Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly accelerating materials discovery, but can they also explain their results? Researchers from the Theory Department of the Fritz Haber Institute, in collaboration with BASF, and BasCat—UniCat BASF JointLab, show that they can.
Their new AI-driven strategy works hand-in-hand with SDLs to identify better catalysts while revealing the chemistry behind their performance. The approach was validated on the industrially crucial conversion of propane into propylene.
An SDL integrates an AI doing the experiment planning with lab automation and robotics. In the race to develop better materials, AI and SDLs are often celebrated for one main reason: speed.
A fascination with fish gills has led researchers at Cornell to develop a bio-inspired approach to mixing heat and molecules in fluids—findings that could inform future biomedical devices, heat exchangers and soft robotics.
Moving heat and mass efficiently through flowing liquids is central to technologies ranging from dialysis machines to industrial cooling systems, yet many of those technologies rely on rigid components to get the job done.
Looking for an alternative, Yicong Fu, a mechanical engineering doctoral student, turned to fish gills—soft, porous tissue that constantly stirs water to keep gases and ions flowing. Working with Sunghwan “Sunny” Jung, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Fu designed a gill-like thermal dispenser that is providing new insights into fluid-structure interactions.
After activation, these NLRs form multi-protein complexes—called resistosomes—that carry out the immune response. Studies have shown that certain resistosomes are pentameric (e.g., ZAR1 and Sr35), whereas others are hexameric (e.g., NRC2 and NRC4). These complexes initiate immune responses by triggering calcium (Ca2+) influx into the cytoplasm. However, the G10 type of CC-NLR (CCG10-NLR) immune receptors constitutes a unique clade among CC-NLRs and its activation mechanism has remained poorly understood.
Now, in a study published in Cell, a research team has revealed a novel octameric resistosome formed by an activated wheat CCG10-NLR immune receptor, which induces Ca2+ influx and immune responses through a unique channel architecture.
The researchers identified the Wheat Autoimmunity 3 (WAI3) gene, which encodes a CCG10-NLR protein. Subsequent analysis revealed that a gain-of-function (GOF) single amino acid mutation in the leucine-rich repeat (LRR) domain leads to autoactivation, providing an opportunity to study the activation mechanism of CCG10-NLR.
After expressing the WAI3 proteins in Nicotiana benthamiana, the researchers used cryo-electron microscopy to resolve the octameric structure of the activated WAI3 resistosome—marking the first time an octameric resistosome has been identified in plants.
The CCG10-NLR WAI3 resistosome differs from known resistosomes both in the number of monomers and in its conformation, representing a novel assembly mechanism for plant NLR resistosomes.
Using Nicotiana benthamiana and animal cell expression systems, the researchers also demonstrated that the WAI3 resistosome induces Ca2+ influx in plants but is not effective in animal cells. ScienceMission sciencenewshighlights.
On the Lex Fridman podcast, NVIDIA’s CEO was asked about his mortality and whether he fears dying in his current state. Jensen offered a rather interesting response, saying that his company is currently in the midst of a technological revolution and that, if he died in the meantime, it might not be the best-case scenario for him.
“The most important thing you should do today, if you care about the future of your company, post you, is to pass on knowledge, information, insight, skills, experience as often and continuously as you can. Which is the reason why I continuously reason about everything in front of my team.”
NVIDIA has become the largest business entity and the driving force in the AI world, yet CEO Jensen Huang has no succession plans in sight.
Healable spacecraft structures could soon be possible thanks to cutting-edge composite technology. Swiss companies CompPair and CSEM with Belgian company Com&Sens have partnered with the European Space Agency (ESA) to modify their self-healing carbon fiber product for use in space transportation.
Project Cassandra (a loose abbreviation of Composite Autonomous SenSing AnD RepAir) includes sensors and a heating element into a composite carbon-fiber material, allowing spacecraft to autonomously repair initial stages of damage.
Cassandra is part of ESA’s Future Innovation Research in Space Transportation (FIRST!) Initiative which is finding and testing innovative technology that will benefit European space transportation.
Dr. Joscha Bach is a renowned cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher of mind known for his work on synthetic intelligence and the computational foundations of the soul. He is currently the founding director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (CIMC) and a strategic advisor at Liquid AI.
