#scientific-sleuths

#scientific-sleuths

"It had its own biography, its own deep history. It seemed like an archaeological site between covers," recalls Stinson, who is now a medievalist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.

The format has ginormous link cards at the bottom of the AI summary, which include a thumbnail of no apparent value, the site name, favicon, description, and title.

Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.

A maggot's age and species can give essential information to forensic entomologists investigating murders. Combing through these fly larvae, investigators can potentially learn when and where a crime happened, whether the body has been moved or whether toxins were involved. For example, blowflies are among the earliest insect colonizers of corpses; they typically sniff out and lay eggs on a dead body within minutes to hours.

Google AI mode has added an 'Ask about this' option above the sources where all URLs are displayed. Clicking on 'Ask about' here automatically pulled a new prompt into the search box.

His message is clear: our world is built on abundant energy, around 80% of which has come from fossil fuels over the past 50 years. Because supplies are limited, energy consumption will peak in decades - sooner if humans attempt to limit climate change. To keep global warming below 1.5 °C by 2100, the use of fossil fuels must fall by 5-8% each year - a pace that is too fast for low-carbon energy to keep up with.

A core question we want to understand is where did matter come from. And then, if you know about antimatter, it's natural to ask, why is that not here? The process is not understood and we are hunting for clues as to why it happened, says Dr Christian Smorra, a physicist on the Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (Base) at Cern.

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets "to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."

Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.

In fact, Stawicki was on a mission to save the lives of around 1,000 zebrafish ( Danio rerio) in her laboratory. Similarities between lines of hair cells on the fish's flanks and those in the mammalian inner ear enable her to use them as a model to study hearing problems in humans caused by some antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs. A sensor had picked up that the lab's heating system had been knocked out by a power fault.

Last November, the UK government announced a bold plan to phase out animal testing in some areas of research. Animal tests for skin irritation are scheduled for elimination this year, and some studies on dogs should be slashed by 2030. The long-term vision is 'a world where the use of animals in science is eliminated in all but exceptional circumstances'.

Three scientists have coined a rather scatological, yet revealing, term: PISS, short for Published In Support of Self. The acronym defines a disconcerting phenomenon. Specialized scientific journals that were once published every two weeks or weekly now churn out special issues every few hours. Previously, these monographs were selective and entrusted to a leading figure in a scientific discipline. Now, even the most mediocre researchers receive a flood of invitations to edit one of these countless special issues, which have become a multi-million dollar business.

Countless millions of nonhuman animals (animals) of all sorts are used in a diverse array of laboratory research. Their treatment varies from being unspeakably inhumanely abused to being treated with kindness, depending on the questions at hand and the values and attitudes of the researchers themselves. The lives of these animals truly are hidden, and most people are incredulous when they learn that laboratory rats and mice still are not considered "animals" under the current federal Animal Welfare Act.