The SETI Institute awarded its 2025 Cosmic Chronicles Literary Award to Cal Hunter. The Cosmic Chronicles Literary Award is a new contest for emerging authors from the SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence (AIR) program. This summer, we launched an Open Call inviting writers and poets working in literature, speculative fiction/sci-fi, experimental poetry, and philosophy to submit original, unpublished creative work reflecting on the themes of intelligence, consciousness, and communication. We received a remarkable number of submissions from 33 countries across six continents, including Peru, New Zealand, Ghana, India, Japan, throughout Europe, Canada, and the USA.

A generative AI-driven system enables non-experts to design and build common objects like furniture simply by describing the objects with words.

The team created a new tool that reduces bias and improves cancer diagnosis across populations

Weed control is essential in apple orchards because weeds compete with trees for nutrients, water and sunlight, which can reduce fruit yields. However, physically removing weeds is not only labor-intensive, but it also can damage soil structure and tree roots. Using chemical sprays to kill weeds can lead to other problems, such as pollution, herbicide resistance and excess chemical residues on apples. Another option called precision weed management — detecting and measuring weeds with high accuracy then applying small amounts of herbicide to control them efficiently — can help farmers avoid wasting chemicals or causing injury to crops or the environment, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. To help growers achieve such precise management, the researchers are developing an automated, robotic weed-management system.

Kharon and Digital Science have entered into a strategic partnership, bringing together Kharon’s risk intelligence and Digital Science’s world-leading Dimensions Research Security platform.