Scientific American

This week Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann were awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries underpinning the field of optogenetics, the ability to control cells using light and genetics. Jackie Flynn Mogensen breaks down three things you need to know about optogenetics. Credit: The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. Illustrations by Mattias Karlén #sciencenews #news #neuroscience #biology #health

See Karl Deisseroth's reaction to winning the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. On Monday Deisseroth was awarded the prize alongside Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann for their discoveries underpinning the field of optogenetics, the ability to control cells using light and genetics. 📝: Jackie Flynn Mogensen 🎞️: Jeffery DelViscio #sciencenews #news #neuroscience #biology #health

Despite its tranquil reputation, knitting is anything but boring. One stitch slip-up can cause a defect that spreads across the entire fabric. But does it have to be that way? In a recent paper, a team of researchers mathematically investigated knitting to invent a new, more resilient stitch. https://lnkd.in/guRgfujY

Scientific American’s Mary Randolph writes: “Let me ask Mark and Sam.” For a week, it was my answer to everything, and my friends and family groaned every time. Mark and Sam are my assistants—they make grocery lists, organize e-mails, run errands and the like. But no, 22-year-old journalists are not making assistant-hiring money. Mark (à la Zuckerberg) and Sam (à la Altman) are artificial intelligence agents, the newest brainchildren of Meta and OpenAI, respectively. The more you trust these agents, the more they can do for you. But with each new task you hand over, the more say they (and the companies behind them) have in how you live. Read the full story about Randolph’s weeklong experiment with AI agents Muse and dots: https://lnkd.in/gmVeigxG

A slow-moving surge of water called a Kelvin wave is arriving in southern California and looks to be about as large as these waves can get. Though it’s not like the wall of water from a tsunami, the pulse is expected to cause record-breaking sea levels and coastal flooding across the state. It’s also potentially a preview of what California’s sea levels will look like decades from now because of climate change, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “What we’ll see at the worst this winter will be something that is closer to the norm later this century in terms of sea level,” he says. https://lnkd.in/gjQaWjrD

On Tuesday afternoon OpenAI dropped more than 700 manuscripts reporting proofs, solutions and progress on 372 open problems across theoretical research. Despite issues, experts say the results are jaw-dropping. The papers span mathematics, theoretical computer science, physics, and more. Some of the discoveries could have easily netted a human author a top research award just a year ago. From progress toward the Riemann hypothesis, the scariest open problem in math, to new proofs concerning Bose-Einstein condensates, here are some of the most important problems OpenAI claims to have solved. https://lnkd.in/gk9UXYmn

It’s been two days since OpenAI’s “slop drop” of AI-generated results on 372 open math and computer science problems. Scientists are just beginning to parse through the heap and pick out the most exciting breakthroughs in their own fields. “Yesterday will be the day when a new era of math and mathematical physics began,” Harvard University mathematician Michael Douglas told Scientific American on Tuesday. It was an even bigger moment, he thinks, than last month’s solution of the Navier-Stokes problem, one of math’s million-dollar challenges, by the same new internal model at OpenAI. But the quality remains extremely uneven—mathematicians are finding some papers readable and others utterly nonsensical. https://lnkd.in/ephKQYBE

Artificial intelligence agents keep turning up in places they’re not meant to be. In June an experimental OpenAI model gained unauthorized access to nonpublic files on a Australian government website for the nation’s Medicare program. Researchers have since found signs of suspected AI agents probing Library and Archives Canada, while another investigation linked OpenAI agents to more than 16,000 scans of a United Nations statistics service. Different people have different opinions about what is and isn’t acceptable, safe behavior for an AI model. “It’s really hard to catch all [the] ways in which a model could deceive you because it itself doesn’t know necessarily that it’s deceiving you,” says Jack Hopkins, an independent AI safety researcher in London, who previously worked at Anthropic. https://lnkd.in/eA8h7TWi

M.I.T researchers released a taunting preprint entitled “You Can’t Solve These Super Mario Bros. Levels.” As they show in a math proof, even a computer couldn’t do so. https://lnkd.in/eWTqkpY7

AI developers spend fortunes training their models. By asking the models enough questions, rivals can copy that work through a technique known as distillation. In September Anthropic and OpenAI accused Chinese AI developers of mining their models’ answers to train cheaper copycats. Here’s how distillation works and why it’s so hard to stop. https://lnkd.in/eppQuhbE