science News

Rogue AI aren’t science fiction anymore

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started It all started…

Todd McFarlane Sitting on Animated ‘Spawn’ Movie Starring Keith David

Plus, 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' returns to theaters this September with 'Sting of Death.'

Inside Humanity’s Ancient Obsession With Conquering Time

Particle physicist Guido Tonelli discusses humanity's long-held obsession with time and how this relationship has shaped science.

‘President Curtis’ Star Keith David on Why He Loves Science Fiction

The POTUS himself and his co-star, Jim Rash, talk about their new 'Rick and Morty' spin-off.

‘Not healthy’ LLM use is more common than you think

Hank Green, a popular YouTuber and science communicator, said he is stepping back from production amid intense criticism over his use of AI. Green described his AI usage as "not healthy," but stressed that he used it for finding research sources and not to wr…

Apple Acquiring Materials Science Company PlasmaSolve

Earlier this year, Apple informed the European Union that it had agreed to acquire certain assets and hire employees from PlasmaSolve, according to a notice published today on the European Commission's website. Apple Inc. ("Apple"), through a subsidiary, w…

Researcher Faces Investigation for Concealing 6-Year-Old Girl’s Death in Gene-Editing Trial

Zilong Qiu is now being investigated by his university more than a year after his patient likely died from his team's experimental gene-editing therapy.

Computer science enrollment fell for the first time in 20 years after ChatGPT's rise, a Stanford economist says

A Stanford economist says AI may be reshaping students' choices as computer science enrollment slows.

Lighting 3D Printed Parts on Fire for Science

Although lighting 3D prints on fire is rarely the intended outcome, it’s possible that said print will at some point in its future come into contact with either an open flame or a significant…

Life on Mars? It Remains a Tantalizing Topic for Scientific Study

Earth’s neighbor still has secrets that science is trying to figure out, and one of them is potential signs of life.

Oh Cool, AI Is Inventing New Biological Viruses Now

Can we just stick to cybercrimes?

Millions watch 'surreal' solar eclipse in UK and Europe

More than 90% of the Sun was covered by the Moon in the UK, while a full eclipse was visible in Spain and Iceland.

Long After Pluto Fly-By, NASA's New Horizon's Probe Wakes Up Again, Starts Doing New Science

Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN. It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth... NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a…

This 16-year-old built an autonomous AI-powered robot turtle that finds microplastics in water

Evan Budz, 16, won a $50,000 scholarship at the International Science and Engineering Fair in May for his microplastic-seeking robot turtle.

Former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil has sought a valuation of at least $750 million for his new AI science startup

Kevin Weil, the former chief product officer of OpenAI, is in discussions to raise a round of funding for a new AI science startup.

A physicist explains the overlooked problem that could doom Elon Musk’s Mars colonization plans: dust

Astrophysicist and science writer Adam Becker discusses why the dream of life on Mars may be out of reach, maybe for centuries to come.

Famous Science YouTuber Admits He Has Unhealthy Relationship With AI After Facing Backlash Over Recent Video

'The level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs is not healthy for me,' said Hank Green

YouTube Mistakenly Penalizes Popular Science Channel Kurzgesagt For AI-Generated Slop

The science and technology explainers warned audiences in the past about the entropy AI will unleash upon the web and after being forced to remove a video on microscopic superpredators, they're living through it

What your summer reading list says about you

Just picked your holiday book? Our choices can subconsciously reveal important parts of our personality, studies show.

Intriguing Stories in Computer Science

Comments

Digital habits that rob attention and energy — and how to combat them

There's a reason why double- or triple-screening your devices makes you feel tired, says NPR's Manoush Zomorodi. She explains the science of information overload and how to reclaim calm and focus.

Computer science enrollment fell for the first time in 20 years after ChatGPT's rise, a Stanford economist says

A Stanford economist says AI may be reshaping students' choices as computer science enrollment slows.

