Brian Buntz

Sesame’s AI voice models are, without a doubt, among the most human-sounding that have been yet developed. The company, which recently released an uncanny pair of voice model demos on its website, has open-sourced its advanced Conversational Speech Model (CSM). The voices on its website — of Maya and Miles — are not present, but…

There’s a new sheriff in town at Intel, and his name is Lip-Bu Tan, a seasoned semiconductor veteran stepping into the CEO role. He will be charged with steering the beleaguered chipmaker back toward a more sustainable financial future. Tan, the former CEO of Cadence Design Systems and founder of venture capital firm Walden International,…

Earlier this year, NVIDIA launched Cosmos, a so-called World Foundation Models that shrinks the brings AI to the tangible world. Its CEO Jensen Huang  described it as “The next frontier of AI is physical AI.” Now, Google has announced its latest foray into this AI/robotics synthesis, weaving its latest large multimodal foundation model on Gemini…

Water appears to have emerged far earlier than once thought—less than 200 million years after the Big Bang—according to research in Nature Astronomy. Using advanced 3D simulations, scientists discovered that the first supernovae produced oxygen, which rapidly bonded with hydrogen to form water, permeating early galaxies. “Besides revealing that a primary ingredient for life was…

Imagine a research world where laboratory scientists don’t just analyze their data; they talk directly to it, and it talks back. That’s a reality that the Somerset, New Jersey–based laboratory information management system (LIMS) provider LabVantage is working toward. The company’s latest LIMS platform, version 8.9, layers semantic search onto complex data sets, allowing scientists…

Standalone instruments are out; automated workflows are in. That was a take from an interview with Andrew Whitley, VP and field officer for the HORIBA Life Science Business unit, in an interview at PittCon 2025. The company, which just announced a trio of products at the show, is applying lessons learned from its automotive testing…

The U.S. R&D landscape as a whole looks fairly resilient. That’s the finding from an exploration of 10,000 scenarios in a simulation that aims to capture the interplay between federal and private-sector funding under economic strain. In any event, as 2025 unfolds amid economic uncertainty and budget cuts and a string of R&D related job…

In 1926, British aerodynamicist Hermann Glauert introduced an equation that shaped a century of wind turbine development — a third-order polynomial that determines the optimum axial induction factor. Yet, at Penn State nearly one hundred years later, Divya Tyagi, an engineering student revisited and improved this classical result by deriving missing analytical approaches for rotor…

The U.S. still leads the world in absolute R&D spending, now investing some trillion dollars annually in R&D each year. By 2027, the U.S. is on track to spend in the ballpark of $1.2 trillion on R&D. But its dominance isn’t secure. In 2025, America’s scientific enterprise faces significant headwinds, and other regions, particularly Asia,…

Each year, the European Commission publishes the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, an international compendium whose 2024 edition ranked 2,000 of the world’s top corporate spenders on research and development. Yet it consistently omits Amazon, arguably the single largest corporate R&D spender globally. Why? Because Amazon doesn’t explicitly report its R&D investment separately, instead grouping…

Scientists seeking advances in drug discovery and bioprocess monitoring might soon have extra time to dedicate to more strategic research. The Kyoto-headquartered scientific instruments firm HORIBA has just introduced a trio of tools designed to reduce analysis time. PoliSpectra Rapid Raman plate reader Consider, for instance, the possibility of analyzing a full plate of pharmaceutical…

More than a decade after Amazon launched Alexa, the company is debuting Alexa+, a significant leap over its predecessor. As is the case with so many headlines these days, Alexa+ uses generative AI (genAI). In particular, it is using the tech to overhaul user experience with improved conversational abilities and personalization—think a jump from basic command…

SpaceX’s satellite internet system, Starlink, just scored a major win with the FAA. The mission? Deploy 4,000 terminals over the next 12 to 18 months to upgrade the agency’s IT networks. This rollout—part of the FAA’s “TDM X” program—goes beyond enhancing network capacity. By integrating Starlink’s phased array antennas and laser-linked satellite mesh into remote…

For years, 3D-printed metamaterials have teased engineers with their wispy, featherweight promise. But in reality, many of them have crumbled under pressure. “Toughness is a limiting factor in not all, but many 3D-printed mechanical metamaterials,” said Kevin Turner, Professor and John Henry Towne Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) at Penn Engineering,…

Anthropic, a favorite frontier AI lab among many coders and genAI power users has unveiled Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its first “hybrid reasoning” AI model. It is capable of both near-instant answers and in-depth, step-by-step reasoning within a single system. Users can toggle an extended thinking mode where the model self-reflects before answering, considerably improving performance…

Apple has committed to spend over $500 billion in the U.S. by 2029, equalling the total that OpenAI and partners announced last month as part of the Stargate Project. From an R&D perspective, one core takeaway is how much of this cash will fuel cutting-edge work. For instance, Apple is specifically aiming to invest in…

The challenge of powering tiny robots and medical implants may have just gotten a boost. Researchers at UC San Diego and CEA-Leti have developed a microactuator driving system that’s not only compact and lightweight but also highly efficient. The research, which integrates energy storage and voltage conversion, could pave the way for novel designs in…

In an iconic scene from The Matrix (1999), Neo sits wired to a training chair, eyes closed, as decades of martial arts expertise—jujitsu, kempo, taekwondo, even drunken boxing—flood his brain in seconds. At the end of it all, he stoically declares: “I know kung fu,” before he spars with his guide Morpheus. A quarter-century later,…

Brain signals in, mechanical responses out—traditionally, that’s been the limit of many brain computer interfaces (BCIs). But in a sense, this BCI doesn’t just listen; it talks back. In a study published in Nature Electronics, a research team in China reported a two-way setup that not only efficiently decodes a user’s intentions  but also sends tailored…

A new cathode material for all-solid-state fluoride-ion batteries (FIBs) delivers a reversible capacity of approximately 550 mAh/g. That’s more than double the 120–250 mAh/g typical of lithium-ion cathodes. A Japanese language article in Nikkei reported that the volumetric capacity of a cathode for such fluoride-ion batteries increased by roughly three times that of lithium-ion batteries.…

China National Space Administration’s (CNSA’s) Tianwen-2 is set to launch on a Long March 3B rocket in May 2025 as part of China’s  deep-space ambitions. The craft follows the success of the prior craft in the Tianwen line, the Tianwen-1 at Mars. The Tianwen-2 mission will tap solar electric propulsion to explore two celestial bodies:…

Traditional AI training is something like spoon feeding: domain experts and AI/ML practitioners meticulously label data, guiding models step-by-step like a parent feeding a child. But what if AI could learn autonomously, inspired by the universe itself? Enter torque clustering, a novel algorithm introduced in 2023 by University of Technology Sydney researchers. Named after the…

In a first for one of the most severe forms of childhood blindness, doctors in London have used gene therapy to restore vision in four children born with a rare genetic mutation (AIPL1 gene (Aryl-hydrocarbon-interacting protein-like 1). The treatment, recently profiled in The Guardian, involves injecting a functional copy of the AIPL1 gene beneath the…

Chinese scientists have identified a newly discovered bat coronavirus, called HKU5-CoV-2, that uses the same ACE2 receptor as SARS-CoV-2 to enter human cells, according to a study in the journal Cell and covered by Reuters. While lab tests confirm it can infect ACE2-expressing human cell models, the virus binds to ACE2 with much lower affinity…

Picture this: rapid, stimulus-free self-healing of electronic skin in 10 seconds. That’s the core innovation that scientists at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation have announced in a study published in Science Advances. But it’s not just fast, its healing is relatively sound with the E-Skin tech recovering over 80% of its functionality within that…