In an era where technological advancements in artificial intelligence, space exploration, and defense dominate headlines and capture vast financial resources, it’s easy to overlook a critical truth: without a healthy planet, none of these achievements can be sustained. Prioritizing funding for AI, space missions, and military endeavors while neglecting the urgent environmental challenges we face […]
Science has always relied on a curious human’s mind forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, analyzing the results, and presenting the case to that person’s peers. Over centuries, we’ve built better tools such as electron microscopes, particle accelerators, and supercomputers, but the core loop of scientific discovery has remained stubbornly human. Now, for the first time, that loop has started with a new kind of mind.
So far, scientists have often had artificial intelligence help them with solving a predefined, narrow task, such as folding proteins, says Jeff Clune, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. “We’re saying the AI gets to be the scientist,” he says.
In a recent Nature study, Clune and his colleagues unveiled the AI Scientist, an AI system that wrote a paper without human involvement that passed peer review for a workshop at the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a top-tier venue in the field of machine learning. The paper was mediocre, according to Clune and other experts. But its existence marks a turning point that the scientific community is only beginning to grapple with: AI has quickly moved from assisting scientists to attempting to be one.
The AI Scientist comprises multiple modules. After it is given a general topic prompt by researchers, it surveys available literature and generates hypotheses. “We’re just giving it a general direction like ‘Come up with something interesting to study on how the AI learns,’” Clune explains. The system then evaluates and refines those ideas, filtering out any that are not novel. From there, further modules plan and execute experiments, analyze and plot the data, and, finally, write the paper. It even does its own internal peer review process to find flaws in its papers, Clune says. (The system relies on existing foundation models such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o; the team’s contribution is the pipeline orchestrating these models).
To see if The AI Scientist’s output could meet human standards, the team submitted three papers generated by it to the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better (ICBINB) workshop at the 2025 ICLR. One was accepted. (The conference organizers gave their permission for the AI-generated papers to be submitted, and all of the AI Scientist’s papers were withdrawn from the conference after the review process.)
The team behind the AI Scientist admits the bar for this workshop was lower than that of a main conference publication. “Would a mediocre graduate student get one paper in three accepted at a place that accepts 70 percent of papers? Sure!” says Jodi Schneider, an associate professor of information sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in Clune’s study.
The AI’s papers “are okay but not great,” Clune says. To him, some of the AI’s ideas seemed truly creative, yet the system struggled with execution. “The logic and the writing and the thinking throughout the whole paper didn’t all fit together beautifully,” he notes. Further issues included hallucinated references, duplicated figures, and a lack of methodological rigor.
Overall, Clune and his colleagues’ new study has received a lukewarm reception. “The approach is agentic and without any real novelty,” says Maria Liakata, a professor of natural language processing at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the work.
There was one metric, though, where the AI Scientist did outperform human researchers by a huge margin: it produced a formally passable paper on machine learning within 15 hours at a cost Clune estimated to be around $140. Compare that with the capability of a graduate student, who might take a full semester to write their first accepted workshop paper, according to Schneider.
As costs drop and output speeds increase, AI-authored papers present the scientific community with an immediate challenge. “The AI-written papers are probably going to make things much worse,” warns Yanan Sui, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China and the senior workshop chair for ICLR 2026.
To safeguard against this flood, top-tier venues have begun setting limits. “There are strict rules for the main conference that do not allow submission of purely AI-written papers,” Sui says. The compromise, for now, is forced transparency—the authors using AI must clearly state how it was used. Sui admits, though, that journals and conferences usually lack the tools to reliably detect AI-generated contributions.
The tools to autonomously write these contributions, meanwhile, have already started to proliferate. Intology claimed its AI Zochi passed peer review for the main proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (though human researchers were involved in areas such as verifying results before submission and communicating with peer reviewers). Another group, called the Autoscience Institute, stated that its AI system created papers that were accepted at ICLR workshops before the AI Scientist.
