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Researchers at Columbia University's Fertility Center are using artificial intelligence to find sperm that standard testing simply misses. The system, called Star, scans samples for rare viable cells that trained human eyes routinely overlook. For men with very low sperm counts, that difference could determine whether biological parenthood is even possible.
Shifting to the world of physics, scientists are investigating exotic particles that may not fit neatly into the Standard Model, the theoretical framework that has governed our understanding of matter for decades. These anomalies aren't just academic curiosities — if confirmed, they could force a fundamental rethinking of how the universe is built at its smallest scales.
And in the world of AI infrastructure, LlamaIndex CEO Jerry Liu is making a striking argument: the scaffolding layer that developers built around large language models is becoming obsolete. As the models themselves grow more capable, the elaborate pipelines and retrieval systems wrapped around them matter less. What survives, Liu says, is genuine application value — not the plumbing holding it together.
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