EurekAlert! In the Spotlight - Artificial Intelligence

Welcome to In the Spotlight, where each month we shine a light on something exciting, timely, or simply fascinating from the world of science.

This month, we’re focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), a topic that continues to capture attention everywhere. Here, you’ll find the latest research news, insights, and discoveries shaping how AI is being developed and used across the world.

Latest News Releases

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 18-Dec-2025 06:11 ET (18-Dec-2025 11:11 GMT/UTC)

2-Jul-2025

AI-created materials could make your energy bill cheaper

University of Texas at Austin
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin used machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop new materials that could keep your house cooler and reduce energy bills.

Journal: Nature

2-Jul-2025

How do we reach decisions? Researchers pioneer AI method to uncover cognitive strategies

New York University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers have long been interested in how humans and animals make decisions by focusing on trial-and-error behavior informed by recent information. However, the conventional frameworks for understanding these behaviors may overlook certain realities of decision-making because they assume we make the best decisions after taking into account our past experiences. A newly released study by a team of scientists deploys AI in innovative ways to better understand this process. By using tiny artificial neural networks, the researchers’ work illuminates in detail what drives an individual’s actual choices—regardless of whether those choices are optimal or not.

Journal: Nature
Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation

2-Jul-2025

“Sniffing” bodily fluids to diagnose bacterial infections and detect antimicrobial resistance

Cell Press
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Tiny sensors, similar to breathalyzers, could “sniff out” bacterial infections and detect antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in bodily fluids, says a team of engineers, microbiologists, and machine learning experts in an opinion paper publishing July 2 in the Cell Press journal Cell Biomaterials. Developing this technology could provide affordable and rapid diagnostic tests, which would improve treatment plans and help combat antibiotic resistance.

Journal: Cell Biomaterials
Funder: Helmut Horten Foundation, Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation, Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Zurich

2-Jul-2025

AI that thinks like us – and could help explain how we think

Helmholtz Munich (Helmholtz Zentrum München Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheit und Umwelt (GmbH))
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have developed an artificial intelligence model that can simulate human behavior with remarkable accuracy. The language model, called Centaur, was trained on more than ten million decisions from psychological experiments – and makes decisions in ways that closely resemble those of real people. This opens new avenues for understanding human cognition and improving psychological theories.

Journal: Nature

2-Jul-2025

Clingy planets can trigger own doom, suspect Cheops and TESS

European Space Agency
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.

This is the first-ever evidence for a ‘planet with a death wish’. Though it was theorised to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.

Journal: Nature

2-Jul-2025

New computational model could help shed light on how we see

Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new class of simplified ‘minimodels’ developed by researchers at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus can predict the visual responses of individual neurons in the primary visual cortex, an important first step in understanding visual processing and figuring out how other parts of the brain are carrying out more complicated computations.

Journal: Nature Communications

2-Jul-2025

Forging a novel therapeutic path for patients with Rett Syndrome using AI

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A highly multi-disciplinary research team at the Wyss Institute has made a significant breakthrough to help patients with Rett syndrombe by leveraging an AI-driven drug discovery process in combination with innovative disease modeling. Their study identified a drug known as vorinostat as a promising treatment for Rett syndrome, demonstrating disease-modifying abilities across multiple neuronal and non-neuronal tissues in preclinical models. The Wyss-enabled startup Unravel will be initiating a clinical trial to assess the drug in female patients with Rett syndrome later this year.

Journal: Communications Medicine