NASA’s Just Prolonged Voyager 2’s Science Mission With a Big Bang

Letting go is hard, especially when it concerns an irreplaceable space probe like the two Voyagers. Fortunately JPL engineers have managed to pull off a ‘big bang’ switch on Voyager …read more

BBC Inside Science

Will the US army benefit from testing its male soldiers for testosterone levels?

NASA’s New 3D Model Shows the Earth Is a Lumpy Mess

We like to think of our home as a nice, smooth sphere. But mapping the Earth’s gravitational field provides a different view of the planet.

At colleges, the AI boom means everyone wants to dabble in computer science

With no background in coding, Faith Maeba, a psychology major, was reluctant when her mother first suggested she enroll in classes on artificial intelligence...

YouTuber Hank Green Is Facing a Fan Revolt Over His AI Use

He says his loved ones don't think his LLM use has been "healthy."

NASA’s Curiosity rover found a ‘sea of polygons’ on Mars

The latest discovery from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is a field of honeycomb-shaped polygons covering a Martian valley called Valle Grande. As Gizmodo reports, Curiosity has snapped pictures of the unusual terrain texture before, called polygonal fractures, …

Ghost In The Shell Fans Who Never Read The Manga Are Very Confused By The New Hornier Adaptation

Science Saru's 2026 adaptation of Ghost in the Shell is finally here, and its goofy and raunchy vibes are perplexing those who haven't read Masamune Shirow’s original 1989 manga

Ungewöhnliche Stellenausschreibung: Cyberagentur sucht Science-Fiction-Autor

Die bundeseigene Gesellschaft soll Forschung und Innovation in der Cybersicherheit voranzutreiben. Warum es dafür jetzt auch einen Schriftsteller braucht.

SpaceX moon crash offers ‘incredible’ lessons, ex-NASA official says

"This is a wonderful opportunity for citizen science," noted Gold, as the crash will happen on the side that faces Earth.

BBC Inside Science

Researchers have announced synthetic viruses designed by artificial intelligence.

Shanghai science forum photos show China's AI and robotics advances in rivalry with US

BBC Inside Science

What if the Goldilocks zone is for idiots?

BBC Inside Science

The surprising science of how drought affects the health of our soils.

The ultimate science summer reading list

SciAm books editor Bri Kane shares her favorite science books for every summer mood

Don’t You Dare Recreate Dinosaurs If You Buy This ‘Jurassic Park’ Amber Mosquito

The iconic prop from Steven Spielberg's blockbuster is going up for auction in August.

Neal Stephenson's guide to writing books with a fountain pen

Neal Stephenson writes his novels the way people did in 1850. The science-fiction author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and the thousand-page Baroque Cycle has composed nearly every book since about 2001 with a fountain pen on paper. On his Substack, Graphoman…

Easy Theremin Uses ESP32

The Theremin is that classic electronic musical instrument that makes those weeee-ohhhhh noises which were so popular in mid-century science fiction movies. Mid-last-century, that is, because this century is just …read more

Interstellar Travel May Soon Be Within Reach

Compact sensor-packed probes, propelled by laser- or Sun-powered sails, could be humanity's first scouts to another star system.

This New Field of Study Is Giving College Students an ‘Edge’ in the Job Market

Colleges are adding degree programs in this emerging field.

ByteDance Is Training a 10-Trillion-Parameter Model To Chase the Frontier

ByteDance is reportedly training an AI model with roughly 10 trillion parameters as it tries to close the gap with leading frontier systems such as Anthropic's Mythos. The model is still in early pre-training, and its eventual performance will depend on more …

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."

These ‘Masturbation Consultants’ Were Hired to Pleasure Themselves With AI

Joi AI hired 10 people to masturbate using AI companions as part of a monthlong “wellness” study. The company claims the practice could help “solve male loneliness.”

Silicon Valley Is Completely Divided Over Chinese AI

The AI “startups” worth billions of dollars are raising alarm bells about Chinese AI. The smaller players have a totally different take.

