Brian Buntz

Leica Biosystems has launched the HistoCore LIGHTNING C Laser Cassette Printer globally, with a stated printing time of 2.5 seconds per cassette and capacity for up to 600 cassettes. The Danaher company, the parent of Leica Biosystems, announced the system Sept. 16 for pathology labs seeking to automate specimen labeling and tracking. Histology cassettes hold…

At Dreamforce on Tuesday, Salesforce introduced AIforce, a layer that lets people and AI agents reach the data, workflows and business logic inside Salesforce from Anthropic’s Claude via Claudeforce, Slack and other AI interfaces. The CEOs of Anthropic, Siemens and NVIDIA joined Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to discuss how AI could reshape corporate work and…

    AI’s spending boom, which has continued mostly unabated so far in 2026, has left its imprint on many of this year’s world-leading innovators. In pharma, Eli Lilly has brought its LillyPod supercomputer online, and Roche has deployed NVIDIA-based AI computing infrastructure. Bristol Myers Squibb has announced plans to expand its existing infrastructure with…

Clinical trials are among the pharma domains seeing the most rapid embrace of AI agents, thanks to their potential extensibility and ability to automate routine tasks. Cost and complexity have a lot to do with that interest. An average phase 3 trial collects close to 6 million data points, according to a Tufts CSDD and…

OpenAI’s new GPT-6 Astra scored 62.7% under the benchmark’s standard, provider-neutral testing harness on ARC-AGI-3, an interactive benchmark that requires AI agents to explore unfamiliar games, infer their rules and goals, and plan effective actions without instructions. The same model scored 99.9% with an OpenAI-specific context-management adapter that preserves the model’s hidden reasoning state between…

The U.S. Department of Energy has opened a funding opportunity of up to $12 million for research on space-grade photovoltaic cells, manufacturing processes and testing systems. The Space Photovoltaics Research and Development opportunity is a notable expansion of DOE’s photovoltaic R&D portfolio into spacecraft power after a history centered largely on terrestrial solar applications. “The…

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 on September 1, the latest iteration of the model series that is among the most influential, and expensive, model launches in recent memory. Now, with the launch of the two new models, Anthropic is claiming significant jumps in performance on scientific benchmarks. On Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1, an…

Costa Rica, the land of pura vida, stunning national parks and biodiversity, has transformed itself from an agricultural-focused exporter into a high-tech manufacturing hub. “Medical devices are now our biggest export,” said Keiner Morales, chief technology officer at Lantern Med Digital. The country has transformed considerably since the 1980s. “Back then, we were a coffee-and-banana…

In late June, frontier AI lab Anthropic laid out a vision for its Claude models to run scientific workflows rather than only help plan them. In the weeks since, the pieces of that vision have grown clearer. Anthropic now says it has supplied part of the missing physical layer with the Model Hardware Standard (MHS),…

San Francisco-based Benchling is betting that AI agents can potentially bring something like vibe coding’s rapid build-test-revise loop and targeted automation to scientific work with the requisite level of reproducibility required for science. The aim is to start with data-heavy tasks and eventually extend toward human-supervised wet-lab workflows. “LLMs can work in the wet lab…

Palo Alto–based startup Architect Labs, which emerged from stealth in June with a $24 million seed round, is boasting that its AI-designed and validated Redwood chip beats one NVIDIA edge product, the Jetson Orin Nano, in a specific AI-inference comparison. The company projects that a Samsung 8 nm implementation of Redwood would deliver 1.75× the…

Over the past several months, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been increasingly vocal about putting AI data centers in space. In February, he predicted that, within five years, “we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth.” He said then that SpaceX, then still a private…

Solar arrays have been standard spacecraft hardware for decades, but their tendency to flex can complicate maneuvers needing precision such as docking. To tame the wobble, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) developed PaSTA, a technology that can bring rigidity to deployable structures on spacecraft, thus enabling autonomous spacecraft docking operations. PaSTA also happens to be one…

NVIDIA just announced the Jetson Orin Nano 2, a new computer platform for robotics and edge AI that the company says doubles inference performance compared with the Jetson Orin Nano Super. It can also run at 40% less power at equivalent performance. NVIDIA has not yet disclosed pricing, and says the module and developer kit…

The U.S. power grid is at an inflection point, with factors ranging from blistering summer heat to data center power demand that is potentially set to double from 2025 to 2027, an uptick in wildfires and aging transmission infrastructure. But a significant effort to reshape the grid is also underway. “In this era we’re in…

No one knows for sure when quantum computers will be able to crack widely used public-key encryption methods, but the anxieties are on the rise that the threshold may be in the relatively near term. The probability of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is in the ballpark of 28% to 49% within 10 years and…

Investors have set their sights high for Anthropic, with some eyeing a valuation of $2 trillion or even $3 trillion. While the figures comes from investor models rather than a valuation target set by Anthropic, according to the Financial Times and CNBC, Anthropic could rival or best SpaceX’s record IPO, which raised $75 billion at…

Enterprise software in drug development tends to arrive slowly. Laboratory information management systems, quality platforms and the enterprise resource planning software they connect to typically take months to deploy. In Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP report, based on 170 organizations across industries surveyed between January 2025 and January 2026, the median project ran nine months,…

Kumar Sanketh, R&D director of Functional Polymers product R&D within Packaging, Specialty Plastics and Hydrocarbons at Dow Inc., is the 2026 R&D 100 Leader of the Year. Sanketh leads a global product R&D organization of more than 110 employees at six sites across the Americas, Europe and China. He supports business portfolios that drive more…

M. Parans Paranthaman, distinguished corporate fellow in the Chemical Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is the 2026 R&D 100 Researcher of the Year. Paranthaman joined ORNL in 1993 and has worked across materials chemistry, energy storage, high-temperature superconductors, permanent magnets, critical-material recovery and advanced manufacturing. He also holds a joint appointment as a…

Cody Somers, lead technician at Kennametal, Inc., is the 2026 R&D 100 Technician of the Year. Having worked at the industrial technology and manufacturing company Kennametal since 2015, Somers has more than a decade of hands-on experience with tungsten carbide manufacturing processes. At Kennametal, Somers serves as a lead operator for multiple industrial-scale additive-manufacturing systems.…

Nobel Prize winner and deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Ph.D., has frequently expressed concern that AI systems could escape human control. At a keynote at the AI4 event in Las Vegas, he pointed to developments that are “scary,” pointing to recent examples of AIs escaping sandboxes at prominent AI companies. “You are seeing AIs with…

National laboratories are the primary submitting organization on 51 of this year’s 100 R&D 100 Award winners, with Oak Ridge alone accounting for 18. Companies account for 21. The 2026 winners, announced today by R&D World, were selected from 149 finalists across six categories, 38 of them in Process/Prototyping. This year’s judging panel included more…

The current AI wave is running into a type of sticker shock reminiscent of what happened when cloud computing went mainstream in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The pitch then was essentially: stop worrying about buying servers and running a data center for capacity you might not need. But it turns out that the…

A neutron detector built around abundant lithium instead of scarce helium-3, a battery made of heated sand, and software that spots the faint electrical arcing that starts wildfires. The three winners of the 2026 R&D 100 Special Recognition: Market Disruptor award, announced today by R&D World. Each listing includes the primary submitting organization, followed by…