Researchers led by Andreagiovanni Reina from the University of Konstanz have shown that a simple interaction rule enables robot swarms to reach clear collective decisions despite faulty or manipulated information. Remarkably, the same basic decision-making logic recurs across very different biological systems.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University have developed a new tool that estimates a cell’s biological age by analyzing its gene activity. In the journal Advanced Science, they also demonstrate how the tool can be used to identify substances that influence cellular ageing.

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) present an algorithm that estimates the risks to players in online casinos based on their actual gaming behavior. Unlike similar tools made by commercial providers, the new algorithm will be available for free (open source). This will provide gambling industry regulators, such as the Netherlands Gaming Authority (Ksa), with an independent, transparent instrument to detect risky gambling behavior early and better assess whether online gambling companies are actually fulfilling their duty of care.

A new type of plastic that turns into a gas when heated and reforms into a solid when cooled has been developed by scientists at the University of Surrey, opening up a new approach to processing and recycling polymers. 

The National Institute of Informatics (NII), part of the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS) and led by Director-General Sadao Kurohashi, has integrated metadata from its Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB)(*1) into OpenAlex (*2), one of the world's largest open scholarly information databases. As of August 18, 2026, metadata for nearly 4 million research outputs collected through IRDB is freely available to researchers and the public worldwide via OpenAlex.

What if the key difference between human intelligence and AI isn’t computing power, but the chemistry of memory? New research proposes that the brain may not simply transmit information electrically, it may also “write” and “read” memories chemically, through interactions among neurons, astrocytes and their surrounding molecular environment. The theory connects memory with emotion and thought, raising a timely question as AI grows more sophisticated: Can computation alone ever produce the kind of consciousness generated by a living brain?