A.I./Robotics

The country has transformed considerably since the 1980s. “Back then, we were a coffee-and-banana country,” Morales said. Both the medical device and semiconductor industries have made significant investments. The medical device firm Baxter set up shop in 1987. Intel followed with a landmark $300-million-plus semiconductor assembly-and-test plant investment announced in late 1996 and begun in…

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),…

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…

Over the past several months, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been increasingly vocal about putting AI data centers in space. In February, he predicted that, within five years, “we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth.” He said then that SpaceX, then still a private…

NVIDIA just announced the Jetson Orin Nano 2, a new computer platform for robotics and edge AI that the company says doubles inference performance compared with the Jetson Orin Nano Super. It can also run at 40% less power at equivalent performance. NVIDIA has not yet disclosed pricing, and says the module and developer kit…

Investors have set their sights high for Anthropic, with some eyeing a valuation of $2 trillion or even $3 trillion. While the figures comes from investor models rather than a valuation target set by Anthropic, according to the Financial Times and CNBC, Anthropic could rival or best SpaceX’s record IPO, which raised $75 billion at…

Enterprise software in drug development tends to arrive slowly. Laboratory information management systems, quality platforms and the enterprise resource planning software they connect to typically take months to deploy. In Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP report, based on 170 organizations across industries surveyed between January 2025 and January 2026, the median project ran nine months,…

Researchers at Binghamton University are using computer vision and machine-learning to detect landmines from aerial images. Their results reveal the importance of out-of-sample (OOS) testing, which evaluates a model on independently collected images beyond the dataset used to train and tune it.  “It’s easy to get numbers in the 80 or 90 percent range if you’re not doing out-of-sample testing,” said…

Nobel Prize winner and deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Ph.D., has frequently expressed concern that AI systems could escape human control. At a keynote at the AI4 event in Las Vegas, he pointed to developments that are “scary,” pointing to recent examples of AIs escaping sandboxes at prominent AI companies. “You are seeing AIs with…

ChemGraph, an open-source AI framework from scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, lets scientists without computational chemistry expertise run quantum chemistry simulations through natural language prompts. Its creators also made a model-by-model reliability leaderboard that ranks models based on various criteria and tasks.  In a paper published early this year, the team evaluated ChemGraph across 13 benchmark experiments involving six integrated tools, organized into three categories: molecule names,…

The current AI wave is running into a type of sticker shock reminiscent of what happened when cloud computing went mainstream in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The pitch then was essentially: stop worrying about buying servers and running a data center for capacity you might not need. But it turns out that the…

Will AI soon be able to build AI? Maybe not quite as soon as some pundits have expected, based on a recent preprint from researchers at Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, the University of Toronto, Georgetown and the UK AI Security Institute. One important driver of the current AI wave is the expectation that…

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, a program that offers 100,000 scientists, mathematicians and engineers free access to its frontier models. An initial cohort of 10,000 researchers will receive access this summer, with the program expanding through 2027. OpenAI says participant data will remain excluded from model training by default. The program joins ChatGPT…

Whatever your take on the current AI wave, it is clear that the prospect of creating software has been transformed. “The most impressive edge of it is probably using [genAI models] to help speed code development. And that’s kind of working,” said the computer scientist Jaron Lanier recently. Frontier AI labs are now pushing for…

Researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) developed a generative agentic AI that can translate experimental goals into instructions for a laboratory robot. Their paper was published in Scientific Reports.   Gihan Panapitiya, a data scientist at PNNL and the lead author of the paper, said the researchers had plans to extend AutoLabs to literature review, persistent memory and other autonomous lab equipment besides the automated lab workstation Big Kahuna…

Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 is arguably the most influential LLM to launch in recent memory, marking the biggest leap in capabilities since Opus 4.5 debuted in November 2025. The publicly available counterpart to Claude Mythos Preview, which had a sizable jump in capabilities, most notably, in cybersecurity, Claude Fable featured stronger agentic performance and markedly…

Brookhaven National Laboratory says its GridSearch AI system could cut grid simulations from months to minutes as DOE targets 20–100× faster grid decision-making. Speaking at the recent Genesis Mission Annual Summit, an event dedicated to the U.S. government’s AI-focused initiative that aims to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a…

Clinical trials are notoriously difficult to predict, and they have grown more so as protocols pile on endpoints, procedures and eligibility rules. As that complexity climbs, so do the odds of studies needing mid-course changes. The share of Phase 1 through 4 protocols requiring at least one amendment hit 76%, up from 57% in 2015,…

Establishing causal relationships in plant-microbe studies can be exceptionally difficult, as it requires juggling sterility, standardization and manual labor. A single contaminant or inconsistent measurement can render weeks of work unusable. For example, one study on the effects of plant genotype and soil microbiome on growth in Lotus japonicus found that 15% of variability in shoot length was due to variability in the…

China has done it again. They have launched a new AI model that comes close to the frontier roughly a year and a half after Hangzhou, China–based Deepseek launched R1, a model that was roughly tied with OpenAI’s then frontier model o1. Now, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, released yesterday, follows a similar template while matching…

Tecan’s latest bet is on agents. The Swiss lab automation company has built agentic AI into Introspect, its cloud analytics platform, using NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, in an announcement on June 24 that opened early access to pharmaceutical, biotech and clinical labs. The agents watch instrument telemetry and environmental data, hunt for the patterns that…

Within roughly 18 months, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic have all launched or upgraded products aimed at scientific research, many of them built around AI agents that promise to compress the earliest, most expensive stages of discovery. That push builds on the explosive growth of AI coding tools. Even as many frontier…

When Becton, Dickinson and Company launched its Incada Connected Care Platform in October 2025 with the next-generation Pyxis Pro dispensing system, it framed the move as a way to turn data from nearly 3 million smart connected BD devices into actionable insights on medication inventory, waste and clinician workflows. Omar Ahmed, who joined BD as…

ViewsML, the Vancouver-based company developing what it calls the world’s first virtual biomarker library, closed an oversubscribed $4.9 million seed round earlier this year. Wittington Ventures, the Toronto venture arm of the Weston family holding company, led the round. New investors Mayo Clinic and Continuum Health Ventures participated alongside repeat backers including Debiopharm. In an…