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Researchers at the University of Cambridge have reached a milestone that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. An AI-designed vaccine antigen has been successfully tested in a living subject — the first time artificial intelligence has taken the lead in engineering that kind of biological component entirely on its own. It's a signal that drug discovery may be entering a genuinely new chapter.
That same shift toward machine-driven science is showing up in laboratories around the world. Scientists are increasingly handing experimental work off to robots inside what are being called autonomous laboratories — facilities where AI and automated systems run tests, gather data, and iterate with minimal human intervention. The efficiency gains are real, but so are the questions about oversight and accountability when the robot makes a call you didn't anticipate.
And on a different frontier entirely, there's a growing conversation about whether the answer to the data center cooling crisis might literally be outer space. A recent analysis argues that the heat generated by AI infrastructure is becoming an earthly problem with no clean earthly solution — and that orbital facilities, free from atmospheric constraints, deserve serious consideration. It sounds audacious, but so did cloud computing once.
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