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Google collaborated with Imperial College London and its "Fleming Initiative" partnership with Imperial NHS, giving their scientists "access to a powerful new AI designed" built with Gemini 2.0 "to make research faster and more efficient," according to an announcement from the school. And the results were surprising... "José Penadés and his colleagues at Imperial College London spent 10 years figuring out how some superbugs gain resistance to antibiotics," writes LiveScience. "But when the team gave Google's 'co-scientist'' — an AI tool designed to collaborate with researchers — this question in a short prompt, the AI's response produced the same answer as their then-unpublished findings in just two days." Astonished, Penadés emailed Google to check if they had access to his research. The company responded that it didn't. The researchers published their findings [about working with Google's AI] Feb. 19 on the preprint server bioRxiv... "What our findings show is that AI has the potential to synthesise all the available evidence and direct us to the most important questions and experimental designs," co-author Tiago Dias da Costa, a lecturer in bacterial pathogenesis at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "If the system works as well as we hope it could, this could be game-changing; ruling out 'dead ends' and effectively enabling us to progress at an extraordinary pace...." After two days, the AI returned suggestions, one being what they knew to be the correct answer. "This effectively meant that the algorithm was able to look at the available evidence, analyse the possibilities, ask questions, design experiments and propose the very same hypothesis that we arrived at through years of painstaking scientific research, but in a fraction of the time," Penadés, a professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said in the statement. The researchers noted that using the AI from the start wouldn't have removed the need to conduct experiments but that it would have helped them come up with the hypothesis much sooner, thus saving them years of work. Despite these promising findings and others, the use of AI in science remains controversial. A growing body of AI-assisted research, for example, has been shown to be irreproducible or even outright fraudulent. Google has also published the first test results of its AI 'co-scientist' system, according to Imperial's announcement, which adds that academics from a handful of top-universities "asked a question to help them make progress in their field of biomedical research... Google's AI co-scientist system does not aim to completely automate the scientific process with AI. Instead, it is purpose-built for collaboration to help experts who can converse with the tool in simple natural language, and provide feedback in a variety of ways, including directly supplying their own hypotheses to be tested experimentally by the scientists." Google describes their system as "intended to uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals, building upon prior evidence and tailored to specific research objectives... "We look forward to responsible exploration of the potential of the AI co-scientist as an assistive tool for scientists," Google adds, saying the project "illustrates how collaborative and human-centred AI systems might be able to augment human ingenuity and accelerate scientific discovery.

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Second time's a charm

SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endurance capsule successfully launched on Friday, March 14, and docked with the International Space Station (ISS) just over a day later.…

Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: A group of U.S. consumer advocacy groups on Wednesday proposed legislation to address the growing epidemic of "zombie" Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have had software support cut off by their manufacturer, Fight To Repair News reports. The Connected Consumer Product End of Life Disclosure Act is a collaboration between Consumer Reports, US PIRG, the Secure Resilient Future Foundation (SRFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology. It requires manufacturers of connected consumer products to disclose for how long they will provide technical support, security updates, or bug fixes for the software and hardware that are necessary for the product to operate securely. The groups proposed legal requirements that manufacturers "must notify consumers when their devices are nearing the end of life and provide guidance on how to handle the device's end of life," while end-of-life notifications "must include details about features that will be lost, and potential vulnerabilities and security risks that may arise." And when an ISP-provided device (like a router) reaches its end of life, the ISP must remove them. "The organizations are working with legislators at the state and federal level to get the model legislation introduced," according to Fight To Repair News.

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PLUS: Foxconn wants 40 percent AI server market share; Atlassian CEO jets into controversy; Starlink reaches 800 million in India; And more!

