Somewhere in the archive of Humanity’s Last Exam sits a question about a Roman tombstone. Not the Latin inscription — that would be too easy — but the Palmyrene script running alongside it, a language spoken in ancient Syria and dead for seventeen centuries. The question was written by a classicist at Oxford, tested against … Read more
Somewhere in the visual cortex of a macaque monkey, a single neuron fires every time a small dot appears in the right location. Not a circle, not a line — a dot, specifically, at a specific size. For decades, neuroscientists could describe this selectivity without really explaining it. Now, for the first time, they can … Read more
At around midnight in a laboratory in Daejeon, South Korea, two robotic arms are working through a queue of 96 experiments nobody asked them to start. One grips a pipette, delivers a precise shot of sodium borohydride into a reaction vessel, and moves on. The other lifts a small cuvette, slides it into a spectrometer, … Read more
Picture a task so simple it takes four minutes. Generate ten words. That’s all. Make them as different from each other as possible, in every way that matters (meaning, usage, the way they sound in the mouth). This isn’t a test you’d find in an IQ exam or written into the competitive frameworks that sort … Read more
The next time someone hooks you up to a sleep study, those sensors tracking your brain waves and heartbeat may not just be looking for snoring problems. They could be capturing something far more revealing: a physiological signature that can forecast whether you’ll develop Parkinson’s disease, suffer a heart attack, or face dementia, sometimes years … Read more
Creativity has never been a numbers game, and a new Australian analysis offers a stark reminder of just how far generative AI sits from human imagination. In a study grounded in mathematics, researchers show that today’s large language models hit a ceiling long before they reach the ingenuity of society’s most inventive thinkers. The paper, … Read more
Artificial intelligence can diagnose disease, write essays, and generate art. But it often refuses to admit when it’s wrong. Now, a University of Arizona astronomer has found a way to change that. In a preprint posted to arXiv, Peter Behroozi introduces a new method for reducing hallucinations in large-scale AI models by making them aware … Read more
Watch a dog navigate from sidewalk to forest floor—notice how seamlessly it shifts from trotting to bounding, adjusting its gait without conscious thought. Now scientists at the University of Leeds have taught a four-legged robot named “Clarence” to do the same thing, learning in just nine hours what takes young animals days or weeks to … Read more
Hybrid collectives consisting of humans and artificial intelligence make significantly more accurate medical diagnoses than either medical professionals or AI systems alone. New research analyzing over 40,000 diagnoses reveals that combining human expertise with AI models creates a powerful diagnostic partnership that outperforms traditional approaches. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of … Read more
The arms race between deepfake creators and detectors has reached a critical turning point. Researchers have discovered that modern deepfakes can now replicate something previously thought impossible: a realistic human heartbeat. Scientists at Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute and Humboldt University of Berlin found that current deepfake videos inadvertently mimic the subtle skin color fluctuations caused by … Read more