ireland documentary on the football team.” Encouraged by the enthusiastic response to the proposal, Laible and a team of students from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media worked diligently to turn that vision into reality. In August, Laible and seven peers traveled to Dublin, Ireland, with the Carolina football team and women’s soccer team. Equipped with video cameras, the student journalists covered both teams during their international games — both wins — and filmed scenes throughout Dublin, interviewing Irish locals, Tar Heel fans and key Carolina figures who helped make the trip possible. Back home, Laible’s team put the finishing touches on the documentary, with its first screening at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 22-23 in Carroll Hall room 111. The project is the latest in a long line of sports documentaries produced under the guidance of C.A. Tuggle, John H. Stembler Jr. Distinguished Professor. Since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Tuggle and the Hussman school have sent journalism students to cover each of the Summer Games, and Tuggle’s students have also produced documentaries on Carolina teams that win national championships. But this Ireland excursion presented a new kind of opportunity. “This trip is really unique,” Tuggle said. “Bubba liked the idea, so we started working on it, and it’s all because Anna was forward-thinking and assertive.” Laible’s team worked to create a holistic depiction of the Dublin trip, billed as “Much More Than a Game.” The documentary’s 12 chapters cover Irish culture, music, trips to the Guiness Storehouse and the myriad connections between Tar Heels and Ireland. “Our main focus was to make sure we gave a whole encompassing idea of what this experience was like,” Laible said. “We wanted to show not just the student-athletes, but other students, other Carolina fans, Carolina alumni, the music and really incorporate that all in the documentary.” Joining Laible in Dublin were juniors Emily Brietz, Cooper Hall, Eliza Jennings and Katherine McCullough and seniors Molly Malek, May Proctor and Merrily Tew. Those students also traveled to Milan for the 2026 Olympic Winter Games in February. Those kinds of opportunities wouldn’t be possible without the support of UNC Hussman and, in the case of the Ireland trip, the Carolina athletic department. UNC Hussman students create Ireland trip documentary. (Submitted photo) “Never in a million years did I think I would have the opportunity to go to the Olympics or to the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, and now I’m even being presented with potential opportunities go to the Super Bowl,” said Malek, who served in a leadership role with Laible in Dublin. “I think that Carolina does a terrific job of connecting us to these opportunities that almost no other university does. This is a university where you have the opportunity to have an interdisciplinary education and to learn and experience a lot of things all at once.” With the support of UNC Hussman, Tuggle and fellow students like Malek, Laible turned a spur-of-the-moment idea into a documentary. When the film screens, Laible said she’s not quite sure what emotions to expect. “I’m a little worried that I might cry — not that crying is a bad thing,” Laible said, laughing. “But I’m really grateful for so many people helping, and I’m excited for everyone to see it.”
How a walk in the woods can be good for mental health
Ever wonder why a walk through the woods can be such a mood booster? Research from the University of New Hampshire shows that it can be as simple as the sounds people experience in nature, people's awareness ...
Healthcare on the trail in Arizona
The signature Republican reconciliation bill is playing a starring role in Arizona Democratic messaging two weeks out from the midterms.
Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.
CBS Sports projects Florida for Citrus Bowl after Week 7 Texas win
After securing a signature road win over Texas in Week 7, CBS Sports now projects Florida football to play in the Citrus Bowl against Iowa.
Louis-Ernest Barrias | Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (1816-1918)
Access all artwork details and all available works by Louis-Ernest Barrias at M.S. Rau
Perot Museum Of Nature And Science Unveils $185 Million Expansion
The expanded campus is scheduled to open in late 2028
Perot Museum of Nature and Science announces expansion, adding hands-on attractions and outdoor space
One of three Jensen Huang-signed RTX Spark laptops won at NVIDIA launch event is already listed for $17,150
An ASUS ProArt RTX Spark laptop bearing Jensen Huang's signature is reportedly being offered for $17,150. The asking price exceeds regular Turkish retail pricing by more than two times.
Scientists found 2 ways to destroy 'forever chemicals,' and 'forever' may not mean forever
The video says PFAS "barely break down in nature" and can remain for decades or even centuries.
