The resolution revolution in cryo-electron microscopy had reached broad recognition by 2015, when Nature Methods hailed it the method of the year and declared an end to “blob-ology,” a term structural biologist Helen Saibil recalls crystallographers once used to dismiss EM’s then low-resolution imaging. In the decade since, pharma companies have moved from cautious exploration…

Longevity medicine is gradually going mainstream in pharma. In April, Insilco Medicine unveiled what it termed the industry’s first longevity board, a panel aimed at accelerating AI-driven aging research into new therapies. Chairing the board is Eli Lilly molecular discovery executive Andrew Adams, alongside Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, Medici Therapeutics CEO Denitsa Milanova, and Insilico…

FUJIFILM Cellular Dynamics opened a new headquarters and iPSC manufacturing facility in Madison on May 19, expanding the company’s capacity to produce human cells for drug discovery, toxicity testing, stem cell banking and cell therapy development. The 175,000-square-foot campus, part of a $200 million strategic investment announced in 2023, includes process development laboratories and a…

Google’s Gemini 3 triggered a Code Red at OpenAI last December and briefly seized the frontier narrative. Roughly half a year later, the AI model race had mostly become a two-company contest between Anthropic and OpenAI with Claude and GPT trading the top spots on independent leaderboards. Meanwhile, Google’s developer tools steadily lost ground to…

Anthropic hired Andrej Karpathy to its pretraining team on Tuesday and is winding down Stainless, the $300 million SDK startup it also acquired recently. That latter move cuts off tooling that rivals OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare relied on. Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, served as director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, and in…

The market for industrial robot installations has never been worth more, even as North American robot orders remained flat in early 2026. Industrial robot installations alone hit a record $16.7 billion in market value in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics, with Asia (74% of deployments) and China in particular driving the totals.…

Instead of Spy vs. Spy, the cybersecurity world is quickly becoming AI vs. AI. Anthropic is positioning its gated Claude Mythos Preview model as offering a “striking leap” in many evaluation benchmarks over its predecessor, which at the time of launch was Opus 4.6. Most recently, Cloudflare Chief Security Officer Grant Bourzikas reported that Mythos…

RLWRLD, a Seoul-founded startup backed by KAIST researchers, is making a simple pitch across manufacturing, logistics and hospitality: let us replace human hands with robot ones. At the company’s “Dexterity Night” launch event in San Francisco, CEO Junghee Ryu said his team has met with more than 200 large companies and heard the same thing…

Stanford researchers have announced that they have compressed a time-intensive protein building and testing process to 24 hours. Published in Molecular Systems Biology, the paper describes a method known as MIDAS (Microbe-Independent Deep Assembly and Screening) that differs from traditional protein engineering, which requires cloning genes into circular plasmids, growing them in bacteria or yeast,…

Companies from Palantir to Salesforce to Veeva are racing to speed up regulatory workflows with AI agents, as is a wave of startups targeting everything from clinical document generation to pharmacovigilance case processing. Meanwhile, many large pharmas are pursuing a build-and-compose strategy of their own, stitching AI into existing regulatory systems, validated workflows and company-specific…

Say you are in the market for form-fitted clothing for a special event. Off the rack won’t do, and your tailoring requests are demanding: structural alterations, unusual fabrics, tight deadline. Some tailors might balk at the request. Others might take your measurements, feed them into the system and tell you the job can’t be done.…

At Sandia National Laboratories, inspecting ceramic components destined for nuclear deterrence applications traditionally meant lots of manual work. Inspectors would sit at a microscope for up to an hour per part where they would scan every surface for hairline cracks, chips and voids that could compromise performance. Training a single operator on the manual process…

Several of the highest-profile AI-biology startups have made openness part of their strategy. Profluent, an Emeryville-based protein design company, open-sourced OpenCRISPR-1, which it calls the first AI-created gene editor to successfully modify human DNA, and says tens of thousands of researchers have accessed it since 2024. Xaira Therapeutics, co-founded by Nobel laureate David Baker with…

The National Science Foundation is channeling $1.5 billion over the next decade into independent research teams. Focus areas include quantum systems and next-generation scientific instruments. The news comes even as the agency navigates proposed budget cuts that would slash its funding by more than half and a grant pipeline that has slowed dramatically under the…

PacBio’s HiFi Solves Sub-fertility Consortium published a preprint of its first major study. The study focused on couples with unexplained subfertility or recurrent pregnancy loss after standard clinical evaluation had ruled out known causes. Subfertility affects approximately one in six couples globally. Genetic evaluation often remains fragmented, requiring multiple sequential tests over months to years…

Federal funding cuts are affecting scientists across the country. In academia, cuts are causing budget reductions, termination of ongoing research and disruption to the talent pipeline.  Universities are facing a 15% cap on facilities and administrative cost reimbursements. Usually, the government reimburses universities for about 60% of these indirect costs. Now, universities like UConn expect…

Medtech giant Medtronic won approval for its Altaviva implant, a tibial neurostimulator, in September. The device, roughly half the length of a stick of chewing gum (43.7 × 15.7 × 4.5 mm, 7.5 g), recently won a 2026 Edison Award for health innovation. Now, Medtronic has enrolled its first patient in the ENDURANCE post-approval study. “As Altaviva…

AI can help scientists accelerate their research, run powerful simulations and gather insights from vast amounts of data. However, these tools may not be up to the caliber needed for scientific papers. Recent studies have found thousands of papers featuring fake citations and other errors, likely from the use of AI. One study found that…

An outbreak of Andes virus (ANDV), a strain of hantavirus, on a cruise ship has made a diagnostic test more urgent than ever. The incubation period for ANDV ranges from four to 42 days, with symptoms becoming life-threatening in 24 to 48 hours, making early detection essential. ANDV is also the only known strain of…

The past week or so, Anthropic’s gated Mythos model remains a news fixture, drawing White House policy attention, a Mozilla proof point and a somewhat skeptical review from an open-source project. Earlier this month, OpenAI had formalized a split between general-purpose and cyber-specific model access while Anthropic opted for a more reserved gated release for…

According to measurements from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations averaged approximately 431 parts per million (ppm) last month, a record high.  In 1958, when continuous monitoring began, levels were below 320 ppm. Before the Industrial Revolution, levels were approximately 280 ppm or less.  NOAA data…

A new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded that atmospheric microplastics may significantly contribute to global warming. The study showed that microplastics’ warming effect equates to about 16.2% of that of black carbon, or soot.  In hotspots such as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the warming effect of microplastics can exceed that of local…

Elsevier has joined a class-action lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the company’s Llama language model was trained on datasets containing unauthorized copies of academic papers and literary works.  Elsevier claims that Meta used illicit repositories like Sci-Hub and LibGen to source the copyrighted text. The eventual ruling of this case could establish a critical legal…

SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, made up of SpaceX’s Super Heavy Version 3 (V3) booster and Starship, completed its launch rehearsal today in preparation for liftoff as soon as May 19. At nearly 150 meters tall, the Starship V3 is the tallest rocket ever assembled. It is designed to haul up to 150 metric tons of cargo…

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed AI drug design company led by Sir Demis Hassabis, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for their work on the protein structure prediction platform AlphaFold, announced a $2.1 billion Series B on May 12. The total outside capital raised to date is about $2.6 billion. Thrive Capital…