In April, Anthropic acquired the biotech Coefficient Bio for $400 million. In June, the company signaled its intent to automate science more broadly, starting with its Claude Science platform. In August, it announced a research preview of Model Hardware Standard (MHS), an open interface specification that lets AI agents operate physical devices such as microscopes.…

A little over a decade ago, Merck & Co. outspent Google on research and development. Merck still led in 2013, with $7.5 billion against Google’s $7.1 billion. Google pulled ahead in 2014, spending $9.8 billion against the $7.2 billion Merck reported in its 2014 annual report.1 Big Tech’s R&D spending has only continued to climb.…

In a fireside chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Sam Altman called OpenAI’s agentic breach of Hugging Face over the summer “the worst accident we’ve seen.” Other AI companies, including Anthropic, have since found similar behavior in their models. Altman argued that the industry needs an aviation-style culture of transparent accident reporting while, earlier in…

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…

The top two innovation hubs in the world are in Asia, according to a recent report from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Leading the list of the top 100 innovation clusters is the greater Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou area, with Huawei being the commercial anchor there. In the second slot is Tokyo-Yokohama, which is home to…

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…

Asisloglycoprotein receptors (ASGPRs) on healthy hepatocyte membranes physiologically function in clearing glycoproteins containing galactose or N-acetylglucosamine residues from the circulation. In mammalian circulation, approximately 90% of proteins are glycoproteins, typically adorned with terminal sialic acid residues. Physiologically, as these glycoproteins age, sialic acids are removed, exposing galactose, lactose, or N-acetylgalactosamine residues. These exposed sugars are…

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is collaborating with Argonne, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as four universities and more than 20 industry partners, on a three-year project to bring agentic AI to nuclear engineering. The principal investigator said the project, called Prometheus, will aim to compress the time to get a nuclear power…

While 84% of R&D leaders expect generative AI to deliver significant benefits for their functions, 60% concede that their current integrations fall short of expectations. This gap is a result of how R&D organizations are choosing to deploy GenAI rather than the technology itself. R&D organizations typically rely on a traditional technology adoption playbook, treating…

Thermo Fisher Scientific debuted 250-liter Heratherm environmental chambers. expanding its laboratory equipment lineup with smaller, stackable models for stability testing, cell culture and sample storage. The chambers complement the company’s existing 750-liter versions. The smaller format allows labs to stack units for simultaneous testing under different environmental conditions or for long-term studies, according to Thermo…

    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…

Researchers led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have combined two X-ray techniques to watch how a molecule’s electrons and its surrounding water reorganize together during a reaction that underpins photosynthesis and cellular metabolism in what the team says is the first study to combine these techniques to capture that interplay in a single experiment. They published their work in Nature…

Verily Health, a company focusing on AI for precision health that emerged from Google X and eventually became Google Life Sciences in 2015, has received funding from its partner Nvidia. The company’s flagship product, the Verily Pre Platform, is a precision health platform that turns clinical, genomic and device data into AI-ready datasets. Verily’s current investors include Alphabet, Series X Capital and UCHealth. In…

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…

A team of researchers spent almost eight years collecting observations of a binary star system to build a three-dimensional model which supports the theory that the two stars formed separately and came together later, rather than forming from the same disk, as the researchers’ 2019 paper suggested. Astronomers think at least 90% of massive stars exist in binary or higher-order multiple systems, but…

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…

After 13 years with the same seafloor-mapping system, the research vessel Nautilus from the non-profit Ocean Exploration Trust (OET) is surveying the deep Pacific around Wake Atoll, a U.S. territory located about 3,000 miles east of the Philippines. The ship is now putting a newly installed multibeam sonar system to work at depths of up to 11,000 meters (36,089 feet), approximately 6.8 miles and deep…

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…

Sandia National Laboratories’ Agent Bayes project faces a nine-month test that asks whether AI can help scientists perform Bayesian reasoning, a process that often requires a subject matter expert and a statistician working together. The project is part of the first cohort selected for the Genesis mission, a Trump administration effort to “transform American science and innovation through the power of artificial…

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),…

In a survey of more than 1,000 laboratory personnel across five countries, quality, safety, and purity emerged as the leading considerations when purchasing research chemicals. Cost ranked near the bottom, according to findings previously presented by Honeywell’s research chemicals business, now part of Solstice Advanced Materials. Those priorities pave the way to a larger operational…

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…