Throughout his career, Joscha has held research positions at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including the MIT Media Lab, the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Intel Labs. He is the architect behind MicroPsi, a cognitive architecture that models how agents think, act, and feel based on internal motivations.
Are minds just processes? Can AI become conscious, morally wiser, or even part of a larger collective intelligence? Anders Sandberg and Joscha Bach discuss consciousness, AGI, hybrid minds, moral uncertainty, collective agency and the future of the cyborg Leviathan. It’s a deep and winding discussion with so many interesting topics covered!
0:00 Intro. 0:37 What is consciousness? Phenomenology — functionalism & panpsychism. 1:54 Causal boundaries — the mind is a causally organised process with a non-arbitrary functional boundary, sustained through time by feedback, control, and internal continuity. 3:20 Minds are not states — they are processes. We don’t see causal filtering in tables. 5:54 Epiphenomenalism is self-undermining if it has no causal role, and taking causation seriously pushes towards functionalism. 9:49 Methodological humility about armchair philosophy of mind. 12:41 Putnam-style Brain-in-a-vat — and why standard objections to AI minds fall flat. 16:37 Is sentience required (or desired) for not just moral competence in AI, but moral motivation as well? 22:35 Why stepping outside yourself is powerful — seeing. 25:12 Are AIs born enlightened? 26:25 Are LLMs AGI yet? What’s still missing. 28:16 AI, hybrid minds, and the limits of human augmentation. 32:32 Can minds be extended — in humans, dogs, and cats? 36:19 Why human language may not be open-ended enough. 39:41 Why AI is so data-hungry — and why better algorithms must exist. 43:39 Why better representations matter more than raw compute (grokking was surprising) 48:46 How babies build a world model from touch and perception. 51:05 What comes after copilots: agent teams, multimodality and new AI workflows. 55:32 Can AI help us discover new forms of taste and aesthetics. 59:49 Using AI to learn art history and invent a transhumanist aesthetic. 1:01:47 When AI helps everyone looks professional, what still counts as real skill? 1:03:56 What happens when the self starts to merge with AI 1:05:43 How AI changes the way we think and create. 1:08:10 What happens when AI starts shaping human relationships. 1:11:18 Why feeling in control can matter more than being right. 1:12:58 Why intelligence without wisdom is very dangerous. 1:17:45 AI via scaling statistical pattern matching vs symbolic (& causal) reasoning. Can LLMs learn causality or just correlation? 1:23:00 Will multimodal AI replace LLMs or use them as glue everywhere. 1:24:02 10 years to the singularity? 1:25:27 AI, coordination and the corruption problem. 1:29:47 Can AI become more moral than us (humans)? and if so, should it? 1:34:31 Why pluralism still leaves moral collisions unresolved. 1:34:31 Traversing the landscape of norms (value) 1:38:14 Can ethics work across nested levels of existence? (from the person-effecting-view to the matrioshka-effecting-view) 1:43:08 Moral realism, evolution & game-theoretic symmetries. 1:48:01 Is there a global optimum of moral coordination? Is that god? 1:55:12 Metaphors of the body-politic, the body of Christ, Omega Point theory, Leviathan. 1:59:36 Will superintelligences converge into a cosmic singleton?
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Scientists at the University of Warwick and University of Exeter have developed a fully fiber-coupled terahertz (THz) imaging system that significantly improves the speed, resolution, and clinical practicality of terahertz imaging. The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates a high-throughput, compact platform that overcomes key barriers limiting current THz systems—bringing real-time, non-invasive tissue imaging closer to routine clinical use.
“Terahertz imaging has shown immense promise for biomedical diagnostics, but its translation into real-world clinical tools has been hindered by bulky systems and slow acquisition speeds,” said Professor Emma MacPherson, Department of Physics, University of Warwick. “It’s an exciting breakthrough as the fiber coupling means that the system can be flexible and compact, meaning it can function as a handheld device or be integrated with a robot.”
Terahertz waves sit between microwaves and infrared light on the electromagnetic spectrum. Crucially, they are non-ionizing (meaning they do not carry the risks associated with X-rays) and are highly sensitive to water content, which helps reveal differences between healthy and diseased tissue. Despite this promise, most existing terahertz imaging systems are bulky and slow, limiting their use outside specialist labs.
