A blog post from the AI image company announced the launch of a whole-body ultrasound scanner users would step into through a pool of water. “We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies,” the company noted. The “Ultrasonic CT” will be featured in…

The Trump administration has reclassified approximately 8,000 senior-level career officials across 54 agencies to Schedule Policy/Career, formerly Schedule F, status. The move strips the employees of standard civil service job protections, making it easier to remove them from their positions. Approximately 97% of those reclassified hold GS-15 or senior leadership positions. Agencies can remove Schedule…

Days after going public, SpaceX has reached a market capitalization of about $2.5 trillion, even with its stock skidding in midday trading on June 17. At the time of writing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was worth more than the next four billionaires on Earth combined. SpaceX laid out its vision weeks ago in its S-1,…

The House Appropriations Committee has approved the Fiscal Year 2027 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $189.3 billion, which is 3% below the FY 2026 level. While the bill includes several increases to medical research, it also codifies some significant reductions and…

Over the past two years, software engineering has handed a growing share of its routine work to AI agents. At one end of the spectrum, companies ranging from Google to Anthropic use AI to write the bulk of their code. At the other, there are reports of the bills coming due for heavy users at…

Continuing a Biden-era push accelerated by the Trump administration, the NIH is making research findings available to the public and requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit the author-accepted version of their peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC) and make it available at the time of publication. Many publishers enforce a six to 12-month embargo period before…

Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), the inner layer of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), this week. The garment was designed for NASA’s Artemis IV, which is scheduled to land on the moon in 2028.  “By bringing together the best in both aerospace engineering as well as luxury…

In April 2026, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, now a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, posted an architectural overview on GitHub. The project itself, which he called an “LLM wiki,” has generated significant buzz, though nothing approaching OpenClaw, the agent framework that became one of the most successful projects in GitHub history. The tweet that…

Researchers at Washington University have genetically engineered hookworms to produce and secrete a human antibody, creating a “living pharmaceutical biofactory,” according to the study published in Nature Communications.  To survive within the human gut, hookworms secrete over 800 molecules to modulate inflammation and maintain homeostasis.  “We thought: what if we make it secrete one more…

The Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a $368 million network of over 900 deep-ocean instruments that provide researchers with real-time, long-term data on marine ecosystems, coastal environments and global climate patterns.  This could lead to permanent gaps in long-term oceanographic datasets, disrupting longitudinal studies on climate change and ocean health. The…

How facility design, containment, and cleaning validation decisions determine commercial yield and time-to-market. Scaling spray drying from lab success to commercial production is one of the most complex transitions in pharmaceutical manufacturing. While early-stage results may appear promising, many organizations underestimate how facility design, safety systems, and day-to-day operations affect performance at scale. These oversights…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) has launched a differential scanning calorimeter built to test fully assembled coin cells, eliminating the cell teardown step that has long made DSC-based battery safety work slow and destructive. The Waters TA Instruments Coin Cell Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC) scans fully assembled coin cells from -80 °C to 600 °C while…

Digital pathology matured quickly during the pandemic, when remote work needs and temporary FDA enforcement discretion lowered the perceived barriers to whole-slide imaging. Capital followed. Roche’s May agreement to acquire PathAI for up to $1.05 billion, pending closing, is only the most recent sign of how much money is chasing the field. The most valuable…

At Microsoft Build 2026, the software giant’s annual developer conference, held June 2 and 3 in San Francisco, the life sciences AI company Causaly announced a collaboration with Microsoft aimed at one of drug discovery’s earliest and most consequential decisions: which biological targets are worth pursuing. Causaly runs an agentic AI platform that reads across…

Claude Mythos was one of the most hyped models in recent memory. And it is out now. Sort of. Yesterday Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, a generally available model built on the same weights as Mythos 5 that switches over to the older Opus 4.8 for most tasks that even mention cybersecurity or biology. Early…

A team of researchers recently uncovered living microorganisms on the remains of the 5,300-year-old Iceman, revealing a methodological gap in modern genomics. In a study published in Microbiome, the team showed that while DNA analysis can map the presence of ancient genetic material, traditional petri dish cultivation remains necessary to determine if those microorganisms are…

Stanford scientists have discovered a new kind of cell death in flatworm immune cells. Called ruptosis, the mechanism results in the cell exploding and taking out approximately 70 cells surrounding it.  The flatworms, Schmidtea mediterranea, evolved to sacrifice healthy cells through this process in order to ensure the elimination of biological threats. Unlike vertebrate immune…

NASA today announced the four members of the Artemis III crew and gave updates on the mission, including how a recent explosion during a Blue Origin test is affecting the timeline.  The Blue Origin New Glenn rocket exploded during a hotfire test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 28. The incident destroyed the…

For eight days, a kilometer of fiber-optic cable on the floor of Monterey Bay became a temporary nervous system for one of the West Coast’s major submarine canyons. The portable seafloor sensing system, deployed at roughly 380 meters depth in Monterey Bay, operated autonomously for eight days and detected all 32 earthquakes in the U.S.…

Since April 2026, AI labs have begun keeping their most powerful models behind vetted-access programs. Anthropic limited its Claude Mythos system and OpenAI its GPT-5.5-Cyber to approved security partners, each billed as able to spot and exploit software flaws with unprecedented precision. Also in April, OpenAI announced its GPT-Rosalind life-sciences model, gating it over biosecurity…

President Donald J. Trump is pushing Washington deeper into the business of artificial intelligence, with a pair of new directives that move the federal government closer to the release calendar of frontier models, the military deployment of commercial AI and possibly the ownership structure of the companies building it. The President signed two artificial intelligence…

Solving humanity’s biggest problems has been OpenAI’s stated reason for pursuing artificial general intelligence since its 2015 founding, and over time, life science challenges have crystallized as core parts of its vision. In February 2025, CEO Sam Altman wrote that “we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases,” and by that September…

Agentic AI company Owkin and Sanofi have extended their collaboration with a five-year license for K Pro, Owkin’s AI scientist, under which Owkin will lead the end-to-end development of novel, purpose-built biopharma agents for Sanofi. Owkin pitches K Pro as a system that reasons over biological data and orchestrates AI agents to run research and…

After securing $65 billion in Series H funding and achieving a $965 billion post-money valuation, Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement for a proposed IPO to access more capital. Today, the company floated the idea of a pause on model development. “We believe it would be good for the world to have the…

On a clear night in early 2019, in his hometown in China, Jie Yang, Ph.D., was thinking about how galaxies merge. In essence, they combine through mass, distance and gravity, with nothing else involved. Yang, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney, asked whether a clustering method could group itself the same…