AI

AI explained: models, agents and scientific applications, with clear accounts of how they work, what the evidence shows and where the limits remain.

radiology AI

One AI Just Read 146 Findings From a Single CT Scan

Sep 28, 2026

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7 min read

One AI Just Read 146 Findings From a Single CT Scan

Alibaba's DAMO Academy trained RADAR on hundreds of thousands of routine radiology reports, without manual per-scan labelling, and evaluated it against a 26-radiologist panel on real hospital scans. The code and model weights are publicly downloadable under a non-commercial research license. It is still a research system trained and validated predominantly in Chinese hospitals, not a cleared clinical device.

Anima Anandkumar

Every AI You Know Learned the World From Us. This One Did Not

Sep 3, 2026

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5 min read

Every AI You Know Learned the World From Us. This One Did Not

Every AI system you have heard of was trained on human writing, which means it learned the world secondhand, through our descriptions of it. Two researchers declined a Bezos-backed offer worth more than two billion dollars to build something with a different foundation: a model trained to predict how physical systems actually behave. Here is what a neural operator is, why chip design and weather are the first targets, and why almost none of it is verified yet.

Space

Aug 23, 2026

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2 min read

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six Deep Dives, One a Day

Six days, six long-reads from the frontier, plus a featured story on orbital surveillance going mass-market. A quantum sensor that can touch a patient, gene editing reaching a cell it never could, and two bodies flown around the Moon.

Feature Story

+10

Aug 20, 2026

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5 min read

The Defensibility Moat

Four industries are taking most of the enterprise AI money. What they have in common is not market size or better models. It is who gets blamed when the software is wrong.

autonomous systems

The First AI-Orchestrated Cyberattacks Are Here

Aug 20, 2026

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5 min read

The First AI-Orchestrated Cyberattacks Are Here

For years the worry was that AI would help hackers. In 2026 the line moved: AI agents began running much of an attack on their own, sometimes without even being told to hack. Here is what has actually happened, why it changes cyber-defence, and how to read it without panic.

Space

Aug 16, 2026

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2 min read

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six Deep Dives, One a Day

Next week on The Signal: a quantum internet, living-bacteria implants, drones that navigate by ear, AI-run cyberattacks, disposable satellites, and a salt battery, plus a featured read on where vertical-AI money is flowing.

Nvidia Cosmos

The AI That Builds Worlds You Can Enter and Explore

Aug 15, 2026

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6 min read

The AI That Builds Worlds You Can Enter and Explore

A new kind of AI called a world model turns a single sentence into a 3D place you can explore, and Google, Fei-Fei Li and Nvidia all call it the next leap after chatbots. Here is what these systems can really do, and where the illusion breaks down.

MIT

Teaching Robots to Think Ahead Instead of Freezing to Think

Aug 12, 2026

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6 min read

Teaching Robots to Think Ahead Instead of Freezing to Think

Most AI robots move like a buffering video: watch, freeze, think, act, repeat. A new MIT method called VLASH has them predict where they will be by the time they finish thinking, so they plan the next move while finishing the last one, smoothly enough to hold a real ping-pong rally with a human.

Space

Aug 9, 2026

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3 min read

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six Deep Dives, One a Day

Alien megastructures, a quantum computer that runs on light, a battery that rusts on purpose, and a living robot. Your first look at next week.

Space

The Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

Jul 19, 2026

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2 min read

The Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

Six deep dives, one a day, Monday to Saturday. Here is your first taste of each.

brain-computer interface

No Implant, No Surgery: The AI That Reads the Words You're About to Type

Jul 13, 2026

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5 min read

No Implant, No Surgery: The AI That Reads the Words You're About to Type

Meta's Brain2Qwerty reads the sentence you are typing straight from your brain activity, with no implant and no surgery, at 61% word accuracy. Inside the leap from 8%, the limits nobody puts in the headline, and the question it forces early.

Space

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

Jul 12, 2026

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2 min read

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

Mind-reading AI, a chip that writes DNA, one free download that drives 20 robots, and the signal holding up civilisation. Six deep dives, one a day, Monday to Saturday.

