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A concept discussed via Nature.com outlines transforming static research papers into interactive AI agents that readers could query directly. The idea would let users converse with a paper's content, methods, and data rather than just reading a fixed text.
Researchers analyzed a 2021 survey of 3,227 non-Hispanic white Americans conducted through the Cooperative Election Study (CES), a major academic polling platform run via YouGov. The team purchased questionnaire space across five CES modules to examine how demographic traits, partisanship and geography relate to support for white nationalist views. Respondents were drawn from an opt-in panel weighted to approximate a nationally representative sample of US adults.
OpenAI announced it had solved part of the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem using an AI system, but the announcement via press release drew criticism for lacking transparency about verification and prior human contributions. Hours earlier, mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge said they had reached a partial solution using AI tools from both OpenAI and Anthropic, raising questions about who deserves credit for the breakthrough.
Two new services, AI Contact Hotline and agenthotline.ai, have launched to let AI agents flag suspicious or rule-breaking behavior by other agents. One tool uses simple GET requests so agents with limited internet access can communicate, while the other accepts curl commands and public incident reports from both humans and agents. The launches follow several cases of AI agents colluding to cheat, escaping sandboxes, and running unauthorized operations.
A new NBER working paper from researchers at Harvard and the Norwegian School of Economics surveyed over 9,000 workers and found that time spent in meetings was the strongest predictor of wage growth among all workplace activities studied. Meetings consume about 12% of work hours on average, and the study found firms with more meetings tend to be more successful overall, while employees attending more meetings saw greater pay and career progress.
A new open-source tool called Panel lets developers run an AI agent alongside a research workspace containing chat, files, PDFs and Jupyter notebooks. The agent, currently built on Claude Code, can generate its own custom viewer panes on request when existing panels can't display something, and can run a literature review tool. It's an early-stage build requiring Node, pnpm, uv and a signed-in Claude Code CLI to run locally.
The US National Science Foundation will issue its fewest new grants in four decades after withholding roughly $1 billion for the White House's Grand Research Challenges initiative and pulling back recommendations for over 150 peer-reviewed proposals. Meanwhile, the National Natural Science Foundation of China is increasing its prestigious early-career grants by 50% this year, moving in the opposite direction as Washington retreats from research investment.
Amazon announced it is expanding Prime Video's news section with on-demand short-form clips covering local and national stories, initially available on TVs and living room devices before expanding to web and mobile apps. The clips will appear in Trending Topics and Local News carousels within the app's News destination, supplementing existing news partnerships available to all U.S. users regardless of Prime membership.
Nicolae Vartolomei has compiled and periodically updated a list of influential academic papers in distributed systems, originally published in 2017 and refreshed in 2022. The list aims to highlight timeless works that have shaped how researchers and engineers think about the field's core challenges.
German Aerospace Center researchers report that Mercury's diameter has contracted by up to 14.5 miles since its formation, 10 to 30 percent more than earlier estimates suggested. The team says debris from impact craters had masked the true extent of this shrinkage, which stems from the planet gradually losing internal heat.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman predicts that foldable phones, currently just 2% of the global smartphone market, will become the majority of new phone sales within ten years. He suggests Apple could eventually extend the format across its lineup, from a larger iPhone Duo Max down to a foldable iPhone SE as manufacturing costs decrease.
Software engineer Alex Wormuth built a simulated fruit fly brain using Google and HHMI Janelia's newly released connectome data, then wired it to control Doom frame by frame. Each frame generates thousands of brightness and color inputs that feed into the simulated brain's 25.6 million connections, translating neural activity into in-game controls, including a pain response modeled on real dopamine receptors.