“AI has solved one of the problems in FrontierMath: Open Problems, our benchmark of real research problems that mathematicians have tried and failed to solve.

The newly-solved problem came from Will Brian, who had placed it in the Moderately Interesting category. It is a conjecture from a paper he wrote with Paul Larson in 2019. They were unable to solve it at the time, or in several attempts since.”

From Epoch AI.

“In response to anthropogenic forcing, the Earth’s surface generally warms as greenhouse gases trap outgoing longwave radiation. Counterintuitively, however, some regions exhibit surface cooling against this global warming background—a phenomenon known as a warming hole. Beyond the well-documented warming holes over the North Atlantic and southeastern United States, here we show that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations can also induce summertime cooling over India. Due to the direct radiative effect of CO2, warming of the Eurasian continent relative to surrounding oceans, low-level moisture transport and vertical motion are enhanced over India. Combined with abundant summer-monsoon moisture and the topographic blocking effects of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush Mountains, these circulation changes increase cloud cover. The resulting cloud enhancement reduces incoming solar radiation at the surface, producing the observed regional cooling. These results reveal a previously underappreciated mechanism whereby greenhouse gas forcing can paradoxically induce regional cooling through atmospheric dynamical pathways.”

From Live Science.

“Last summer, scientists in China reported promising results from clinical tests of a new drug for people with the lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The compound, rentosertib, performed well in the phase 2 trial, being safe and well tolerated, and is set for phase 3 and possible approval.

So far so good. But why has this drug been labeled as a breakthrough that could ‘change drug discovery forever’? The answer is that it was discovered not by a diligent chemist or through an arduous trial-and-error assay but by several smart artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Both the drug target and the small-molecule compound were identified by generative AI platforms from Insilico Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. Rentosertib could be the first true medicine of the AI age, and, crucially, given the expense of drug discovery, it was created on an accelerated schedule.”

From Nature.

“Today, in a world first, a team of scientists from the BASE experiment at CERN successfully transported a trap filled with antiprotons in a truck across the Laboratory’s main site. The team managed to accumulate a cloud of 92 antiprotons in an innovative portable cryogenic Penning trap, then disconnect it from the experimental facility, load it onto a truck and continue experiment operation after transport. This is a remarkable achievement, given that antimatter is very difficult to preserve, as it annihilates upon contact with matter. This world premiere is a test, the ultimate aim being to transport antiprotons to other European laboratories, such as Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), where very-high-precision measurements of the antiproton properties could be performed.”

From CERN.