Science Trends

In less time than it will take you to read this article, an artificial intelligence-driven system was able to autonomously learn about certain Nobel Prize-winning chemical reactions and design a successful laboratory procedure to make them. The AI did all that in just a few minutes -- and nailed it on the first try. "This is the first time that a non-organic intelligence planned, designed and executed this complex reaction that was invented by humans," says Carnegie Mellon University chemist and chemical engineer Gabe Gomes, who led the research team that assembled and tested the AI-based system. They dubbed their creation "Coscientist." The most complex reactions Coscientist pulled off are known in organic chemistry as palladium-catalyzed cross couplings, which earned its human inventors the 2010 Nobel Prize for chemistry in recognition of the outsize role those reactions came to play in the pharmaceutical development process and other industries that use finicky, ...

A new snapshot of an ancient, far-off galaxy could help scientists understand how it formed and the origins of our own Milky Way. At more than 12 billion years old, BRI 1335-0417 is the oldest and furthest known spiral galaxy in our universe. Lead author Dr Takafumi Tsukui said a state-of-the-art telescope called ALMA allowed them to look at this ancient galaxy in much greater detail. "Specifically, we were interested in how gas was moving into and throughout the galaxy," Dr Tsukui said. "Gas is a key ingredient for forming stars and can give us important clues about how a galaxy is actually fuelling its star formation." In this case, the researchers were able to not only capture the motion of the gas around BRI 1335-0417, but also reveal a seismic wave forming -- a first in this type of early galaxy. The galaxy's disk, a flattened mass of rotating stars, gas and dust, moves in a way not dissimilar to ripples spreading on a pond after a stone is thrown in. ...