Brian Buntz

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory unveiled its first images today, showcasing a 3,200-megapixel digital camera that promises to capture more data about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined, according to Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. In 10 hours of test observations from its mountaintop perch in Chile,…

Microsoft Quantum has unveiled a family of new four-dimensional (4D) geometric codes, that can reduce the error rates of physical qubits by orders of magnitude to reach the level required for reliable quantum circuits. Available in the Microsoft Quantum compute platform, the error correction codes deliver a 1,000-fold reduction in quantum error rates (from 10⁻³…

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) pack billions of transistors into a single piece of silicon. This chip density drives advances in protein structure prediction, weather forecasting, autonomous vehicles and the generative AI wave. Yet such extreme density creates cascading challenges, contributing to the power consumption and heat generation problems affecting advanced AI data centers. A…

When a famously cautious, methodical regulator like the FDA deploys generative AI as the agency recently did with “Elsa,” the industry sits up and takes notice. While there are signs that the tool itself has received something of a mixed response from staff, it also serves as a signpost:  AI has begun an official transition…

It turns out rocket science is still rocket science. At 11 p.m. on June 18, 2025, SpaceX engineers initiated what should have been a routine six-engine static fire test — a ground test for an upcoming launch — at Starbase’s Massey test site. Instead, Ship 36 experienced a catastrophic failure during propellant loading, which Elon…

The U.S. Department of Defense has directed more than $700 million toward a suite of high-priority research and development initiatives on June 16, 2025. The announcement, posted on the DoD website, signals a push into frontier AI, quantum sensing and advanced battlespace simulation. Headlining the investments were a landmark prototype agreement with OpenAI and significant…

Big Blue is making a bold claim. “We feel at IBM, we’ve cracked the code to quantum error correction, and it’s our plan to build the first large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer, which we call IBM Quantum Starling, in 2029,” Jay Gambetta, vice president of IBM Quantum, announced at a recent press conference. From trial and…

As tech layoffs continue to pile up, a sort of paradox is emerging. Some professionals with the requisite AI/ML experience find themselves getting offers ranging from the high six-figures to reportedly $100 million, according to a recent interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, noting that Meta had approached several of its engineers with nine-figure signing…

[Last updated on June 18, 2025] Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently hinted that AI would result in jobs cuts across the e-commerce giant, declaring “we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” as the company accelerates development of over 1,000 generative AI applications. He counseled employees to begin…

In an announcement, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the company has over 1,000 generative AI services and applications in development, while acknowledging he expects the technology will reshape the company’s workforce. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he…

The unicorn biotechnology startup Xaira Therapeutics, co-founded by 2024 Nobel Prize winner David Baker, has released what it claims is the largest public genome-wide Perturb-seq dataset to date. Freely available, the data is available as a 520 GB download and comes with an associated pre-print. Comprising eight million cells, the X-Atlas/Orion dataset dwarfs previous public…

Groq, the AI accelerator company based in Mountain View, California, has announced that the open-source AI platform Hugging Face has integrated its Language Processing Unit (LPU) inference engine as a native provider on its platform, giving Hugging Face’s over 1 million developers access to inference speeds exceeding 800 tokens per second across ten open weight…

The June 2025 executive order dismantles a regulatory framework that has kept American skies silent of sonic booms since 1973. For over five decades, federal regulations have prohibited any civilian aircraft from flying faster than the speed of sound over U.S. territory, regardless of whether the aircraft actually produced a disruptive sonic boom. This blanket…

Meta is frustrated. After plowing $45 billion into the Metaverse only to see limited adoption and mounting losses, the company placed big bets on AI with the launch of Llama in 2023. This year, it is investing some $65 billion in capital expenditures with much of that going to AI and data center initiatives. The…

The FDA hails the recent rollout of its internal AI tool, Elsa, as a major move to tackle the crushing weight of regulatory review where documents thousands of pages long are commonplace. But as reports of a rushed, buggy rollout surface, one regulated AI expert Erez Kaminski, a former AI strategist for Amgen and now…

A team from MIT CSAIL, the Jameel Clinic, and Recursion has released Boltz-2, an open-source Python-based biomolecular model that performs physics-level protein-ligand affinity predictions in approximately 18 seconds on a single consumer GPU. This task previously required hours or days on cluster hardware, often costing upwards of $100 per molecule. By releasing the model, weights,…

The Europa Lander was supposed to involve a voyage to the namesake moon of Jupiter. NASA, however, has left it unfunded for several years and the mission was effectively deprioritized by the 2023-2032 Planetary Science Decadal Survey, leaving it essentially mothballed. The craft’s fate leave the space agency and its partners to decide whether a…

Tokyo-based startup ispace lost contact with its Resilience lander during a landing attempt at the Moon’s Mare Frigoris, a lunar mare located in the northern hemisphere also known as the “Sea of Cold.” The mission’s likely failure marks a significant setback in the company’s second bid to achieve a commercial lunar touchdown. The first Hakuto-R…

Just over two months after R&D World covered the debut of Google’s experimental Gemini 2.5 Pro, the company has announced a significant upgrade following a prior May update to the model that drew mixed reactions from developers. Google’s latest Gemini 2.5 Pro has jumped to the top of AI performance rankings with an Elo score…

In many ways, the first half of 2025 hasn’t been kind to the biotech sector’s growth trajectory. Headwinds from constrained research funding and shifting market dynamics have led to strategic recalibrations for many, including instrument makers like 10x Genomics. But the company’s Chief Technology Officer Michael Schnall-Levin is optimistic about the bigger picture. “I think…

President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered a six-month halt on issuing new student visas to Harvard University students, declaring in a proclamation that he is “suspending the entry into the United States of any new Harvard student as a non-immigrant” for a period of six months because their presence “would be detrimental to the interests…

Alongside its new Astral Zoom, Thermo Fisher Scientific also launched the Thermo Scientific Orbitrap Excedion Pro mass spectrometer at ASMS 2025, a system engineered to help researchers tackle the growing complexity and size of modern biotherapeutics. This instrument introduces an extended mass range and novel fragmentation technology to help provide detailed structural data to help…

Peak Scientific has unveiled its new Intura series of hydrogen, nitrogen, and zero-air generators at ASMS 2025. The new series promises significant reductions in both lab footprint and energy consumption. The Scottish firm states these compact modules are engineered to address escalating operational pressures for GC labs. Peak Scientific notes that the Intura range represents…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has introduced its Orbitrap Astral Zoom mass spectrometer at ASMS 2025. The company states the new system can reduce the processing time for large-scale studies, such as analyzing 6,000 research samples, from 1,000 days down to approximately 100. The system is a successor to the company’s R&D 100 award-winning Orbitrap Astral MS,…

The FDA has launched ‘Elsa,’ its new AWS GovCloud-based generative AI assistant. Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary reported the tool, rolled out “ahead of schedule,” is already cutting some scientific review tasks from “two to three days” down to “six minutes.” This agency-wide deployment of Elsa, a secure in-house Large Language Model (LLM), was also achieved…