Utility companies are promising to spare us from AI’s energy bill

In the face of backlash to concerns the AI boom will increase consumer electricity bills, the largest utility companies and data center developers in the US are now promising to do something about it. The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly 200 organizati…

OpenAI's accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction

This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the …

SpaceX has more neocloud revenue

SpaceX's AI revenue grew more than three times to $2.6 billion from the year before, mostly because of deals that the company made to provide compute to other AI companies, according to SpaceX's quarterly earnings. The AI division, which the company said in i…

For Decades, Scientists Thought They Knew How This Inca Child Died. They Were Wrong

The study sheds new light on the final moments of three children sacrified to the Inca gods.

An Amazon data center could have the worst polluting power plant in the country

To power its new West Texas data center, Amazon is investing in the construction of a new power plant that could be one of the largest single producers of greenhouse gases in the US, according to the New York Times. The new gas-burning plant in Pecos County, …

The untold science and drama of Lewis and Clark’s expedition

Historian Craig Fehrman unpacks the science, politics and human stories behind one of America’s most famous expeditions

DuckDB – Data power tools for your laptop, now in Clojure (2023)

A well-written, *FAST* data science database for your laptop.

Hank Green AI controversy raises questions for science communicators

The backlash raises a bigger question for science communicators: where should AI fit into their work?

From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life

Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. Bu…

Marmots now have an OnlyFans account to fund research

I never expected to have an OnlyFans account, but all manner of strange things are possible in 2026, so here we are. Science funding is under attack in the United States, and researchers are exploring alternate funding sources to keep the work going. — Read t…

UK's iconic Jodrell Bank telescope faces axe in science cuts

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

How serial killer profiling actually works, according to a former FBI profiler

Jana Monroe is a former FBI agent and profiler who has interviewed dozens of female killers. Presented by the new Hulu original series "Furious."

The next chapter of our AI momentum

Today, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shared some changes with Google DeepMind teams.

LFM2.5 2.6B model competitive with 4x larger models

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Qwen 3.8 27B is out: open weights, best local dense model yet

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs

From Situational Awareness’s Blow-up to Materials Science to the HuggingFace Hack

Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Join Me in Jamverse

My first foray into contributing to a science fictional extended universe

Qwen3.8-2.4T

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Fei-Fei Li: the real risk of AI in classrooms is students who stop wanting to learn

Fei-Fei Li thinks schools are worrying about the wrong thing. The danger of AI in classrooms is not that students will use it to cheat, she argues, but that it will strip away their reason to learn at all. She made the case on the science podcast Huberman Lab…

Unsloth Qwen3.8-27B GGUF files

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Moburst reveals AI-powered mobile growth playbook following record campaign performance milestones

NEW YORK & TEL AVIV, August 10, 2026 Moburst, a global mobile App marketing agency specializing in creative strategy, performance marketing, and data science, has published its integrated framework for mobile application growth in the AI era. The announcement…

Why is the women's 800m record so tough to break?

The world record for the women's 800m is the longest-standing in athletics. No-one has managed to break it for 43 years. Why?

Scientists Don’t Actually Know How Long Fungi Can Live. The Reasons Are Kind of Weird

Fungi are really important to science, but aging them correctly is much more difficult than you'd think.

Trump’s Assault on Science Continues

I appreciate the plain speech of Science magazine’s Derek Lowe in his recent piece, The Assault On Science Funding Continues. When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journa

Discovery Loop

Discovery Loop is building AI systems that automate the experimental loops of science and engineering. Continuous Exploration.

Ask HN: Any tips for a college freshman enrolled in computer science?

Comments

Nasa boss praises rise of women in science

Dr Nicola Fox says she was one of four women on her science course at university in the 1991.

I Guarantee Your Science Classes Never Taught You About These 18 Bizarre And Unsettling Animal Facts

If you thought humans were gross and disturbing, wait until you read about these animals.View Entire Post ›

Daily briefing: The science of The Odyssey

The tale gives us glimpses of the medicine and technology of the Homeric world. Plus, this year’s El Niño is set to be the largest on record and the boom in languages at the dawn of farming.

