Latest news, developments and reporting on Research.
Nikon is re-reviewing a first-prize microscopy video by Tsinghua University’s Dr. Ning Xu after scientists questioned whether AI altered its airway cilia motion; the entrant denies AI generated the film.
Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have built an AI tool that reconstructs what a person is looking at from fMRI brain scans and predicts brain activity from images. Ethicists call it promising, while neuroscientists warn it could extract mental imagery without consent.
A powerful El Niño is already affecting global weather, but NOAA is planning a smaller research effort than in 2015-16, with further projects awaiting Congress and the Trump administration seeking to eliminate its research office.
Switzerland lost 19.4% of its glacier ice since 2021, including 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, a monitoring report says, leaving Alpine glaciers reduced to rock deserts.
A two-year trial off Cornwall found that floating scarecrow buoys and bird-shaped kites reduced seabird bycatch in gillnets by 59% and 71%, according to research published in Conservation Letters.
A community-led excavation on Scotland’s Lismore has uncovered a major sixth-century monastery, burials, decorated stonework and rare seventh-century metalworking, findings archaeologists say illuminate early Christianity’s spread.
Chicxulub impact created an 8-million-year hydrothermal system that may have supported microorganisms, Ars Technica reports.
A Nature paper finds butterfly wing patterns and flight paths create false motion cues that stop birds from judging speed and direction.
OpenAI researcher Noam Brown says a 10,000-agent, 88-hour run solved a Millennium Prize problem, but the underlying model deserves most of the credit. He discussed multi-agent scaling, RL limits, and AI-run organizations.
New Spectre variant hits JIT compilers, leaking password hashes on Intel-based Linux systems, researchers say.
A review in Nature Reviews Biodiversity documents dozens of overlooked ways insects shelter, protect and sanitize for vertebrates, and warns that disruption of insect communities will affect the species that depend on them.
At IROS 2026, TU Delft professor Javier Alonso-Mora presented mobile manipulation, task and motion planning and aerial multi-robot research, including drones with arms and a 2026-2030 construction project.
At ECCV 2026 and in tests reported on September 30, researchers and companies moved AI beyond visual recognition: NVIDIA generated missing audio and manipulation data, GPT-6 Astra controlled a Unitree G1 and a gimbal, while office agents exposed the gap between execution and judgment.
A Copernicus ocean state report says the world's seas absorbed a record 23 zettajoules of heat last year, driving sea-level rise, acidification, marine heatwaves and damage to coral reefs and plankton.
A new Exeter exhibition explores fungi's cultural world, with music generated from the electricity fungi emit.
Stanford's Movement Lab and Caltech have connected GPT Astra to a Unitree G1 in the HomeBody project, letting the humanoid explore a kitchen, remember object locations and execute long-horizon tasks through local skills rather than end-to-end action generation.
Late-stage trial data show retatrutide produced average weight loss of up to 25% at 80 weeks and 30% at 104 weeks in people with obesity, with improvements in knee pain, sleep apnea and cardiometabolic measures.
The MacArthur Foundation has named 20 scholars and artists as this year's fellows, awarding each $800,000 over five years. The class includes Kate Spradley, who identifies and repatriates migrants who died near the Texas-Mexico border.
A paper published on the Hugging Face blog describes ProvenanceGuard, a post-generation verification layer for MCP-based LLM agents that checks not only whether a claim is supported by evidence but whether it is attributed to the source the answer names or implies.
MIT Technology Review said it will publish its 2026 Climate Tech Companies to Watch list on October 6, selecting 10 companies in energy storage, nuclear power, transportation, and other fields. Its September 29 newsletter also reported biologists' criticism of Anthropic's claim that an AI system made a molecular biology discovery.
At IROS 2026, China's PHYBOT presented a humanoid badminton system that separates tactical decisions from whole-body execution, with a 1.35-meter robot trading more than 40 shots in a rally with a human.
MarkTechPost reports Google Cloud AI Research and university partners have released RRSI, an Apache 2.0 framework that lets an LLM agent edit its own prompts, tools, memory and control flow while model weights stay frozen. The project reports held-out gains and lower token use than unregularized evolution.
Two new studies suggest Saturn's moon Enceladus may be well suited to hosting and revealing microbial life, as lab microbes survived simulated ocean conditions and plume ice appears to sort biosignatures into detectable grains.
A University of Delaware team led by James Buchen has demonstrated a battery-based carbon-capture technique that may use less energy and cost less than reversible-filter designs, Ars Technica reported.