Browsing: Science

A team at Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies has measured a lutetium ion clock to an uncertainty of one part in ten billion billion, the lowest ever reported for an optical atomic clock. Two of their clocks then agreed with each other more precisely than any clock comparison in history. The reason this matters is not the record. It is that the second itself is up for redefinition.

Nikon is re-reviewing the winner of its 2026 Small World in Motion contest after scientists flagged artifacts and a SynthID watermark hit. Dr Ning Xu says AI only colored his data. Nikon’s own profile of him, published before the row, described exactly that workflow.

Georgetown and University of Washington researchers had 331 people watch a car accident, then read an AI summary of it a day or two later. One altered detail dropped accurate recall from 83.6% to 44.8%, and being told the summary was AI written made no difference at all.

MIT’s insect-scale flying robot just got about 450% faster and pulled off 10 somersaults in 11 seconds. The robot itself was not rebuilt. A new AI control system replaced the math that was holding it back.

OpenAI says an unreleased model produced a full proof for the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem in a week. NYU and Anthropic-linked researchers say they had already solved related problems first.

Anthropic says Claude autonomously produced the first fully machine-checked proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Lean, a 13-million-line formalization that took 11 days.

Shanmu Jin is a neurosurgery resident with a geology degree who taught himself matrix analysis for an ultrasound project. He was not trying to prove Crouzeix’s conjecture. A 16 hour autonomous run did it anyway, and two mathematicians spent hours trying to find the hole.

Surgeons at UCLH removed a pituitary tumour with an AI reading the live endoscope feed and color-coding the structures that must not be touched. The interesting part is not that AI was in the room. It is what it was looking at.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 briefly carried the highest impact probability ever recorded for an object its size. Webb has now ruled out both an Earth strike and a lunar one. The number worth remembering is not 3.1 percent.

Researchers at Southern Illinois University engineered yeast to turn PET bottles and corn stalks into a protein rich, vanilla scented cookie called µBites. It smells good, it was funded by NASA, and no human has been cleared to taste one.