More R&D-heavy companies are going into debt. SpaceX? Racked up $23 billion in debt in 2025. Its xAI subsidiary, itself funded through loans, stands to repay $17.5 billion in debt. Microsoft? While it has retained its “AAA” credit rating, its stock has tumbled 12% year to date, partly over spending concerns. The company, which is…

The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center have announced the first selections for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad. Deployable Energy, General Matter, NuCube Energy and Radiant Industries were selected from an initial pool of Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program applicants, the two precursor programs to…

A new study in Science reveals that LLMs can now outperform physicians at diagnosis. The study demonstrated that OpenAI’s o1 model identified the correct or a very close diagnosis in 67% of early ER cases, compared to about 50% to 55% for physicians.  The model was required to complete various tasks such as reading medical…

Researchers at Brno University of Technology have developed magnetic microbots that can remove nanoplastics from water via electrostatic attraction. They published their findings in Environmental Science: Nano.  Nanoplastics, plastic particles smaller than 100 nm, are considered more dangerous than microplastics because their size allows them to cross cell membranes. They have been detected in the…

The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies approved a bill proposing slimmer cuts to science agencies than those proposed in President Donald Trump’s proposed FY 2027 budget. The bill would still leave the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the…

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover found organic molecules that have never been seen before on Mars. A rock that the rover drilled and analyzed in 2020 includes the most diverse collection of organic molecules ever found on Mars, NASA announced last week. Of the 21 carbon-containing molecules identified in the sample, seven of them had never…

BEIT Inc., a quantum computing startup founded by ex-Googlers in Kraków, has launched CovAngelo, a hybrid quantum-classical platform designed to accurately model chemical reactions in complex molecular environments. Its focus is on covalent inhibitors. The firm is backed by Bloomberg Beta and the European Innovation Council and participates in NVIDIA Inception, a startup program that…

Vacuum technology keeps running into sustainability challenges. First there was a helium shortage. Then another. And another. In addition, the industry has been moving away from oil-sealed pumps and towards more sustainable methods.  Helium shortages affect lab equipment Helium shortages aren’t exactly new. The gas has been through four supply crunches since 2006, each driven…

For decades, the loudest voices against animal testing in drug development belonged to animal rights groups and organizations like PETA. The pharmaceutical industry largely tuned them out while committing to the three Rs, which include Replacement, Reduction and Refinement of preclinical testing processes. So it was striking to see FDA encouraging drug developers to plan…

The Pistoia Alliance, a life sciences nonprofit organization, today announced new data showing that only 1% of professionals report AI having value in the wet lab. The data also shows that while 30% of organizations claim to have rolled out enterprise-wide AI, 69% lack metrics to show the impact of AI on reducing costs or…

President Trump’s FY2027 budget request would cut NASA by $5.6 billion, with the deepest reductions falling on science and STEM education while leaving Artemis and a planned lunar base camp funded through prior appropriations. The request would cut the Science Mission Directorate by roughly 50%, terminate 27 operating missions, cancel 26 missions in development and…

Engineers manage agents now. So do scientists. So do the labs building AI. “Engineering roles are becoming management roles where you manage AI agents.” That is how Vinay Pinnaka, co-founder and CTO of the Y Combinator-backed Silicon Valley fintech JustPaid, describes what the past year has done to his job. “I built AI Gilfoyle,” Pinnaka…

A Chinese robotics company is finally tackling what we all wanted to see robots do: our chores. UniX AI announced earlier this month that its Panther service robot had begun the “first real-home deployment of a mass-produced humanoid robot.”  The Panther robot has completed full-stack, continuous multi-task validation in real, unmodified household environments without staging…

Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD is going high end. The firm just announced a 1,000-plus-horsepower supercar that measures its speed in seconds at both the track and the plug. Unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show under the automaker’s premium Denza brand, the Denza Z is claimed to hit 100 km/h in less than two seconds…

President Donald Trump fired all 22 members of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation and guides the president and Congress on science policy, via email on Friday.  The board was created in 1950 to advise the administration on science and engineering policy and approve major funding awards. It is usually made…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has opened a flagship U.S. Bioprocess Design Center (BDC) at its Plainville, Massachusetts, site, adding 4,000 square feet of lab and training space for biologics process development. The center gives biotech and pharma customers hands-on access to Thermo Fisher’s integrated bioproduction workflow, ranging from media to cell line development to chromatography and …

Researchers have developed a metal-organic material (MOM) that can capture water from the air. They published their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Materials like this could be critical to combating global water scarcity, the paper stated.  According to the United Nations, water stress levels reached 18.6% in 2021, rising 2.8% globally…

A pharmaceutical company can spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars learning that a Phase 3 trial was aimed at the wrong patients, the wrong endpoint or the wrong competitive bar. The venture-backed startup QuantHealth is trying to force that reckoning earlier. QuantHealth says its AI clinical simulation platform can test trial designs before…

Somewhere in the world right now, a patient sits in a clinic waiting room ahead of a clinical trial visit. On the clipboard is eligibility status, recent labs, comorbidities, medication history, prior notes, all of it needing clinician review before anything else happens. This is the smallest waiting room in the whole system. Zoom out,…

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a compact, automated robotic platform for foundational photochemical assays. They call the system Roblonski, after A. Jablonski, who created the Jablonski diagram. They published their findings in ACS Central Science.   Reliable photochemical and photophysical characterization is essential for understanding and optimizing photocatalytic processes. However, traditional spectroscopic methods…

Big Tech is sharpening its focus on healthcare and drug development. Amazon’s recent Bio Discovery launch is one recent signal, with AWS pushing into agentic AI application for antibody design. It joins a growing playing field: Google DeepMind’s Isomorphic Labs has advanced pharma partnerships with Novartis and Eli Lilly on the back of AlphaFold 3…

The new Thermo Scientific FluidEase Pro ClipTip electronic pipettes combine a large, high-resolution touchscreen with ClipTip attachment, electronic tip ejection, Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, up to five user profiles and a modular charging stand that can support as many as four pipettes. “Lab users today grew up with smartphones,” said Joyce Ji, Director & General Manager,…

Interphex 2026 brought over 600 exhibitors to the Javits Center in New York City this week. Among the hundreds of vendors, a few themes emerged: AI and automation, digitalization and sustainability.  The show indicated that discussions around the digital transformation are turning into action. “I think we’re seeing the transition of the discussion around digital…

TL;DR: Claude Mythos Preview appears to lead cleanly on six of nine overlapping rows, especially SWE-bench Pro and Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE), but benchmark comparisons between Mythos and GPT-5.5 are imprecise. The released Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 are neck and neck. Opus 4.7 leads on SWE-bench Pro (64.3 vs 58.6), HLE no tools (46.9 vs 41.4)…

Interphex 2026 featured over 600 exhibitors at the Javits Center in New York City, taking place April 21 through 23. At the show, six technologies were awarded Interphex Exhibitor awards across various categories.  The Interphex Exhibitor Awards recognize leading vendors at the show each year for innovative, state-of-the-art technologies. The submissions are reviewed by a…