News Wire

Science & technology news

A curated feed: only what changes TRL, opens new markets or redefines the scientific consensus.

AI·May 3, 2026·Nature Machine Intelligence

Gemini 3.1 Pro outperforms human experts on USMLE Step 3 with 97.2%

Google DeepMind released independent validation: the model solves clinical cases at the level of physicians with 15 years of practice.

Energy·May 2, 2026·Reuters

Commonwealth Fusion Systems brings SPARC online: first net-positive plasma

Q = 1.4 reached on the demonstration reactor in Devens. The commercial ARC is targeted for 2030.

Biotech·May 1, 2026·Science

First CRISPR therapy for Alzheimer's clears Phase II

Verve Therapeutics shows a 62% drop in tau protein in a cohort of 240 patients.

Quantum·April 30, 2026·IBM Research

IBM Heron r3: 156 logical qubits with error rate below 10⁻⁴

Reaches the fault-tolerance threshold for surface code. Opens the path to practical quantum computing.

Materials·April 29, 2026·MIT News

Graphene superconductor at 77K — independent confirmation

The Pablo Jarillo-Herrero group published a reproducible synthesis protocol for twisted bilayer graphene.

Space·April 28, 2026·SpaceX / NASA

Starship V3 successfully delivers 150 tons to LEO on first commercial mission

Launch cost — $87/kg. Reflashes the Starlink V4 production cycle.

AI·April 27, 2026·Anthropic

Claude Opus 5 released: 2M-token context and native tool-use

SWE-bench Verified: 78.4%. The best result among public models for scientific tasks.

Biotech·April 26, 2026·Cell

Lab-grown thymus: a functional immune organ grown for the first time

A team at Karolinska Institute grew a thymus from iPSC that restores T-cell repertoire in nude mice.

Climate·April 25, 2026·Heirloom Carbon

DAC plant in California reaches 100,000 tons CO₂ / year

Cost — $87/ton. Microsoft and Stripe contracts cover 2.4M tons through 2030.

Robotics·April 24, 2026·Figure AI

Figure 03 — first humanoid with end-to-end neural control across all joints

Deployed on the BMW assembly line in Spartanburg. Productivity: 0.8× of a human operator.