“We’re not going to be able to remove the power to generate AI scientific papers,” says Aaron Schein, a data scientist at the University of Chicago and one of the ICBINB workshop organizers. “This technology is only going to get better. I don’t think there’s anything to do about that.”
But what if one day the AI-generated papers stop being mediocre?
Clune sees the transition unfolding in two phases. “In the very short term, you’re going to get a lot of slop and garbage, and the peer review systems are going to have to deal with that,” he says. But eventually, he argues, AI systems will be far better at science than human researchers. “I predict the AI Scientist actually marks the dawn of a new era of rapid scientific advances,” Clune claims, imagining humans reduced to curators witnessing AI achieve scientific wonders.
Liakata, though, thinks there’s still something for us humans to do. “I believe the future is not fully autonomous scientific discovery but advanced human-agent interaction where the human can scrutinize and contribute to the process,” she says.
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AI can generate research infinitely faster than humans can read it, threatening to bury an already strained peer-review system under a mountain of automated submissions. Vince Talotta/Toronto Star via Getty Images
‘No Kings’ rallies draw crowds across US against Trump Adminstration
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Tens of thousands of people have joined “No Kings” protests across the U.S. against the war in Iran and President Donald Trump’s actions. (AP video by Mike Pesoli, Mark Vancleave, and Emily Wang)
In big cities and small towns across the world, protesters gathered for thousands of rallies against President Trump and his policies and actions, with the self-stated goal of fighting dictatorship.
Demonstrators, including elected officials and community leaders, chanted defiant messages and carried homemade signs that condemned the war in Iran, threats against voting rights, and the White House’s mass deportation push, among other topics. Organized by a coalition of activist groups under the banner “No Kings,” it was the third such countrywide protest in the past 10 months.
No Kings organizers said eight million people took part, one of the largest protests in recent history. Their estimates in some cities were higher than those of local public safety officials. The New York Times is doing its own reporting on some of the turnout, but has not independently confirmed the numbers from the thousands of protest sites.
One of the largest rallies took place outside the Minnesota Capitol, where the singer Bruce Springsteen performed “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote to protest the immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents in January.
“They picked the wrong city,” Mr. Springsteen told the large crowd, adding that “these invasions of American cities will not stand.”
In Washington, D.C., some protesters marched to the military base where Stephen Miller, the White House official overseeing the mass deportation push, has been residing. Some chanted, “Stephen Miller’s got to go,” and “We’ve got the people outside your door.”
Protesters marched down small-town main streets and thoroughfares, many bundled up to withstand chilly temperatures. Attendees at small gatherings, including one in Richmond, Ky., waved American flags as drivers signaled support by honking. In Atlanta, protesters chanted for an end to immigration raids.
Demonstrators seized upon topics where they said there was overreach by the Trump administration, including health care and the environment.
A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, called the protests “Trump derangement therapy sessions” in a statement on Thursday.
The protests, organizers have said, intentionally lack a single, specific demand but rather seek to harness energy on a wide variety of grievances regarding Mr. Trump and his policies.
Like many silver-haired protesters gathered at Auditorium Shores, a riverside park in Austin, Texas, Gilbert Martinez, a 93-year-old Korean War veteran, sees Mr. Trump as reckless and rebellious. And that’s not aligned with the values Mr. Martinez has spent his life preaching.
He called the attack on Iran a “diversion.”
“That idiot is going to cause a lot of good military people to lose their lives,” he said.
A longtime local business leader, Mr. Martinez is from the Texas Panhandle and says he can trace his family lineage to El Paso. He started Austin’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 1973, he said, because in those days, downtown was a “backwater” devoid of Hispanic-owned businesses.
“I’m an American,” Mr. Martinez said. “We didn’t just get here.”
Chicagoans gathered at Grant Park, where Saira Bensett, 60, a retired zoological worker, described the turnout as cathartic.