SpaceX is barely Space and mostly X

Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk's healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we're calling the whole thing SpaceX. Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a c…

Values in science go beyond politics

Letter to the Editor

The way you look can help you get a job - here's how

While you need to answer the questions in an interview, your appearance and mannerisms are also crucial.

U.S. pledges $5 billion to boost AI in government-backed scientific research

The White House’s senior science adviser faced questions over research funding cuts from lawmakers on Wednesday

The best science books to read this summer, according to Scientific American editors

From ecohorror to science-inspired poetry, discover the books Scientific American staffers are recommending this summer

Act like it is science

I am seeing so many doom prognostications, or least severe worries, due to the OAI/HuggingFace incident and related stories.  But virtually all of these I find underargued to say the least. So I have a simple request.  If you are worried, and wish to persuade…

heise+ | Stalker im 4K-Heimkinotest: Picknick in der Gefahrenzone

Tarkowskis Science-Fiction-Klassiker gilt als Höhepunkt des sowjetischen Films. Gehen mit der neuen 4K-Restauration alle Wünsche in Erfüllung?

Toast really does land butter-side down, and physics explains why

For more than a century, people have grumbled that dropped bread always lands butter-side down and chalked it up to plain pessimism. When the BBC science show Q.E.D. tossed toast into the air in 1991, it landed butter-down only half the time — exactly what ch…

A new alloy turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay

A metal that has never been recorded before turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay. Writing in Science Advances, Luca Bindi, Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Mario Wannier, and Teresa Salvatici report the discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima …

Batteries Powered By Rust? This Startup Raised $750 Million to Build Them.

Form Energy's iron-air batteries can keep running for 100 hours straight, far longer than standard lithium-ion batteries.

Watch a Mad Scientist YouTuber Make Lightning in a Bottle From Mercury and Neon

Yes, of course it's Styropyro.

Meteorite That Crashed Into New Jersey Home Contains Rare Ingredients of Life

An analysis of the space rock traced its origin to a primitive asteroid from the early solar system.

Trump calls for review related to scientific manual used by judges

By Dawn Chmielewski LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, July 19 (Reuters) - U.S.

Trump Wants to Roll Back a Rule That Protects Drinking Water for 25 Million Americans

Conservation scientists have determined that Trump’s plan to rescind the 2001 “roadless rule” could jeopardize clean water supplies in key states across the American West.

Naked Mole-Rat Queens Release a Chemical to Stop Other Females From Reproducing

A lone female maintains her status in the colony by hoarding her ability to reproduce.

‘Scott Pilgrim’ Returns in the Most ‘Sonic’ Way Possible [Exclusive]

'Scott Pilgrim EX: Dawn of Metal Sonic' sees writer Bryan Lee O'Malley return to his best-selling comic book 16 years after its conclusion.

OnlyMarms: Funding Science Research on OnlyFans

This is an extremely 2026 story (derogatory): because of the Trump regime’s assualt on scientific funding, a group of scientists who has been studying marmot populations in Colorado since 1962 turned

NSF pilots 4-year PhDs with industry research placements

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a $47 million investment over five years, along with additional financial commitments from nearly three dozen universities and private industry...

Florida’s Surgeon General Blames a Debunked Abortion Vaccine Claim to Explain Measles Surge

During a recent press conference, Joseph Ladapo seemingly endorsed the misleading claim that the MMR vaccine is made using aborted fetuses.

Apple TV’s ‘Neuromancer’ Explores an Eerily Timely Future

The streamer's long-awaited adaptation of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' stars Callum Turner and arrives January 22, 2027.

Viagra Could Be a Secret Weapon Against Cancer

Recent research suggests sildenafil might help disturb cancer's ability to spread elsewhere in the body.

Rubin Gets a Closer Look at the COSMOS Field, Revealing More Than 650,000 Galaxies in One Image

The observatory recently began its 10-year survey of the southern sky using the world's largest digital camera.

Pluto’s Famous Glacial Heart Has Been Secretly Leaking Liquid Nitrogen

“Pluto never stops surprising us.”