In The Physics Teacher, a physics professor-turned-AI-researcher explores the uses of generative AI to teach physical science. Gerd Kortemeyer compares the constantly increasing physics capabilities of generative AI to the boiling frog fable, which predicts that a frog will fail to recognize the danger of a gradually heating pot until it’s too late to hop out. Kortemeyer lays out situations where generative AI usage may be warranted and places where it may not help education — and therefore, a “jump out of the pot” is warranted.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Cifani lab has developed a new mass spectrometry technique that pushes the performance of their instruments to deliver scans that are more sensitive than ever before. Their innovation may improve drug target discovery while helping scientists answer long-standing questions about human health and biology.

Advanced quantum detectors designed at Texas A&M University are reinventing the search for dark matter, an unseen force that science has yet to explain.

A Rice University-led team has unveiled how tiny molecular structures on industrial catalysts behave during the manufacture of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM), a core ingredient in adhesives, paints, coatings, packaging, textiles and many other products people use every day. By revealing how these molecular palladium-acetate trimers and dimers transform under reaction conditions and control catalyst performance, the work points the way to catalyst designs that could cut energy use, reduce carbon emissions and make global VAM production cleaner and more reliable.