Big Data

Chicago startup Newtonian Standard says it has identified a memory behavior in NVIDIA GPUs that could serve as the foundation for a new kind of hardware-level security. J.P. O’Donnell, the company’s founder and a former Okta engineer, says he spent 18 months characterizing the behavior across NVIDIA Turing, Lovelace and Blackwell GPU architectures. The company…

Bioptimus, a global AI company building models for biology, announced the launch of its Spatial Tissue Embedding Learning Atlas (STELA), a multinational spatial data generation initiative in partnership with 10x Genomics and Broad Clinical Labs. The company aims to solve issues in drug discovery and development, improving efficiency and decreasing costs.  Building foundation models for…

Basecamp Research, an AI lab for biological design, today announced the launch of the Trillion Gene Atlas, a scientific initiative to generate and model biological data at the trillion-gene scale. The initiative is a collaboration with Anthropic, Ultima Genomics and PacBio and is powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure.  The Trillion Gene Atlas aims to expand…

In 1982, Joy Milne detected her husband’s Parkinson’s disease with her heightened sense of smell. She wouldn’t realize the source of the scent until after her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s over a decade later. The couple attended a support group, and Milne smelled the disease on almost every person there.  The Milnes’ case was…

R&D World has announced the winners of the 2025 R&D 100 Professional Awards. The honorees were selected by a panel of 54 prestigious industry experts from around the globe. The list of 2025 winners follows, along with highlights from their nomination letters. These winners will be formally awarded at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet at…

Elsevier, founded in 1880, is going all in on AI and data. In addition to publishing, Elsevier now offers several databases, learning resources and AI tools all aimed at supporting researchers. The latest release in this vein is a new AI-powered search engine for its chemistry database, Reaxys, which represents a fresh take on its…

This week in R&D: the first quantum computer in space is now orbiting the Earth; a potential new treatment for Alzheimer’s, thanks to cancer drugs; a startup is breaking ground on their first fusion power plant, they say they are on track to deliver fusion energy by 2030; Google DeepMind announced their AI Earth mapping…

Phase 3 clinical trials are lengthy and expensive processes that could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if they fail, enough to tank a mid-sized or small company. Direct costs alone tend to be in the tens of millions of dollars, yet failures are common. A study by researchers at MIT found…

In 2022, Moderna brought in approximately $19.26 billion in revenue, largely thanks to its groundbreaking Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine. In January 2025, the company is projecting revenue of $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion. To reverse this downturn, the company is pushing to broaden mRNA’s applications into cancer, rare diseases and other areas, but that requires cracking…

Industry analysts from McKinsey to Omdia largely converge on a timeline for initial quantum advantage emerging in the next few years. While the era when quantum computers can routinely tackle large-scale challenges in fields like drug discovery and materials science might still be years away, IBM’s Quantum CTO, Oliver Dial, Ph.D., predicts the threshold of…

A deep learning system known as Aardvark Weather offers accurate weather forecasts that are orders of magnitude quicker to generate than existing systems. Described in a Nature article (currently posted as a preprint), the system can generate predictions on four NVIDIA A100 GPUs that would otherwise take roughly 1,000 node-hours on a traditional supercomputer system…

While OpenAI charges $60 per million tokens for its flagship reasoning model, a Chinese startup just open-sourced an alternative that matches its performance—at 95% less cost. Meet DeepSeek-R1, the RL-trained model that’s not just competing with Silicon Valley’s AI giants, but in some cases running on consumer laptops in some configurations rather than in data…

Imagine a hospital spending millions on advanced imaging equipment yet relying on decades-old computers to run the software. That paradox propelled robotics and computer vision veteran Camilo Buscaron—a former systems engineer at NVIDIA and Chief Technologist for AWS Robotics—into action. In 2023, he set out to commercialize an open-source computer vision library known as Kornia,…

For decades, the Nyquist-Shannon theorem—a foundational principle of signal processing—dictated that fully sampling a signal at or above twice its highest frequency was essential for capturing critical information. Now, a Pennsylvania startup called Lightscline suggests we may be entering a “post-Nyquist era.” According to a recent Nature Scientific Reports paper, the company’s neural-network-based software, inspired…

Over the past couple of years, the world’s most powerful supercomputers have experienced a sizable leap in performance. The combined processing power of the computers on the TOP500 list surged from 5.24 exaflops in June 2023 to 11.72 exaflops in November 2024, representing a 123.7% increase. Meanwhile, the anticipated Colossus supercomputer from Elon Musk’s xAI—if…

The irony isn’t lost on Google’s leadership: even the architects of artificial intelligence find themselves navigating its transformative effects. “You know, things are never quiet,” remarked Shweta Maniar, global director of healthcare and life sciences at Google Cloud in a recent interview, recalling how Silicon Valley giants vowed to disrupt healthcare among other industries. “I…

Each year, the top 2,500 or so international R&D spenders collectively invest more than $1 trillion in R&D. The roster of R&D heavyweights is shaping up to look broadly similar to prior years, but NVIDIA is poised to crack into the top 15 given its recent AI-driven growth. If anything, NVIDIA’s ascent into the ranks…

Life sciences executives are entering 2025 with data-driven optimism, according to Deloitte’s newly released “2025 Life Sciences Outlook.” Survey findings from 150 global C-suite executives show that 75% remain upbeat about the year ahead, with 68% anticipating revenue increases and 57% expecting margin expansions. Two key factors emerge from executive interviews: enhanced clarity following the…

While the term “biotechnology” was coined in 1919, “techbio” dates back roughly a century after that. Around 2019, the VC firm Artis Ventures set up a venture capital fund named Artis techbio with the aim of uniting software, computational biology, and drug development into a cohesive framework. The ambition behind this idea has sometimes surpassed…

For Avandra CEO and founder Ryan Tarzy, the potential of AI in healthcare is personal. He lost his father to pancreatic cancer, a disease often caught too late in the United States. At the recent Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference, he encountered a telling example of what emerging medical tech can achieve. “At…

A good number of organizations rushing to deploy AI in pharmaceutical and genomics research have their priorities backward. They need not only a solid data infrastructure but also true data savviness before forging ahead with deep learning or large language models, argues Stavros Papadopoulos, CEO and founder of TileDB, the developer of data platform for…

A team of researchers at the Allen Institute for AI and UC San Diego have introduced a climate modeling approach boasting 25× speed-ups and associated energy savings over the emulated physics-based model FV3GFS. Specifically, the method takes about 2 hours and 56 minutes to run a 10-year simulation The physics-based FV3GFS model takes about 78 hours…

Imagine a future where needing a new heart means you become your own donor. “It’s going to be your cells, your design—an exact replica of your heart, only made healthy,” said Steven Levine, Ph.D., senior director of virtual human modeling at Dassault Systèmes, in a recent interview. For Levine, the goal of transforming cardiac care…

Yes, questions remain about whether AI chipmaker NVIDIA can maintain its momentum in 2025. NVIDIA’s upcoming Blackwell AI chips have encountered thermal problems when integrated into server racks designed to house up to 72 units. Despite these recent technical hurdles, the company remains an innovation juggernaut. 1. Why NVIDIA is the R&D leader of 2024…

From enterprise software to drug discovery, artificial intelligence is triggering seismic shifts in corporate R&D strategies. SAP is investing €2 billion annually in AI while planning to cut up to 10,000 jobs. OpenAI is pivoting from its nonprofit roots toward a for-profit model valued at $80 billion. Hardware giants like Intel and AMD are slashing…