Headway Issues, Then Retracts New Clinician Contracts After Backlash
Therapist enablement platform Headway is once again facing backlash from its clinician pool on its platform over a lengthy new contract the company rolled
Richard Riehle, prolific character actor known for roles in 'Office Space' and 'Casino,' dies at 78
Riehle's signature mustache and warm persona made him a regular staple in TV and film throughout his nearly 50-year career.
Five mayoral contenders file ballot signatures as incumbent Johnson waits
Mayor Brandon Johnson is struggling in fundraising, but plans to file "far above" the 12,500 signature threshold to make the ballot
Early voting expands Monday in Chicago, suburban Cook County and across the suburbs
Photo identification is not required but it can be helpful if there is a question about voter registration, address or signature.
Nature’s Cafe cuts ribbon on downtown expansion
CANTON — Dozens of local dignitaries, friends, and neighbors gathered Oct. 6 to mark a major milestone on Main Street as Nature’s Storehouse celebrated the grand opening and ribbon cutting
A scoping review of bias in large AI models for medicine and healthcare
Communications Health - A scoping review of bias in large AI models for medicine and healthcare
Hackathon Welcomes STC Cybersecurity Students
For South Texas College Cybersecurity student Athena Vallejo, presenting to high school students at one of the college’s signature events is an opportunity to show them a future they can build for themselves.
The Next Pandemic Might Already Be Taking Shape at the Edge of the World’s Vanishing Forests
Outbreaks cluster where people, livestock, and damaged ecosystems collide, a new Nature study finds.
Reaching peak fall color: The science of autumn's transformation
Ever wonder how every year nature transforms green leaves into a stunning array of colors?
Nature Rx Day Highlights Nature's Impact on Mental Health
Free webinar and day-long live events on November 4.
Business taking action for nature at CBD COP17
At the UN Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP17) in Yerevan, Armenia, from 19-30 October, IUCN will show how business can use science, data and technology to scale up its contribution to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Can AI solve our mental health access problem?
Last week I asked you what worries you most about AI in health. It was close, but your top answer was “AI giving bad health advice.” Last week’s poll results: You’re in good company. This concern was top of mind at a conference I joined at Stanford last week, where researchers, clinicians, and people who build AI systems spent a day debating trust and safety in health AI. Stepping back, I’m also hearing your emerging concerns about AI’s impact on our well-being generally. I see this as a matter of public health, and we’ll take it in pieces as we learn together. Today we’ll focus on AI chatbots used for therapy for mental health. Early this month, Governor Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 903, California’s most ambitious attempt to regulate AI use for mental health. It’s at the center of active debate, and raises the questions patients, family members, citizens, and voters will face as AI moves deeper into health care. Let’s work through it. What is “AI-based therapy”? It’s really two things: purpose-built mental health apps designed to deliver structured support, and general chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that people increasingly use for emotional support—even if they weren’t built for it. Spoiler alert: I don’t know whether the shift toward AI therapy is good or bad. The evidence isn’t there yet. But I do know it’s already happening, and I have some ideas about how we can roll it out with safety in mind. The therapy dilemma, in a nutshell Mental health challenges are common, and strain health and well-being across populations. Therapy (interactive dialogue with a trained, empathetic practitioner) helps many people heal. The demand for licensed therapists far exceeds the supply in California, and AI-based therapy can narrow that gap. AI-based therapy remains novel, unproven, and not well tested. Right off the bat, we can see we’re dealing with trade-offs here. Since the main driver of demand for therapy from a robot is lack of access to therapy from a human, we’ll start there. It’s too hard to find and afford a human therapist California is short roughly 55,000 licensed, non-prescribing therapists and counselors, about 40% of what we need. Psychiatrists, who rely on talk therapy as a complement to prescribed medications, are even more scarce. Eight counties have none, and density ranges from 1.7 per 100,000 residents in San Benito County, to 68.1 in Marin County. My wife is a psychiatrist in Marin, and even here access is tight. If it’s hard in the best-supplied county, imagine rural Sierra County, or the San Joaquin Valley. In 2024, more than half of Californians who tried to make a mental health appointment struggled to find a provider who took their insurance, compared with 14% for physical health care. When Senate staff posed as “secret shopper” patients and