Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.
Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.
I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there's anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down. I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be
In 2023, Australia abandoned its expensive and bureaucratic scholar-led research-assessment programme. New Zealand followed suit soon after. The hope, according to a transition plan unveiled by the Australian federal government's Department of Education and the research sector, was to find a "more modern, data-driven approach". In the United Kingdom, where financial pressures on universities are especially acute, there are similar calls to reform the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the country's performance-based research-funding system.
Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.
Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets "to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."
Fifty-four seconds. That's how long it took Raphael Wimmer to write up an experiment that he did not actually perform, using a new artificial-intelligence tool called Prism, released by OpenAI last month. "Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier," wrote Wimmer, a researcher in human-computer action at the University of Regensburg in Germany, on Bluesky. Large language models (LLMs) can suggest hypotheses, write code and draft papers, and AI agents are automating parts of the research process.
Recent integrative approaches suggest that physics cannot be adequately characterized by magnitude-based distinctions alone, such as those implied by Big-P, little-p, and mini-p physics. While these categories capture differences in scope and historical impact, they fail to address the heterogeneity of physical activity itself. To remedy this, I propose the Five Fs of physics: force, friction, flux, formulation, and foundational structure.