“When I watch the news, it’s often too much — the emotions I feel make me feel like I’m alone,” she said. “So I wanted to be here to feel like I’m not by myself.”
Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton of Illinois, who is also the Democratic nominee for a Senate seat, told a crowd, “We all know the power of turning our anger into action.”
Many who gathered outside the Minnesota State Capitol said they had been driven to protest by the tumultuous monthslong presence of federal immigration officers in the Twin Cities region.
“We don’t want to walk out our door in fear,” said Chas Jensen, 68, who has lived in St. Paul his entire life and marched with his wife, Kitty Warner. “I’ve seen a lot over the years, but nothing like this.”
“It’s been hell, the last few months,” added Sadikshya Aryal, who came from South Minneapolis with her husband and two friends. Ms. Aryal, 32, still carries her passport whenever she leaves her house, she said.
Attendees said they felt the area had not returned to normal since the immigration operation but were comforted by how many people showed up Saturday.
“As much as it can feel helpless, this shows it’s not,” said Ms. Warner, 80.
The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, gave a fiery address from behind a row of bulletproof glass panels, which underscored fears of political violence. Referring to the president’s oft-stated disdain for Somali immigrants, Mr. Walz said that their grandchildren would remain in the United States long after “the orange clown is in the dustbin of history.”
In New York City, Valerie Tirado said she decided to attend an anti-Trump demonstration for the first time because her son, a Marine, was set to be deployed to the Middle East.
“Trump is using these military men as pawns, just to flex,” said Ms. Tirado, 60, a registered Democrat.
Spouses Michael Bianco and Susan Draper said they had demonstrated in the streets for causes they support since 1968. What struck them most about Saturday’s was how many people their age were on the streets.
“I want to express my disdain,” said Ms. Draper, 77, a retired N.Y.U. urban anthropology professor.
Eileen McHugh, 59, traveled an hour from her Republican-leaning town in Westchester County to protest at Columbus Circle.
“The whole Republican Party has blood on their hands,” Ms. McHugh said. “Bombing boats in Venezuela and schools in Iran is murder.”
While immigration policy was the focus of past No Kings protests in Atlanta, demonstrators on Saturday drew attention to the war in Iran, the toll the partial government shutdown is taking on air travel, and a bill Republicans are championing to tighten voting rules.
“They just keep pushing the limits every day to see how far they can take their regime,” said Alan Reed, 72, who attended the protest using a walker and had a rainbow flag draped over his back. “To see how much authority they can grab, until they can cancel our elections.”
Nicholas Phillips, 34, of Long Beach, Calif., cooled himself outside Los Angeles City Hall with a rainbow fan, joined by friends.
Mr. Phillips, who is gay, said he came to protest the Trump administration’s anti-transgender policies and the potential for the Supreme Court to reverse the country’s marriage equality laws.
“It’s important to show up,” he said.
Later in the day, tensions escalated toward a separate group of protesters who had gathered outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center. Tear gas was deployed, and rubber bullets were shot into the crowd. The police declared an unlawful assembly, formed a line, and made several arrests.
In statements on social media, the Los Angeles Police Department said that federal authorities had used nonlethal measures to move the crowd back after protesters were warned not to throw items or try to tear down the gate.
A city councilor, Sameer Kanal, described “a sea of Portlanders” in a park near downtown. Many were wearing the inflatable animal costumes that have made the city’s anti-immigration rallies a viral sensation.
Deana Fredericks, 65, was among a group of women wearing outfits inspired by “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a show drawn from the Margaret Atwood novel that depicts a totalitarian society in which women are treated as property. “We’re concerned about women’s rights, but it’s also gone beyond that,” she said, citing the Iran war and voting rights.
Later, outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, hundreds of protesters gathered, with some breaking open a gate at the entrance of the building. The authorities pushed them back. State and city police officers arrived to further break up the crowd.
