The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has received $20 million from the National Science Foundation to establish ATHENA (Advanced Testbed for High-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science), one of 20 research hubs in the U.S. that will form a national network of AI-powered laboratories to accelerate scientific discovery.

Researchers from LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center will join thousands of nutrition scientists and professionals from around the world at NUTRITION 2026, the annual flagship meeting of the American Society for Nutrition, or ASN, taking place July 25–28 in National Harbor, Maryland. NUTRITION 2026 will feature more than 1,650 scientific presentations and bring together researchers, clinicians, educators, industry leaders, policymakers and other professionals to share the latest advances in nutrition science and its application to human health.

The City University of New York has received an $18.1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) award to create a cloud-programmable national laboratory that uses artificial intelligence and robotics to speed the discovery, design, and production of advanced bio-inspired materials.

Rice University has received a $19.9 million award from the National Science Foundation to lead a four-year project aimed at using ​​artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud-based laboratories to accelerate the manufacturing of electronic and quantum materials.

How children can learn language despite relatively sparse and flawed input is a mystery. To explore this question, researchers created virtual robots based on leading theories of how our brains process information, gave them curiosity, and put them in a rich learning environment. These AIs proved superior at efficiently learning to understand language and exhibited a surprising range of unplanned, childlike behavior, such as playing with objects and overgeneralizing during training.