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Before a fusion shot fires, someone sits down with the plan for it and decides, phase by phase, which set of control instructions the machine will follow. Those instructions are called virtual…
Take a climate model that runs on one supercomputer, move it to another, and you are not guaranteed to get the same climate back. Massonnet and colleagues, writing in Geoscientific Model Development…
Ask a modern weather model what Wednesday will look like and it will tell you, accurately enough that leading forecasting centers have begun running these systems operationally. Ask it what Monday…
Somewhere in a chemical catalog sits a compound that nobody has ever dropped onto living cells while reading what happens to their genes. That is the ordinary case rather than the exception.…
A fruit fly can find the one overripe banana in a kitchen using a brain smaller than a poppy seed. It gets no training set and no chance to rehearse. Its solution looks unfashionable next to modern…
The pitch for AI agent teams is intuitive, which is part of why it sells so well. If one language model can draft an answer, surely two can catch each other's mistakes, and a whole committee of them…
Ask a structure-prediction model to work out how two molecules fit together, and much of what happens next is closer to guesswork than most people assume. The model generates a crowd of candidate…
Predicting what a system will do next is one problem. Predicting the moment it stops behaving the way it used to is a much harder one, and for most of the systems scientists care about, the more…
When a person speaks, the face gives the game away. A hard "b" presses the lips shut. A wide vowel drops the jaw. Surprise lifts the brows a beat before the word lands. We read those correspondences…
Ask someone to memorize a shopping list and then say it back in any order, and a few reliable habits show up. People tend to blurt out the last few items first. They often start strong on the first…
Ask a person to drive from a friend's house to a restaurant they've never visited, in a city they know only in patches, and something quietly remarkable happens. They don't consult a lookup table of…
Ask a chatbot for a proof and you brace for a confident, wrong answer. So there is a certain irony in what a team of four researchers reported this week: they asked a language model to help with a…