No Kings protesters gathered at the park at Pier A in Hoboken on the banks of the Hudson River on a chilly morning. A local folk singer, Ed Fogarty, played the classic Bob Dylan protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Noah Schwartz, 54, one of the organizers of a march from Jersey City to Hoboken, used a bullhorn to lead the crowd in a chant.
“We will not stop our fun, our joy, our democracy,” he said. “Say it once, say it twice! We will not put up with ICE!”
Protesters with signs slung over their shoulders streamed into Anchorage’s Town Square Park, as temperatures hovered around 20.
Lynette Moreno-Hinz, a 67-year-old cabdriver from Anchorage, played a skin drum for the crowd. Ms. Moreno-Hinz, who is Tlingit, said she was protesting because Alaska Natives are concerned about federal support for myriad tribal programs. “He’s taking away the money for our Native people,” she said, referring to Mr. Trump.
The No Kings movement debuted in February 2025 on Presidents’ Day. The decentralized coalition had a stronger showing last June, on the day Mr. Trump marked his birthday by ordering the military to stage a large parade in Washington, D.C. The groups reported an even larger turnout in October.
In London, demonstrators carried scowling bobbleheads of Mr. Trump; the first lady, Melania Trump; and Vice President JD Vance. Caricatures of Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem also hovered over the crowd.
Carmen Kingston, a New Yorker who has lived in Britain for a decade, carried a poster with the words “Minab Massacre,” referring to the strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.
The war, she said, is “part of a domestics political climate that includes the erosion of democratic institutions, democratic guardrails, and unaccountable violence.”
More on the Fighting in the Middle East
Houthis Attack Israel: The attack by the Iranian-backed militia in Yemen marked an escalation in the conflict, bringing in a new actor who threatened to expand the war’s reach across the region.
Strike on U.S. Base: A combined missile and drone attack by Iran injured 12 American troops, two of them seriously, at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, two U.S. officials said.
Iran’s Information War: With help from Russia, China, and A.I. tools, Iran is spreading content designed to exploit opposition to the U.S.-Israeli campaign and to deflect from its own considerable losses on the battlefield. Both U.S. and Iranian officials alike have used memes to taunt each other.
Attacks on Iranian Infrastructure: Strikes on Iran’s industrial infrastructure widened, with attacks on two major steel production complexes that are vital to the country’s economy, along with other industrial sites. Iran attributed the strikes to Israel.
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Protesters gather in front of the Idaho State Capitol during the No Kings Day protest in Boise, Idaho. Credit…Loren Elliott for The New York Times
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Forget the memberships and the mirrors. The most striking gym on earth is right outside your front door, and it has the best ventilation. Prioritizing fitness in nature is a mellow way to reclaim your vitality. Your heart loves the challenge of a hill, and your head loves the view from the top. When you […]
Barreling through the universe with incredible power and speed, galactic cosmic rays are a major source of radiation in space. But thanks to Earth’s strong magnetic field, these charged particles don’t usually make it directly to our planet, so we are protected from the radiation’s damaging effects. This field may be doing much more: new data collected by China’s Chang’e 4 lunar lander shows that our magnetic field’s influence is so powerful that it extends farther into space than previously believed—stretching even beyond the moon.
n a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers describe a “cavity” in space between Earth and the moon where cosmic rays are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field. This suggests that the effects of our planet’s magnetism are present much farther from us than anyone could have expected.
Gravitational cosmic rays spiral through the heliosphere, but Earth’s magnetic influence shields a large area of space from some of the particles. From “A Galactic Cosmic Ray Cavity in Earth-Moon Space,” by Wensai Shang et al., in Science Advances, Vol. 12, No. 13; March 25, 2026
Launched in 2018, Chang’e 4 was the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the moon. Among the many scientific instruments onboard was the Lunar Lander Neutron and Dosimetry experiment, which was designed to measure the radiation future astronauts might experience if they were to land there. Scientists had long assumed most of the moon lay beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, but in 2019, scientists began noticing something odd about the experiment’s data that suggested the moon was somewhat protected from galactic cosmic rays.
