“NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to sample an asteroid is bringing its rubbly haul back to Earth Sunday. Scientists hope to use high-powered lab equipment to study the sample of asteroid Bennu to learn more about how our solar system has evolved over billions of years.”
From Axios.
“Andrew White, a chemist at FutureHouse, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that focuses on how AI can be applied to molecular biology, says that observers have been surprised and disappointed by a general lack of improvement in chatbots’ ability to support scientific tasks over the past year and a half, since the public release of GPT-4. The o1 series, he says, has changed that.
Strikingly, o1 has become the first large language model to beat PhD-level scholars on the hardest series of questions — the ‘diamond’ set — in a test called the Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark (GPQA). OpenAI says that its scholars scored just under 70% on GPQA Diamond, and o1 scored 78% overall, with a particularly high score of 93% in physics…
OpenAI also tested o1 on a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad. Its previous best model, GPT-4o, correctly solved only 13% of the problems, whereas o1 scored 83%.”
From Nature.
Financial Times | Scientific Research
“Google DeepMind and BioNTech are building AI lab assistants to help researchers plan scientific experiments and better predict their outcomes as companies race to find specialised applications for energy and data-intensive artificial intelligence models.
Sir Demis Hassabis, chief of Google’s AI arm, is leading the company’s efforts to develop a specialised AI model to act as a research assistant, helping scientists to collaborate across disciplines and make unexpected connections more easily…
Over the coming years, he said the tools that DeepMind was building could suggest and design experiments based on a given hypothesis and give scientists a probabilistic view on a proposed experiment’s potential success or failure.
Meanwhile, German drugmaker BioNTech and its London-based AI subsidiary InstaDeep said on Tuesday they had designed a specialised AI assistant known as Laila with a ‘detailed knowledge of biology’ built on top of Meta’s open-source Llama 3.1 model.
In a live demonstration, research scientist Arnu Pretorius showed how the AI agent could automate routine scientific tasks in experimental biology, such as analysis and segmentation of DNA sequences, and the visualisation of experimental results.
Scientists at BioNTech’s laboratory in Mainz also demonstrated how Laila could connect to lab devices and monitor ongoing experiments or tasks being performed by robots, with the assistant detecting a mechanical failure from a BioNTech machine during a live demonstration.”
From Financial Times.
“A fruit fly’s brain is smaller than a poppy seed, but it packs tremendous complexity into that tiny space. Over 140,000 neurons are joined together by more than 490 feet of wiring, as long as four blue whales placed end to end.
Hundreds of scientists mapped out those connections in stunning detail in a series of papers published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The wiring diagram will be a boon to researchers who have studied the nervous system of the fly species, Drosophila melanogaster, for generations.
Previously, a tiny worm was the only adult animal to have had its brain entirely reconstructed, with just 385 neurons in its entire nervous system. The new fly map is ‘the first time we’ve had a complete map of any complex brain,’ said Mala Murthy, a neurobiologist at Princeton who helped lead the effort.”
From New York Times.
“The hype around drones may finally be starting to deliver.
Drone deliveries, first touted by Amazon more than a decade ago, are slowly taking off in some parts of the U.S. On Thursday, Matternet, a drone delivery startup, launched its service to Silicon Valley…
The announcement adds to signs of growth for drone delivery. In Fort Worth, Texas, which recently became the first major city in the United States to offer commercial drone deliveries, they’re being used to deliver groceries from WalMart.
In College Station, Texas, Amazon’s drone delivery service has become common enough for residents to see the service as a noisy nuisance. And, with recent FAA approval, the company seems set to expand drone delivery operations across the city and beyond.
Experts say many of the obstacles to drone delivery, most notably the technology and regulations, have been hurdled.”
From NBC News.
