Latest news, developments and reporting on Research.
Geoffrey Hinton and 21 co-authors have published a paper on recursive self-improvement, asking whether automating AI R&D could trigger an intelligence explosion that compresses years of progress into weeks. The authors say current evidence is not enough to prove it has begun.
A re-examination of 46 skulls from Egypt’s First Dynasty cemetery at Abydos found potentially lethal blunt-force trauma in 18 retainers, researchers say, strengthening evidence that some royal servants were sacrificed when their king died.
MIT Tech Review’s EmTech Future 2026 explored AI’s convergence with quantum, energy and robotics; program on demand.
Physicists at Brookhaven's RHIC found an unexpected dip in particle-flow variations while smashing gold nuclei at nearly light speed, a possible hint of a long-sought critical point, though researchers say it is not proof.
Le Monde published an article on 4 October 2026 headlined "In search of the scent 'that smells like sex'," but the full text of the piece could not be retrieved.
Google Research says TEE-based federated learning offers externally verifiable central DP and now trains Gboard models.
Virus carries human gene acquired about 100,000 years ago and may use it to infect people, researchers say.
Toronto-led physicists used rotating light to detect hidden octupolar magnetic order, an early quantum technology step.
Nikon is re-reviewing its Small World in Motion winning video after scientists said it shows signs of AI generation. Dartmouth's provost separately faces AI allegations over his published writing.
A study in The Lancet Oncology estimates 2.3 million new cancer cases worldwide in 2024 were attributable to infections, about 12 percent of all cases, with most occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
AI Ataraxos beat Stratego champion Pim Niemeijer 15-1 with four draws, using a belief model and efficient self-play.
The University of Washington has relocated its Global Innovation Exchange to Microsoft's Building 92 under a rent-free lease, backed by a $42 million in-kind donation, making it the first UW program to operate full-time at the company.
The LUX-ZEPLIN detector in South Dakota has recorded an event that could be a first hint of dark matter, but Ars Technica reports the signal is far below the threshold for discovery and may be a statistical fluke.
Ai2 open-sourced AstaBrief 8B, a Qwen3-8B-based model for cited scientific reports in Asta's Fast mode.
MIT Technology Review's Oct. 2, 2026 Download reports that about 500 people are competing for six months to reverse their biological age, while former DeepMind researcher Thore Graepel argues that today's LLMs do not truly reason. It also rounds up reported tech developments including OpenAI rogue-agent incidents, an Nvidia chip-smuggling arrest, Ukraine's acoustic drone fence, and NASA's nuclear-powered Mars spacecraft plan.
Swiss glaciers lost 5.5 percent of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026, bringing total losses since 2021 to 19.4 percent, according to a report. Researchers say some glaciers are collapsing internally as meltwater carves cavities.
MIT Technology Review essay argues LLMs do not truly reason, contrasting next-token prediction with AlphaGo's search and intuition.
A new paper co-authored by Shing-Tung Yau claims all 28 seven-dimensional spheres admit strictly positive sectional curvature, and thanks GPT 6 Astra and Claude Pro for help with part of the proof strategy and calculations.
Study: AI chatbot answers nearly 19% less diverse than Google Search, raising knowledge-narrowing concern.
Study: Venus's lower haze is cosmic dust from meteorites that interacts with sulfuric acid and helps seed clouds.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU and Stanford built an AI called Ataraxos that beat top Stratego player Pim Niemeijer 15-1 with four draws, using just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars.
A team led by Kaiming He has proposed NAT-ARC, a pure-vision method that uses ImageNet MAE pretraining to solve ARC abstraction tasks. Its best single model reached 63.4% pass@2 on ARC-1, and an ensemble reached 70.2%.
A May 2026 Tilburg University study finds grandparents feel more pride and love when they spend time with grandchildren, while other research links supplementary caregiving to lower dementia risk, greater mobility and slower cognitive decline.
An Australian study finds two causes of recurrent bacterial vaginosis: persistent infection after antibiotics and reinfection.