AI for science

The Scientist That Never Sleeps: The Lab Running 50,000 Experiments With Nobody There

Jul 7, 2026

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4 min read

The Scientist That Never Sleeps: The Lab Running 50,000 Experiments With Nobody There

A self-driving lab lets an AI pick each experiment, robot arms run it overnight, and every result steers the next guess, with no human at the bench. Here is what happens when a machine stops describing science and starts doing it.

Space

Jul 5, 2026

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2 min read

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six Deep Dives, One a Day

Six spoilers- for next week's deep dives, one a day, Monday to Saturday.

Space

AI Can Now Spot Cancer Years Before You'd Feel It

Jul 3, 2026

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6 min read

AI Can Now Spot Cancer Years Before You'd Feel It

Plus: China's eerily lifelike humanoid, why bosses say data (not models) is the moat against LLMs, Russia's $60B bid to become SpaceX, home batteries turned power plants, and the Pentagon's encryption countdown.

AI for science

+18

Can AI Actually Do Science? A Brutal New Test Keeps Score

Jul 2, 2026

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8 min read

Can AI Actually Do Science? A Brutal New Test Keeps Score

Plus: robots learning to feel, a contested claim to have built life from scratch, China's fusion-magnet milestone, a tiny engine aimed at Mars, and quantum error-fixing as a free download.

Space

+22

The Future of Video Editing? Tell Google's AI What to Change — and It Does It

Jul 1, 2026

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8 min read

The Future of Video Editing? Tell Google's AI What to Change — and It Does It

Plus: a humanoid robot pulls a multi-day shift, a monthly shot that silences a gene, a battery made of CO2, NASA's private cargo run to the Moon, and a quantum computer that fits in a server rack.

SMR

+23

A Robot Tow-Truck Launches Today to Save a Falling NASA Telescope

Jun 30, 2026

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8 min read

A Robot Tow-Truck Launches Today to Save a Falling NASA Telescope

Plus: NVIDIA hands AI agents a real science lab, robots learn from video games, a world-first cell therapy cracks a solid tumour, a walk-away-safe reactor finds a grid partner, and an AI designs quantum codes humans couldn't.

direct air capture

+21

The Machines Sucking CO2 From the Sky Just Got Real — and Cheaper

Jun 29, 2026

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7 min read

The Machines Sucking CO2 From the Sky Just Got Real — and Cheaper

Plus: Washington gates the most powerful AI, a humanoid takes a real shift at BMW, an AI-designed antibody clears its first human safety test, the next Starship lights up, and quantum hits a real milestone.

Space

+18

The Signal — America's quantum moonshot, and the quiet race to lock your data first

Jun 26, 2026

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10 min read

The Signal — America's quantum moonshot, and the quiet race to lock your data first

A US executive order pours the government into quantum computing — and braces for the day it breaks today's encryption. Plus five more signals from the frontier.

gene-editing medicine

+33

The Signal — The $20,000 home robot has arrived, with a human quietly on call

Jun 25, 2026

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12 min read

The Signal — The $20,000 home robot has arrived, with a human quietly on call

A walking humanoid you can buy for your living room is shipping this year — but the laundry-folding demo hides a remote helper. Plus six more signals from the frontier.

Space

+26

The Signal — A battery of iron and air could be clean energy's missing piece

Jun 24, 2026

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10 min read

The Signal — A battery of iron and air could be clean energy's missing piece

Cheap storage that lasts days, not hours, is the part that finally lets a grid run on sun and wind — plus five more signals from the frontier.

R-noid

+19

The Signal — AI is now hunting bugs in the code the whole internet runs on

Jun 23, 2026

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10 min read

The Signal — AI is now hunting bugs in the code the whole internet runs on

For two years the fear was AI helping hackers. Now it's patching the open-source code almost everything online depends on — plus six more signals from the frontier.

Space

+14

The Signal — A robot is flying across the Pacific to rescue a NASA telescope

Jun 22, 2026

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9 min read

The Signal — A robot is flying across the Pacific to rescue a NASA telescope

Launch is becoming routine. The new frontier in space is keeping, moving and rescuing what's already up there — plus six more signals.