Asia In Brief Chinese authorities last week announced “identification measures” for AI-generated content that will require it to be labelled with human and machine-readable notifications.…

Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman "recently told Entrepreneur magazine that almost five years of remote work has 'been fantastic for us,'" writes the Seattle Times. Zillow shifted to allowing people to work fully remote during the pandemic. It's been a recruiting and retention tool for Zillow as they "now see four times the number of job applicants for every job we have versus what we did before the pandemic," Wacksman said. While Zillow still lists its corporate headquarters as Seattle, the company bills itself as "cloud-headquartered," with remote workers and satellite offices. Wacksman's comments are backed by serious real estate moves the company has made over the past five years. An annual report detailing Zillow's financial results for 2024 shows its Seattle headquarters and offices across the country are shrinking. In 2019, Zillow had 386,275 square feet of office space in Seattle after steadily gobbling up floors of the Russell Investments Center downtown over the prior five years. The company reported it had 113,470 square feet in Seattle at the end of 2024... The company has drastically cut costs by shedding offices. Zillow's total leasing costs reached $54 million in 2022 and dropped to $34 million last year... It expects those costs to decrease even further, to $18 million by 2029. Zillow is also taking advantage of subleasing some of its office space and expects $26 million in sublease income between 2025 and 2030... Zillow's financial results from last year suggest the workforce has been productive while logging in from home. The company reported Tuesday that it beat Wall Street expectations for the last three months of 2024 with a quarterly revenue of $554 million. Wacksman said in a news release Tuesday that 2024 was a "remarkable year for Zillow," as it reached its goal of double-digit revenue growth.

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PLUS: Alleged Garantex admin arrested in India; Google deletes more North Korean malware

Infosec In Brief United States Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr has unveiled plans to form a Council on National Security that will combat foreign threats to American tech and telecommunications infrastructure.…

Intel's stock jumped nearly 19% this week. "However, in the past year through Wednesday's close, Intel stock had fallen 53%," notes Investor's Business Daily: The appointment of Lip-Bu Tan as CEO is a "good start" but Intel has significant challenges, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a client note. Those challenges include delays in its server chip product line, a very competitive PC chip market, lack of a compelling AI chip offering, and over $10 billion in losses in its foundry business over the past 12 months. There is "no quick fix" for those issues, he said. "There are things you can do," a Columbia business school associate professor tells the Wall Street Journal in a video interview, "but it's going to be incremental, and it's going to be extremely risky... They will try to be competitive in the foundry manufacturing space," but "It takes very aggressive investments." Meanwhile, TSMC is exploring a joint venture where they'd operate Intel's factories, even pitching the idea to AMD, Nvidia, Broadcam, and Qualcomm, according to Reuters. (They add that Intel "reported a 2024 net loss of $18.8 billion, its first since 1986," and talked to multiple sources "familiar with" talks about Intel's future). Multiple companies have expressed interest in buying parts of Intel, but two of the four sources said the U.S. company has rejected discussions about selling its chip design house separately from the foundry division. Qualcomm has exited earlier discussions to buy all or part of Intel, according to those people and a separate source. Intel board members have backed a deal and held negotiations with TSMC, while some executives are firmly opposed, according to two sources. "They say Lip-Bu Tan is the best hope to fix Intel — if Intel can be fixed at all," writes the Wall Street Journal: He brings two decades of semiconductor industry experience, relationships across the sector, a startup mindset and an obsession with AI...and basketball. He also comes with tricky China business relationships, underscoring Silicon Valley's inability to sever itself from one of America's top adversaries... [Intel's] stock has lost two-thirds of its value in four short years as Intel sat out the AI boom... Manufacturing chips is an enormous expense that Intel can't currently sustain, say industry leaders and analysts. Former board members have called for a split-up. But a deal to sell all or part of Intel to competitors seems to be off the table for the immediate future, according to bankers. A variety of early-stage discussions with Broadcom, Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries and TSMC in recent months have failed to go anywhere, and so far seem unlikely to progress. The company has already hinted at a more likely outcome: bringing in outside financial backers, including customers who want a stake in the manufacturing business... Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company. His decades of investing in startups and running companies — he founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of chip design company Cadence Design Systems for 13 years — provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days: by cutting expenses, moving quickly and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering-first company. "In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog," Tan said in a note to Intel employees on Wednesday. "And in areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace...." Many take this culture reset to also mean significant cuts at Intel, which already shed about 15,000 jobs last year. "He is brave enough to adjust the workforce to the size needed for the business today," said Reed Hundt, a former Intel board member who has known Tan since the 1990s.

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