called 120 mental health providers in Medicare Advantage networks, they landed an appointment less than once for every five tries. Insurers pay behavioral health clinicians about 22% less than medical and surgical clinicians for comparable office visits. On top of that, billing denials and prior authorizations hit hardest at the solo and small practices common in mental health. Psychiatrists opt out of Medicare at the highest rate of any specialty. In many places, a cash practice for therapy fills quickly with patients paying $250 or more an hour, with no insurance paperwork at all. Families who can pay cash find providers more easily. Those who rely on insurance, including Medi-Cal enrollees, older adults, rural residents, and non-English speakers, compete for what’s left. So we can’t pretend the human system works, and we can’t blame people for turning to AI for support when they’re in distress. AI is filling the gap It’s estimated that roughly a quarter of AI users use it for mental health support. If you have internet, it’s available 24/7, it’s cheap, and it speaks your language. Uninsured adults are about twice as likely as insured adults to do it (30% vs. 14%). It feels anonymous in ways that may enable people to ask things they’re unsure or embarrassed about. The largely hidden, personal use makes it hard to study whether it’s actually helping people with their mental health issues, but researchers are trying. Does AI therapy work? A 2026 analysis of nearly 40 randomized trials found chatbots showed a real but small reduction in depression symptoms. But most of these trials were compared to an alternative of no therapy, not a human therapist. So the benefit of AI therapy is probably real, but modest, and mostly untested against the alternative of human contact. We need more studies. Serious concerns OpenAI’s own estimate is that more than a million ChatGPT users each week show signs of suicidal planning or intent. These are high stakes encounters, and AI doesn’t always get it right. That’s partly because a chatbot can sound like a therapist, but it has no license, no duty of care, and it’s not clear who to hold accountable when it gets things wrong. AI is also designed to help users in whatever task they’re seeking to accomplish. People may feel like they’re getting therapy, but they’re mainly getting a convincing conversation. It’s easy for an AI companion to wander into gray areas, like playing along with “creative writing” that may be about the user’s own suicidal intent. Courts are driving safety conversations A wave of lawsuits have been filed on behalf of families claiming that chatbots pushed people they loved toward self-harm, including teens who died by suicide. The first settlements came this year. OpenAI is headquartered in San Francisco, and dozens of cases alleging that ChatGPT drove users to suicide or self-harm are now before a San Francisco judge. Character.ai has filed for bankruptcy after several states brought lawsuits accusing the chatbot of pushing dangerous content to kids. But the technology seems to be improving. Last month, an independent evaluation found that newer AI models “almost never endorse suicide.” That’s progress, but our societal appetite for even one preventable death is very low. So how do we move forward? Finding a middle ground Earlier this month the governor vetoed Senate Bill 903, a bill designed to place guardrails on the use of AI for therapy. The bill would have prohibited any AI-based platform from being advertised as psychotherapy, and would have required a licensed professional to review and approve each encounter where AI was used to support therapeutic decisions. Newsom called it overly broad, since even routine screening questions would have needed clinician sign-off. Knowing we’re already short on mental health providers, requiring human review of AI encounters may not relieve our access problems. Still, the answer isn’t no oversight. Here’s one feasible short term solution. Rather than reviewing each encounter, a licensed clinician can design the guardrails: what counts as a crisis, what triggers an immediate handoff to a human, and what gets sampled for audit each month. The AI runs inside that structure. Conversations get checked, failures get reported, and a real clinician owns the framework. Medicine already has models to learn from. The FDA process for rolling out newly approved medications is an example. After a product reaches patients, we keep watching for adverse events. Patient-facing AI needs the same “digital pharmacovigilance”: systematic tracking of harms, near misses, and the types of groups that get hurt and why. It’s also critical that users know that they can reach a human if they’re in crisis. Most chatbots now include messages like these: Bottom line The rush to use unproven AI tools for mental health support is mostly a workaround, a sign of a health system people can’t get into. We need better access to proven care from licensed clinicians. That takes reimbursement that makes accepting insurance viable, and a bigger workforce. But, built and tested well, AI could be part of the answer. It could be the 2 a.m. check-in when no one else is awake, or a way for patients to practice skills their therapist taught them. It could be the first step to get someone the right level of care, and take paperwork off clinicians’ plates so they spend more time with patients. None of this is simple. The SB 903 veto doesn’t end the debate, and the legislature will be back. In the meantime, those of us using these tools need to stay informed, ask hard questions, and hold the companies building them accountable. I’ll try to do my part, and we’ll keep learning together. Love,Matt P.S. