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Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom told Business Insider that remote work has been associated with a 5% increase in fertility rates across the United States and Northern Europe. Bloom's comments come amid broader concern over declining birth rates in many developed countries.
Researchers at Hopkins Marine Station observed that a bleached coral fragment regained its pigmentation after being placed touching a healthy fragment from the same coral colony. In a controlled experiment with ten fragment pairs of Pocillopora damicornis, five pairs were set to touch each other while five were kept apart, and the touching pairs showed transfer of symbiotic algae and rapid recovery of colour within days to weeks. The findings were published in Science Advances on 14 October.
Samuel King, a bioengineering PhD candidate at Stanford, employed a generative AI model in 2025 to create genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. His work suggests that AI could potentially be used to design new biological entities in the future. The interview with senior AI reporter James O'Donnell will explore the implications of this research for biology and AI development.
Stanford's 2026 AI Index finds 88% of companies have adopted AI in some part of their business, while a PwC CEO survey found 56% of CEOs reported neither revenue growth nor cost reduction from AI, with only 12% seeing both. IDC projects enterprises will spend $409 billion on AI platforms, applications, and services this year.
Researchers are increasingly using cell-free protein synthesis platforms to produce proteins without relying on living cells. This approach involves extracting cellular machinery and using it as a molecular factory, allowing for faster and more flexible protein production. The technology has roots in early genetic research and continues to evolve with various systems available, including bacterial, eukaryotic, and purified component-based methods.
The Interim Computer Museum has taken on a new restoration of Galaxy Game, the 1971 Stanford coin-op version of Spacewar! built by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck on a PDP-11/20. The project, prompted by Pitts along with Josh Dersch and Robert Schmuck, has already rebuilt the machine's power supply and gotten the PDP-11 running again, with work now shifting to refurbishing its HP 1300A electrostatic X-Y displays.
Anthropic announced on September 23 that its Claude AI model, running roughly 950 agents simultaneously, identified a gene-editing enzyme system with properties similar to Crispr within 21.5 hours. The company says the system's function remains unknown, and only one physical experiment has been reported so far in a non-peer-reviewed technical paper.
Stanford University researchers led by Sergiu Pașca transplanted lab-grown human brain organoids into mice bred to lack most of their cerebral cortex. The transplanted tissue survived and formed functional connections to the animals' brains and spinal cords, according to a study published in Nature. The team describes it as the most extensive integration of human brain cells into an animal achieved to date.
A working paper from CESifo researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu concludes there is no significant evidence that AI has widely reduced hiring or increased displacement among recent college graduates, contradicting an earlier Stanford study that found weaker entry-level employment in AI-exposed fields. The researchers note firms have recently increased AI spending and task automation, suggesting graduates in 2026 could face different conditions than those studied so far.
Prediction-market platform Kalshi ran an ad built from tech YouTuber Elliott Choy's apartment-move video, using AI to alter the host's appearance so he appeared white instead of Asian-American. Kalshi told NPR's Bobby Allyn the ad was old, that it no longer uses AI-generated ads, and that it is reviewing its relationship with the agency that produced it.
Stanford researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience that the human brain forms from two separate progenitor cells, one giving rise to the forebrain and the other to the hindbrain, rather than developing from a single evolutionary lineage as previously assumed. Senior author Kyle Loh said the team can now grow hindbrain neurons in a lab dish to study their function separately from the forebrain.
Stanford School of Medicine researchers report that the human brain forms from two separate types of stem cells rather than one uniform source. One lineage, marked by the Otx2 gene, produces the midbrain and forebrain responsible for higher-order thinking and speech, while a distinct stem cell type gives rise to the hindbrain, which governs basic functions like heartbeat and breathing. Researcher Kyle Loh says this finding allows scientists to grow hindbrain neurons in a lab dish for the first time.