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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Health & Medicine

    AI could transform health care, but will it live up to the hype?

    AI has the potential to make health care more effective, equitable and humane. Whether the tech delivers on these promises remains to be seen.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    AI helps doctors detect more breast cancer in the largest real-world study

    AI is as good as clinicians at interpreting mammograms, a cancer study with nearly 500,000 participants in Germany suggests.

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  3. Artificial Intelligence

    AI sniffs out whiskey flavor notes as well as the pros

    A machine learning algorithm identified the top five flavor notes in 16 types of whiskey. Each matched the aggregate of what a panel of human pros said.

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  4. Artificial Intelligence

    Generative AI is an energy hog. Is the tech worth the environmental cost?

    Generative AI and the hype around it has rung in excitement and alarm bells this year. Here’s how to consider climate, energy and AI's intersection.

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  5. Neuroscience

    Electronic ‘tattoos’ offer an alternative to electrodes for brain monitoring

    A standard EEG test requires electrodes that come with pitfalls. A spray-on ink, capable of carrying electrical signals, avoids some of those.

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  6. Artificial Intelligence

    Here’s why turning to AI to train future AIs may be a bad idea

    If future AI models are trained on AI-generated content, they could end up producing more bias and nonsense, researchers caution.

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  7. Tech

    Feather-inspired airplane flaps could boost flight performance

    Rows of flaps inspired by bird wing feathers improve airfoil performance by boosting lift, reducing drag and mitigating stall.

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  8. Humans

    A phone app could help people have lucid dreams

    New experiments show that an app developed by researchers can boost snoozing users’ likelihood of knowing when they are having a dream.

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  9. Psychology

    Smiles tweaked by AI can boost attraction, a speed-dating study shows

    Using face filters to alter expressions manipulated feelings of attraction, raising questions about how such technology may influence social interactions.

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  10. Science & Society

    Using AI, historians track how astronomy ideas spread in the 16th century

    A new AI machine learning technique helped historians analyze 76,000 pages from astronomy textbooks spanning nearly two centuries.

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  11. Tech

    Tech companies want small nuclear reactors. Here’s how they’d work 

    To fuel AI’s insatiable energy appetite, tech companies are going big on small nuclear reactors.

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  12. Artificial Intelligence

    The discovery of tools key to machine learning wins the 2024 physics Nobel

    John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton used tools from physics to develop data analysis methods that underlie machine learning.

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