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs to talk, call or text 988- you’ll reach a real person— or chat at 988lifeline.org 24/7. Dr. Matt Willis is the author of Your Local Epidemiologist in California. A California native, he’s served as a primary care physician, CDC epidemiologist, and public health officer for Marin County, where he guided the pandemic response. He lives in Marin with his family and their dogs, Teddy and Ramona. Thank you Cynthia He, MD, PhD, and Parnika Saxena, MD, for their guidance in preparing this article. Cynthia works in an outpatient mental health clinic, treating patients who have Medi-Cal or, sometimes, no insurance. Parnika works in an inpatient psychiatric unit, treating patients with public or private insurance or self-pay ability. All opinions are their own and do not represent their employers.
Denver Museum of Nature & Science Appoints Kirk Johnson as President and CEO
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science Board of Trustees has appointed Kirk Johnson as the Museum’s next president and CEO.
Closing surveillance detection gaps for emerging digital drug discourse with ontology-enhanced large language models
npj Digital Public Health - Closing surveillance detection gaps for emerging digital drug discourse with ontology-enhanced large language models
KFC to Ditch Pepsi for Coke in Thousands of Restaurants
The switch at thousands of U.S. restaurants deals a setback to PepsiCo as it struggles to revive sales of its signature soft drinks.
Conflict with fathers deters youth from seeking mental health services
Youth are less likely to seek mental health services if they have a tumultuous relationship with their father, although the exact nature of this link is still unclear.
Things I never leave Costco without, from executive Costco member
The Kirkland Signature organic chicken breasts and Bachan's Japanese barbecue sauce are a few of the many things I never leave Costco without.
Computational Models as Liminal Models in Neuroscience, a Cognitive Science Speaker Series Presentation | Events
Speaker: Danielle Williams, Ph.D. Title: Computational Models as Liminal Models in Neuroscience Short Bio: Danielle is a philosopher of mind and science whose research examines the role of computation in our theories and explanations of the mind and brain. Her work brings together philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, with particular interests in computational theories of mind, computational modeling, and the relationship between different explanatory and modeling strategies in the mind sciences. She also investigates philosophical questions raised by contemporary AI, including the nature of opacity in computational models and its implications for explanation in cognitive science. Alongside this work, she is a historian of cognitive science and AI, examining how the development of computer technology has shaped our conceptions and models of the mind and brain. Abstract: Scientists rely on various types of models to make sense of their phenomena of interest. This has led philosophers to take up a range of semantic, ontological, and epistemological questions about how models represent, what kinds of things models are, what we learn from models, and how they explain. One type of model that has been of particular interest to philosophers is the computational model. Computational models are commonplace in the mind sciences in general and neuroscience in particular, with many asking how computational modeling can help us understand the nervous system and its contribution to cognition and behavior. These questions are particularly pressing in neuroscience, as computational models have become a dominant framework for making sense of cognition. Thus, old questions about model-based science have re-emerged within the context of neuroscience, with many philosophers looking to established frameworks to understand how computational models represent, explain, and contribute to theory development in neuroscience. These established frameworks, however, characterize computational models as a homogeneous type which cannot capture actual modeling practices in neuroscience. In this talk, I argue that computational models in neuroscience are best typed as a kind of liminal model, a type I introduce to capture how the status of a computational model is determined by the epistemic context in which it is deployed. Indeed, the category to which a computational model belongs shifts according to the role it plays within a given context. ASL-English interpreters have been requested. Light refreshments will be provided.