AI saves scientists seven hours a week, Google paper finds - Research Professional News

Scientists are saving time with AI, but the laboratory is struggling to keep up. A new DeepMind Institute essay reports that 40.5% of surveyed researchers have a growing backlog of untested hypotheses, while 43.5% say their main research bottleneck has shifted downstream into testing and validation. The findings draw on 15 million interactions across Gemini services, an analysis of more than 2,600 specialized AI models and a survey of 637 active scientists in the US and UK. Together, they show how faster computational work can leave researchers with more possibilities than they have the capacity to investigate. Surveyed scientists report saving an average of just under seven hours a week through AI, mostly reinvesting that time in research. Nearly half use AI daily. Yet 45.7% say they spend more than a quarter of the time they save checking AI outputs.

(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)Before we get started, I wanted to highlight a new idea I saw from Real Good AI, proposing a ratings system for AI use. (H/T to Anthony Kaufman’s article highlighting this.) It would look something like this:In general, I think that this is a solid, middle-ground solution that should appease both the pro-AI camp (who love AI) and the anti-AI camp (who wants to know if what they’re watching didn’t come from humans). Regardless of your feelings on AI/LLMs—I’ll never use it for my writing—transparency is often the best solution to many problems. In general, I think way more media outlets need to be using way more AI disclosures. My quick “Yes and...” to this idea: what about ads? In particular, I hate it when I see or hear ads that are obviously AI-generated, but a person or voice says, “I used this product”. AI doesn’t use products!

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Orcas are hunting great White Sharks around the world, scientists confirmThe killing of great whites by orcas has been reported in the waters of South Africa, California, and Australia, and the implications that the hunting behaviour would have on the marine ecosystem have been considered. In fact, it all started back on May 3, 2017, when the body of a female great white, weighing 1,100 kilograms, washed ashore in Gansbaai, close to Cape Town, with a deep gash through which its 90-kilogram liver had been extracted. Five more corpses of great whites appeared with similar wounds in the coming months, as claimed by shark biologist Alison Towner of Rhodes University. Two adult males, called Port and Starboard, who are supposed to be brothers judging by their dorsal fins that fold differently, were identified as the most probable perpetrators. The connection was officially established in 2022 based on video footage of a drone that caught three orcas chasing and biting a 3-meter great white off Mossel Bay. The sharks quickly disappeared from Dyer Island, one of the best places in the world to witness a great white.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.