The finding came as “a surprise,” says Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, a co-author of the study and a physicist at Kiel University in Germany. “Personally, I didn’t believe it for a long, long time. I thought it was an artifact in the data until we did a lot of statistical tests.”
Galactic cosmic rays originate from a variety of sources in space, such as stars, supernovae, and black holes. These diverse origins mean that by the time the rays get near Earth, they don’t all carry the same level of energy. The highest-energy particles move quickly through the solar system, while some of the weaker particles linger—and their radiation could affect astronauts, Wimmer-Schweingruber says.
“These low-energy particles weren’t that interesting to us until we saw this effect, and then we realized this is actually important for the skin dose of astronauts,” he says.
Shielding astronauts from the dangers of radiation is critical to ensuring a human presence in space. This means creating materials that are light enough to bring into space but protective enough to keep radiation at bay, says Philip Metzger, a professor of planetary science and space technology at the University of Central Florida, who was not involved in the new study. Knowing more about the distribution of radiation in space, and especially between the moon and Earth, could help scientists plan safer missions.
For example, if NASA’s plan to put humans on the moon in a semipermanent capacity comes to pass, then it may make sense for astronauts to schedule activities outside any sheltered habitats while the moon is within the influence of Earth’s magnetic field.
“It is brilliant research, and it just shows us that the more we study phenomena outside of our planet, the more we discover we don’t know,” Metzger says. “That’s why we need to do space missions.”
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Though it is far from Earth’s magnetic core, the moon feels even more of the core’s effects than scientists previously thought. NASA
Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is the final phase of the four stage cycle that occurs during sleep. Unlike non-REM sleep, the fourth phase is characterized by an increase in brain activity and autonomic nervous system functions, which are closer to what is seen during the awakened state. Similar to non-REM sleep stages, this stage of sleep is primarily controlled by the brainstem and hypothalamus, with added contributions from the hippocampus and amygdala. Additionally, REM sleep is associated with an increase in occurrence of vivid dreams. While non-REM sleep has been associated with rest and recovery, the purpose and benefits of REM sleep are still unknown. However, many theories hypothesize that REM sleep is useful for learning and memory formation.
Key Takeaways: What Is REM Sleep?
REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity, return to awake state autonomic functions, and dreams with associated paralysis.
The brainstem, particularly the pons and midbrain, and the hypothalamus are key areas of the brain that control REM sleep with hormone-secreting “REM-on” and “REM-off” cells.
The most vivid, elaborate, and emotional dreams occur during REM sleep.
The benefits of REM sleep are uncertain, but may be related to learning and storage of memory.
REM Definition
REM sleep is often described as a “paradoxical” sleep state due to its increased activity after non-REM sleep. The three prior stages of sleep, known as non-REM or N1, N2, and N3, occur initially during the sleep cycle to progressively slow bodily functions and brain activity. However, after the occurrence of N3 sleep (the deepest stage of sleep), the brain signals for the onset of a more aroused state. As the name implies, the eyes move rapidly sideways during REM sleep. Autonomic functions such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure begin to increase closer to their values while awake. However, because this period is often associated with dreams, major limb muscle activities are temporarily paralyzed. Twitching can still be observed in smaller muscle groups.
During REM sleep, brain wave activity measured on an electroencephalogram (EEG) also increases, as compared to the slower wave activity seen during non-REM sleep. N1 sleep shows slowing of the normal alpha wave pattern noted during the awake state. N2 sleep introduces K waves, or long, high-voltage waves lasting up to 1 second, and sleep spindles, or periods of low voltage and high-frequency spikes. N3 sleep is characterized by delta waves, or high voltage, slow, and irregular activity. However, EEGs obtained during REM sleep show sleep patterns with low voltage and fast waves, some alpha waves, and muscle twitch spikes associated with transmitted rapid eye movement. These readings are also more variable than those observed during non-REM sleep, with random spiking patterns at times fluctuating more than activity seen while awake.
