A.I./Robotics

The R&D story of Nvidia in the past went something like this: Designed in California, made in Taiwan. Buried in its Q3 earnings call was the real news: Nvidia and TSMC produced the first Blackwell wafers on American soil. “We remain focused on building resiliency and redundancy in our global supply chain. Last month, in…

Google’s Gemini 3 promises a leap in reasoning, math and scientific accuracy. While its leaderboard scores are high, its real value depends on how well it plugs into daily workflows whether in the lab or in coding. First impressions? It excels at rapid visualization. The interactive model below was generated from a single prompt asking…

Automation was supposed to help R&D labs run more smoothly, freeing scientists from repetitive work so they could focus on discovery. And sometimes it does do that. But the reality now is messier. In a recent survey of 856 biopharma R&D professionals, 31% cited lack of flexibility and 30% pointed to poor integration as top…

As 10x Genomics plugs Anthropic’s Claude into its cloud analysis stack, Michael Schnall-Levin, the company’s chief technology officer, is less interested in the novelty of “natural-language pipelines” than in solving a stubborn problem he calls the last mile of single-cell analysis. For years, 10x has invested heavily in software and visualization tools to automate early-stage…

As Anthropic rolls out Claude for Life Sciences, 10x Genomics is positioning its cloud as the analysis engine behind natural-language queries on giant single-cell datasets. “What we just launched is a meaningful first step toward that: an integration with Claude where we expose an MCP interface to the tools we have in our cloud,” said…

Elsevier’s “Researcher of the Future Report,” published earlier this month, reveals that while 58% of researchers use AI tools for work, 45% feel undertrained in AI. Even so, researchers identify the benefits of AI, with 58% of researchers saying it saves them time. 68% of researchers say the pressure to publish is greater than it was…

The Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) has been translating sperm whale communications since its founding in 2020. CETI is now made up of more than 50 researchers who are using artificial intelligence to help them understand the whales’ language. Now, with help from a team at MIT, they are using an LLM (large language model) to…

Lab automation was supposed to commodify technicians. Replace manual pipetting with liquid handlers, and skilled laboratory workers would become interchangeable button-pushers. That theory hasn’t aged well. An analysis of federal wage data shows the role is not being devalued. It is splitting in two. From 2019 to 2024, the median wage for biological technicians rose…

Maryland is getting its first undersea internet cable, and it’s a monster. Amazon Web Services announced plans for “Fastnet,” a dedicated fiber optic system linking the state’s Eastern Shore to Ireland with enough raw power to stream 12.5 million HD films simultaneously. The project, set to be operational in 2028, represents AWS’s bet that customer…

CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, in partnership with Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) and Google Australia, has launched a global competition with a $75,000 (USD) prize pool to advance the use of AI in agriculture.  The challenge, hosted on Kaggle, aims to improve the accuracy and efficiency of estimating pasture biomass, a critical factor in…

Meta is trimming roughly 600 AI roles across legacy teams, just four months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched one of Silicon Valley’s most aggressive hiring sprees. Axios called it “a multibillion-dollar talent raid” in which the company offered eye-popping compensation packages to lure top researchers from OpenAI, Apple and Google. Wired magazine had noted that…

Verily, a Dallas-based Alphabet subsidiary that Alphabet is preparing to spin off or sell, announced Tuesday it is integrating NVIDIA’s AI software stack into Pre platform, its platform for analyzing health data. Specifically, NVIDIA NeMo, Parabricks and CUDA-X Data Science are now available as pre-configured applications within Verily Workbench, the company’s trusted research environment (TRE),…

Asked whether AI will lessen the need for researchers, Google’s head of Research Yossi Matias gave a clear answer. “The only scenario where you would need fewer researchers is if we assume we’ve answered almost all the major questions. I don’t think anyone believes that,” he said at Google’s flagship research conference in Mountain View.…

A familiar expectation in technology goes like this: breakthrough innovation sparks euphoric predictions, investors pile in, reality disappoints, valuations crash and only then does the technology mature quietly into actual utility. This is the Gartner Hype Cycle, a framework created in 1995 that became an industry institution after one analyst used it to correctly predict…

The OpenFold Consortium released a preview of OpenFold3, an Apache 2.0-licensed foundation model that predicts 3D protein structures and co-folded complexes with small-molecule ligands, nucleic acids and other proteins, positioning it for industry use at scale. Simultaneously, Apheris, a Berlin-based provider of enterprise-grade AI applications for drug discovery, launched ApherisFold to run, benchmark, and fine-tune…

Eli Lilly said today it is building what it calls the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful AI supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia. The system, billed as the first Nvidia DGX SuperPOD configured with DGX B300 systems, will power an “AI factory” for drug discovery and development. Lilly and Nvidia say the installation will use 1,016 Nvidia…

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and NVIDIA are expanding their collaboration to accelerate development of AI-powered virtual cell models, committing to GPU-accelerated processing of petabyte-scale biology datasets and adding open imaging and RNA models plus shared benchmarks to CZI’s Virtual Cells Platform. The effort advances multiple strategies to relieve persistent bottlenecks in biological research: scale and…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is rumored to be staffing up Merge Labs, an unannounced brain-computer interface venture that points away from skull-opening implants and toward ultrasound-based sensing. Reporting from The Verge says Altman tapped Caltech engineer Mikhail Shapiro, known for ultrasound neurotech and gene-encoded “acoustic reporter” cells, suggesting a non-implanted, “read-only” path to decode intent…

Since the 1990s, scientists across fields have used electronic lab notebooks to record data and take notes. Before that, they used paper records. Now, the next generation of lab notebooks is emerging: AI ELNs.  AI ELNs, sometimes called AILNs, are ELNs with generative AI tools and features built into the user interface. These new programs…

At its “Research to Reality” media event on Thursday, Google showcased DeepSomatic, an AI tool that accurately identifies cancer-causing genetic mutations, outperforming current methods according to a study published in Nature Biotechnology on October 16.”DeepSomatic is an AI tool that helps scientists find genetic variants in cancer cells that could enable personalized treatment,” said Yossi…

Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., which premiered in 1921, coined the word “robot,” framing it as explicitly humanoid laborers. It’s taken more than a century for that vision to materialize. Some pundits now expect humanoid robots to become a household reality in the coming years. “I believe that many homes will have a humanoid robot but…

Google today introduced a geospatial reasoning system that automates complex environmental analysis, moving its Earth AI platform beyond static data layers toward dynamic decision support. A paper on the system was published in arXiv. The new framework orchestrates multiple specialized AI models to answer multi-step questions about disaster response, public health and infrastructure planning. Open…

Anthropic today announced Claude for Life Sciences, an AI platform that reportedly exceeds human performance on laboratory protocol comprehension. A press release notes that it scores 0.83 versus a 0.79 human baseline on the Protocol QA benchmark. In addition, the platform integrates directly with scientific tools like Benchling and 10x Genomics. The announcement noted that…

Healthcare data is often incomplete and inconsistent, limiting efforts to improve patient outcomes and operational efficiency. A 2021 report from Sage Growth found that only 20% of healthcare organizations fully trust their data. Because records follow patients across providers with shifting identifiers and coding schemes, the same encounter often appears multiple times or partially, breaking…

Google Cloud and multiple healthcare partners announced production deployments of AI agents on Oct. 16, timed to the release of Google Cloud’s second annual ROI of AI in healthcare & life sciences report and the start of HLTH 2025, held October 19–22 in Las Vegas. The announcements include clinical-note summarization at scale at Hackensack Meridian…