From reducing administrative workload to navigating ‘alien intelligence,’ this month’s column takes a practical look at integrating LLMs and LWMs in the lab
Category: robotics/AI – Page 25
Did the Unabomber Predict the Singularity? Ted Kaczynski’s Warning
16, he entered Harvard. At 25, he was the youngest assistant professor Berkeley had ever hired. At 27, he walked away from all of it into a Montana cabin with no electricity and no running water.
Then he started mailing bombs.
Ted Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others. Nothing excuses that, and this is not an attempt to.
But in 1995 he traded an end to the killing for the publication of his manifesto, and there are two passages in it I have not been able to shake. Not because they are unhinged. Because of when they were written and what they describe.
I am deliberately not quoting them here. You should read them cold, with no name attached, and work out for yourself what you are looking at.
Then the uncomfortable question arrives on its own. Was the Unabomber a murderous neo-Luddite whose ideas deserve to be buried with him, or was he among the first to see the #Singularity coming and recoil at it?
My answer will not satisfy either camp.
Shining Science (@ShiningScience) on X
Shining Science on X: 🚨 A groundbreaking MIT brain-scan study shows relying on ChatGPT weakens critical thinking and memory wiring.
A recent MIT study, titled The Cognitive Cost of Using LLMs, monitored the brain activity of 54 students using electroencephalography (EEG) devices.
Researchers from the MIT Media Lab discovered that participants who consistently relied on ChatGPT for essay-writing tasks demonstrated significantly lower neural engagement in brain regions tied to memory and analytical reasoning.
A new kind of AI that does its thinking cheaply without words
There may soon be a new kind of artificial intelligence in town, one that uses a novel approach to thinking that could save massive amounts of computing power and money.
The AI that most people use every day, like ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini, relies on large language models that can work through difficult problems step by step. While this may ultimately give us the answers we are searching for, the process can increase response times and use a lot of computing power.
So scientists at AI company Pathway decided to test an alternative approach. The research and technical foundations of the team’s work are in a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server.
AI-informed AdaptiveFlow redefines large-scale cloud computing for drug discovery
Researchers today announced AdaptiveFlow, an AI-informed platform that can virtually screen billions of drug-like molecules with a 1,000-fold reduction in computational costs over existing methods. Developed and validated by scientists from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, University of Pavia, Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, AdaptiveFlow allows prohibitively expensive ultra-large virtual drug screens to be conducted routinely. The open-source platform was published today in Nature Biotechnology.
The platform’s framework demonstrated linear scaling up to 5.6 million virtual central processing units (CPUs)—a new benchmark for cloud-based drug discovery—allowing billions of molecules to be screened without loss of efficiency. As proof of concept, the team identified potent inhibitors for existing and emerging cancer targets for which few inhibitors are known.
“AdaptiveFlow is the next generation in automated drug discovery platforms for routine ultra-large virtual screenings,” said co-corresponding author Christoph Gorgulla, Ph.D., Center of Excellence for Data-Driven Discovery, St. Jude Department of Structural Biology. “With this platform, we are able to screen 69 billion molecules, representing the largest ready-to-dock library in the world.”
Human model of childhood dementia from drug screen and AI
In a new study published in the prestigious Nature Communications journal, medical researchers used patient-derived brain cells grown in the lab, combined with advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, to rapidly test approved drugs and pinpoint those that improve brain cell health.
The research focused on Sanfilippo syndrome, a devastating childhood dementia that causes progressive loss of memory, behavior and physical abilities. There are currently no widely available treatments.
Sanfilippo syndrome is one of more than 100 genetic disorders that together affect 1 in 2900 children in Australia and half of all children with dementia die by the age of ten.
Scientists use robots more than two kilometres beneath the Pacific to discover huge lava fields around an active underwater volcano
More than two kilometres beneath the surface of the Pacific, off the coast of Oregon, an active underwater volcano has been hiding one of the strangest landscapes ever mapped on the seafloor. Using robotic vehicles capable of withstanding crushing depths, scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have spent more than two decades surveying Axial Seamount, a volcano along the Juan de Fuca Ridge that has erupted repeatedly since its discovery in the 1980s.
Organic crystal reveals how Joule heating stabilizes resistive switching
Metal-insulator transitions (MITs), in which a material changes from a metallic state with low resistivity to an insulating state because of a change in an external parameter, such as temperature, pressure or an electric field, are a central topic in fundamental physics research.
In materials that undergo MITs, it has also been observed that in the insulating phase, but near the transition point, applying an electric field or current can sometimes trigger a sudden drop in resistance, known as resistive switching.
This volatile resistive switching holds promise for various applications, including resistive memory, optoelectronics and neuromorphic computing, which is key to artificial intelligence implementation.
Martians by ZIA | High Arctic | NASA HMP-2003 | Remastered and AI-enhanced with subtitles
We helped remaster and AI-enhance and subtitle this cool pro-Mars settlement video by our Elaine Walker. Enjoy!
We worked a bit with our board member https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.elaine.w… dig up this version from her hard drive before YouTube compressed the hell out of it when she uploaded it in 2006. Subtitles are now added as well as YouTube’s auto-dub just didn’t cut it for this video. This is also AI-enhanced for better resolution.
You can also view the non AI-enhanced version at • Martians by ZIA | High Arctic | NASA HMP-2…
Also, check out Elaine’s new mini-movie music album at • Macrochip Mini-Movie Album (Bohlen-Pierce… t’s meant for friends to have viewing parties! It’s 40 minutes total, made with real human-made stock footage!
This video was commissioned in 2003 by the NASA Haughton-Mars Project and filmed on DV tape (digital video) in the Canadian High Arctic on Devon Island 75 degrees North, Nunavut, Canada. Sam Burbank of National Geographic did the videography and Elaine Walker did the editing. Her band ZIA was formed in 1991 and described themselves as electronic-pro-space-pop. Elaine took part in four additional seasons since then as an official participant, interviewing the scientists and posting photos and blogs.
Analog Devices’ Industrial Revenue Jumped 53%. AI Chips Aren’t Why
Analog Devices posted its first-ever $4 billion quarter in Q3 FY2026, with Industrial revenue reaching $1.97 billion, up 53% year over year. The growth came from automated test equipment, aerospace and defense, and automation, not AI accelerator chips. Meanwhile, ADI’s real AI exposure runs through a different channel entirely: power delivery, where the company says power availability, not chip supply, is now the binding constraint on AI expansion.
Analog Devices industrial revenue just posted its strongest growth in years, and the AI narrative most coverage reaches for doesn’t actually explain it. ADI reported total revenue of $4.02 billion for its fiscal third quarter, ended August 1, 2026, up 40% year over year and above consensus estimates, according to Futurum’s analysis of the results. Industrial, representing 49% of total revenue, grew 53% year over year to $1.97 billion, and CFO Richard Puccio said that growth was led by automated test equipment, aerospace and defense, and automation, not by AI accelerator demand.
ADI’s real AI exposure sits in a different segment. Communications revenue, which includes data center, grew 84% year over year, with data center now representing 80% of that segment, and optical and power products both growing more than 100% year over year, according to TipRanks’ summary of the earnings call. Analog Devices industrial revenue growing 53% on classic end markets, while data center revenue does the actual AI-linked doubling, tells a more precise story than a single headline number crediting “AI demand” for the whole quarter.