REM and Your Brain
During REM sleep, brain wave activity measured on an electroencephalogram (EEG) also increases, as compared to the slower wave activity seen during non-REM sleep. N1 sleep shows slowing of the normal alpha wave pattern noted during the awake state. N2 sleep introduces K waves, or long, high-voltage waves lasting up to 1 second, and sleep spindles, or periods of low voltage and high-frequency spikes. N3 sleep is characterized by delta waves, or high voltage, slow, and irregular activity. However, EEGs obtained during REM sleep show sleep patterns with low voltage and fast waves, some alpha waves, and muscle twitch spikes associated with transmitted rapid eye movement. These readings are also more variable than those observed during non-REM sleep, with random spiking patterns at times fluctuating more than activity seen while awake.
The major portions of the brain activated during REM sleep are the brainstem and the hypothalamus. The pons and midbrain, in particular, and the hypothalamus contain specialized cells known as “REM-on” and “REM-off” cells. To induce the transition to REM sleep, REM-on cells secrete hormones such as GABA, acetylcholine, and glutamate to instruct the onset of rapid eye movements, muscle activity suppression, and autonomic changes. REM-off cells, as their name implies, induce the offset of REM sleep by secretion of stimulatory hormones such as norepinephrine, epinephrine, and histamine.
The hypothalamus also contains stimulatory cells known as orexin neurons, which secrete the hormone orexin. This hormone is necessary for maintaining wakefulness and arousal from sleep and is often decreased or absent in people with sleep disorders. The hippocampus and amygdala are also involved in REM sleep, specifically during periods of dreams. These areas of the brain are most notable for their functions in memory and emotional regulation. An EEG will show increased hippocampal and amygdala activity with the presence of high voltage, regular waves known as theta waves.
Dreams and REM Sleep
Although dreams can occur in other stages of sleep, the most vivid dreams occur during REM sleep. These dreams are often elaborate and emotional experiences of imagined life, most often associated with sadness, anger, apprehension, or fear. A person can also more readily recall a dream when awakened from REM sleep rather than from non-REM sleep. The purpose of dream content is not currently understood. Historically, neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams were a representation of unconscious thought, and therefore each dream had deeply significant meaning. His dream interpretation, however, is not a universally accepted theory. An opposing hypothesis proposes that dream content is a result of random brain activity that occurs during REM sleep, rather than a meaningful interpretive experience.
Benefits of REM Sleep
Sleep in general is necessary for health and well-being, as mild sleep deprivation increases risk for chronic health conditions and severe sleep deprivation can lead to hallucinations or even death. While non-REM sleep is required in order to survive, the benefits of REM sleep remain inconclusive. Studies in which participants were deprived of REM sleep by waking have shown no obvious adverse effects. Some drugs, including MAO antidepressants, lead to drastically decreased REM sleep without issue for patients even after years of treatment.
Due to the lack of conclusive evidence, many hypotheses exist concerning the benefits of REM sleep. One hypothesized benefit relates to the association of REM sleep and dreams. This theory suggests that certain negative behaviors, which should be “unlearned,” are rehearsed through dreams. Actions, events, and sequences related to fearful situations are often the subject of dreams and are therefore appropriately erased from the neural network. REM sleep is also proposed to help transfer memories from the hippocampus to the cerebral cortex. In fact, the cyclical occurrence of non-REM and REM sleep is often thought to enhance the body’s physical and mental rest as well as aid in memory formation.
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REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity. Jamie Grill / Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Tens of thousands of people have joined “No Kings” protests across the U.S. against the war in Iran and President Donald Trump’s actions. (AP video by Mike Pesoli, Mark Vancleave, and Emily Wang)
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REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity. Jamie Grill / Getty Images
James' World 2 