Researchers have developed an AI-powered ‘scientific assistant’ designed to accelerate the scientific process by helping them identify new research questions, analyze and interpret data, and produce scientific documents.

The tool, called Denario, uses large language models to help scientists with tasks from developing new hypotheses to compiling manuscripts. The team hopes Denario will make research faster, more dynamic and more interdisciplinary.

AI can already help with parts of the scientific process: tools like ChatGPT can visualize data or write abstracts, for example. But these tools are typically limited to one step at a time.

You may not remember it, but odds are you took a few tumbles during your toddler era. You weren’t alone. Falling, after all, is a natural consequence of learning to crawl, walk, climb and jump. Our balance, coordination and motor skills are developing throughout early childhood.

But it also doesn’t take long for these abilities—also known as physical intelligence—to become second nature for most, including deceptively complex actions such as walking, grasping objects and navigating our way across a room without having to think about it.

“As humans, we often take our physical intelligence for granted because it becomes so automatic when we’re still young,” said Bowen Weng, roboticist and assistant professor of computer science at Iowa State University.

Scientists have built a prototype neuromorphic computer that thinks like a human brain and is faster than AI at learning new things.