Google veteran Jeff Dean is stepping down to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup aiming to accelerate scientific research and pursue recursive self-improvement. He is joined by co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, with backing from Alphabet, Radical Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.
ResearchClawBench, developed by Shanghai AI Lab, evaluates AI agents' ability to conduct independent research against human-written papers. Concurrently, Zhejiang University launched Qiushi Engine, an LLM-based agent designed for end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery in real physical environments.
The Latin maxim "Fiat experimentum in corpore vili" means "let the experiment be made on a low-value body." Historically, it reflects a pragmatic but ethically troubling principle of conducting experiments on those deemed least valuable. While rejected in modern ethics, its shadow persists in discussions of risk distribution in research and medicine.
Asia's NewSpace economy is shifting from scientific exploration to a strategic domain linked to sovereignty, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Commercial satellite systems and private launch industries are growing, making orbital infrastructure a key element in global power dynamics and national security.
Two new AI systems, Co-Scientist by Google DeepMind and Robin by FutureHouse, have been published in Nature, aiming to assist researchers in hypothesis generation, experiment design, and data analysis to accelerate scientific discovery.
Google announced Gemini for Science at I/O 2026, a suite of AI tools designed to accelerate scientific discovery. Features include hypothesis generation, computational testing, and literature analysis, aiming to streamline research workflows.
China wants artificial intelligence to become a new engine of growth, powering everything from factory upgrades to scientific discovery. But outside the country’s technology hubs, the economic benefits promised by AI may be harder to realise. Recent studies suggest that AI will widen regional divides. Big cities with deep pools of talent, capital and innovative firms are best placed to adopt the technology, while smaller cities and rural areas may struggle to keep up. According to analysts, the...
