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Nature Machine Intelligence
Machine learning methods in cheminformatics have made great progress in using chemical structures of molecules, but a large portion of textual information remains scarcely explored. Liu and colleagues trained MoleculeSTM, a foundation model that aligns the structure and text modalities through contrastive learning, and show its utility on the downstream tasks of structure–text retrieval, text-guided…
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Lessons from nature to harvest energy
Nature and certain social behaviors provide solutions that science takes time to interpret and imitate. The lotus flower, for instance, is a work of natural engineering that has created a unique surface — one that repels the water wherever it lives. And scavenger animals are the great recyclers of the environment (like the people who…
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US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving ‘ignition’ over and over
In December 2022, after more than a decade of effort and frustration, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had set a world record by producing a fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed — a phenomenon known as ignition. They have now proved that the feat was no…
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2023’s biggest breakthrough is not, unfortunately, in separating science from myth
In their year-end list of top scientific achievements and the people who made them, both Science and Nature have included the fight against “the obesity epidemic.” Science named GLP-1 drugs as its Breakthrough of the Year, while Nature included Svetlana Mojsov in its 2023 list of the year’s most important investigators. Mojsov is research associate…
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White Holes by Carlo Rovelli review
Black Holes: The End of the Universe? by John Taylor was the first book I bought with my own hard-earned cash from a poorly paid paper round. It was 1974, I was 11. It was the subtitle that grabbed my attention, since I’d never heard of black holes. At the time these mysterious cosmic objects were merely a theoretical possibility,…
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Korean lunar mission provides a view into the Moon’s dark spaces
South Korea’s lunar mission, known as Danuri, launched in August 2022.Credit: Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty South Korea’s first lunar mission has revealed surprising information about the far side of the Moon, among a host of other insights, scientists reported this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California. The mission, known as…
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Machine learning speeds up search for surface structure
It is difficult to identify stable surface reconstructions of complex materials. Now a Monte Carlo sampling strategy is coupled with a machine learning interatomic potential that is iteratively improved via active learning during the search. Inside the actual device, the surface structure is furthermore subject to changes when the external conditions (such as temperature or…
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A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner dogs
Abstract Dogs that have a vocabulary of object labels (Gifted Word Learner dogs—GWL dogs) have great potential as a comparative model for studying a variety of cognitive mechanisms. However, only a handful of studies, with a small sample size of 1 or 2 dogs, have examined this phenomenon. GWL dogs appear to share many of…
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DeepMind AI outdoes human mathematicians on unsolved problem
In the game Set, players must identify combinations of cards based on the shape, colour, shading and number of symbols.Credit: Valery Voennyy/Alamy The card game Set has long inspired mathematicians to create interesting problems. Now, a technique based on large language models (LLMs) is showing that artificial intelligence (AI) can help mathematicians to generate new…
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Nature’s 10
An AI pioneer, an architect of India’s Moon mission and the world’s first global heat officer are some of the people behind this year’s big stories. The Nature’s 10 list explores key developments in science over the past year and some of the individuals who helped to make amazing discoveries and bring attention to crucial…