With its row of glossy chambers connected by squiggly tubing, the AI-powered setup looks more like a futuristic brewery than a chemistry lab. Yet when given a prompt by its human operator—”make aspirin”—the system leaps into action like a well-oiled team of chemists. One AI takes the command and scours the web to optimize a […]
The pace of the green energy transition has accelerated significantly in recent years. Figures released at the end of last year show roughly 40 percent of US electricity production is now emission-free. With growing concern that climate change is accelerating, rapidly decarbonizing power generation is more important than ever. The US has long been seen […]
In September, scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health announced they had successfully grown “humanized” kidneys inside pig embryos. The scientists genetically altered the embryos to remove their ability to grow a kidney, then injected them with human stem cells. The embryos were then implanted into a sow and allowed to develop for […]
Why do we age? And how can we slow down the clock? This year, we inched closer to answers. Longevity research continued decoding the core causes of aging in the battle to ease age-related disease and extend health as we go grey. A group of studies pinpointed a surprising blood protein that supports multiple anti-aging […]
Psychedelics made their mark this year—not as counterculture party drugs, but as a new paradigm in mental health therapy. In June, Australia became the first country to greenlight MDMA, popularly known as molly or ecstasy, and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. MDMA also inched closer […]
Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives portioning it into work-time, family-time, and me-time. Rarely do we sit and think about how and why we choreograph our lives through this strange medium. A lot of people only appreciate time when they have an experience that […]
Every Saturday we post a selection of articles from the week. With 2023 nearing its end, we dug through all those posts again to surface 25 stories worth revisiting. Here you’ll find a deep dive on OpenAI, a look at the coming golden age in medicine, a surprising explanation of Nvidia’s AI success, a stunning […]
This year gave rise to an incredible mix of brain implants that can record, decode, and alter brain activity. It sounds like déjà vu—brain-machine interfaces also lived rent free in my head in last year’s roundup, but for good reason. Neuroscientists are building increasingly sophisticated and flexible electronic chips that seamlessly integrate machine intelligence with […]
Artificial intelligence had a breakout year in 2023 as large language models leapt from research curiosity to the hottest consumer product around. Given current levels of hype, next year could be make or break for the technology. When ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, its wild success caught everyone by surprise, including its […]
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine. Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood technology journal. […]
