Science
Science
30 stories · page 1 of 4The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 goes to Francis Halzen for one cubic kilometre of ice that catches neutrinos from the distant universe
On 6 October the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison for IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. The idea is from 1988, the instrument was finished in 2011. There is one laureate, with a 1/1 share of the 12 million Swedish kronor prize.
Read →The 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for the switch that turns nerve cells on with light
On 5 October the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet honoured the three for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Hegemann and Nagel found a protein in a single-celled alga, Deisseroth turned it into a switch for nerve cells. The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor, shared equally.
Read →Guest essay at Anthropic: 36 manuscripts in three months, because the tasks were shaped around the model
Matthew Schwartz, author of the earlier "Vibe Physics", describes a method he calls "Claude-shaped science": instead of forcing the model into a scientist's classic workflow, you look for the tasks it is good at. The numbers are his: 36 manuscripts across 18 fields with 19 coauthors. The BootLoops tool is open on GitHub.
Read →Study at Apple: a strong model with a minimal harness keeps up with elaborate agent scaffolding on an equal time budget
A paper published on Apple Machine Learning Research and on arXiv compares the best open-source harnesses for autonomous ML engineering with a single coding agent that has only read, write and bash. Under an equal time budget and the same model, the scaffolding gives no advantage. The authors conclude that hand-crafted harnesses around strong models yield poor returns.
Read →DeepMind put a watermark inside the protein itself, without taking away its function in lab tests
On 30 September Google DeepMind introduced SynthID Bio, watermarking methods for synthetic biology. The signature goes into the choice of amino acids and into the 3D coordinates of predicted structures, and it can be verified even on the synthesised protein. In lab tests against three targets, watermarked proteins worked as well as unmarked ones.
Read →About 950 Claude agents searched a DNA database for 21 hours and found an unknown system with CRISPR-like repeats
Anthropic presented its own biology lab and showed its first result: a system built around a reverse transcriptase in phages, next to an array of evenly spaced DNA repeats. What it does is not yet known. The preprint is out.
Read →Claude sped up more than 30 biology models by about 4 times on average in under four weeks and opened the code
An internal Anthropic research model, supervised by two people with no background in optimisation, optimised the open models for protein structure and design. Plus a new mode that predicts systems over 10,000 tokens on a single server.
Read →OpenAI says an internal model solved the Navier-Stokes problem. The page cites no independent verification
On 8 September OpenAI published a proof, formalised in Lean, that the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow can develop a singularity in finite time. In the company's words this resolves one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems of the Clay Institute. The page cites no check by independent mathematicians or by the institute itself, so for now this is OpenAI's claim.
Read →Claude wrote the first complete machine-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days
On 4 September Anthropic published a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem checked end to end in Lean. Claude worked largely on its own for 11 days, wrote 13 million lines and proved 29,500 intermediate theorems used in the final result. The community expected the formalisation to take years.
Read →