Science

Merge Labs, a company co-founded by AI billionaire Sam Altman that is building devices to connect human brains to computers, has raised $US252 million ($367m).

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The latest AI technology has solved an equation no human mathematician has been able to do. But some experts say the AI’s solution was not very different from earlier work done by humans.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The practice of allowing a physician to help severely ill patients end their lives has been legalised in nine countries, however there are still major questions about who should be eligible.

THE WASHINGTON POST: Gameto says its approach has the potential to ease a plethora of conditions associated with ageing in women, including cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: China’s centrality in rare earths didn’t happen by accident. It is the result of decades of planning and domestic and overseas investment from the highest levels of the Chinese government.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Despite the taboo, many parents do have favourites, and research shows the less favoured children suffer for it.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: ‘Why would you not have dark sky preserves in a place where the skies are darkest?’

The Shenzhou-22 spacecraft has been launched to help China bring back a team of astronauts after a damaged vessel left them temporarily stranded.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Over recent months, scepticism around fluoride has intensified. The people who will suffer most are children who are ‘the most vulnerable of the vulnerable’.

Up to 350 scientists will be laid off as the national science agency announces a cost-cutting restructure stemming from financial pressures and government funding not keeping up.

The Cancer Killers follows two Australian scientists as they fight against the odds to bring a potentially game-changing cancer treatment to the world.

An American biologist who helped discover the shape of DNA molecules is being remembered for both his breakthrough and racial remarks that got him in trouble.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: ‘I think this is a landmark development. They put a pig’s liver in a human for a month, and the human did fine.’

Her discoveries as a primatologist in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behave in the wild broke new ground and were hailed as ‘one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements’.

THE WASHINGTON POST: An ancient skull is challenging the textbook timeline of human evolution, prompting some scientists to argue that our own species is much older than previously thought.