Perhaps the most famous piece of maths in history, and an absolute brute of a problem, has been given the AI treatment. What happened and why might it change mathematics forever?

A massive weekend for a massive telescope, a chance to shine a light on the stuff that doesn’t shine, & an old beauty reminds us why she’s so cool with possibly the most awesome images I’ve ever seen.

It has been an incredible year for robotics. A robot shredded the human half marathon world record earlier this year (50 minutes 26 seconds versus 57:20!). Weeks later, Sony dropped a robot that can beat the world’s best table tennis players. And now Usain Bolt himself would be watching a chunk of metal and wires zip past him. Where will this all end?

To celebrate National Science Week, NerdNews is shining a light on a team of marine scientists and traditional custodians for the work they have done in exploring these precious places.

An AI model was handed the opening fragment of a virus genome and asked to write the rest. It produced thousands of designs. Sixteen came alive in a dish, and a mixture of them conquered a seriously bad-ass bacterium.

1990 Milli Vanilli were exposed as Mimey Vanilli. The Monkees were actively banned from playing on their early albums. Marvin Gaye’s estate took Robin Thicke and Pharrell to court over blurred lines and won. Pop is full of controversy. Well 2026 doesn’t disappoint … with an AI twist.

As Claude has evolved as an AI system, it has created its own inner space, wherein it, in a way, ‘thinks’. Anthropic has taken a look and the operation of this ‘J-space’ is fascinating.

A French team has gone looking for the brain cells that hold our earliest smell memories. But do these memories lay dormant for decades only to burst back to life? Or are we subtly topping them up across the years?

Are you one of the one in six Aussies who reaches for a quick hit of the sticky icky icky before drifting off to sleep? Does it help? What if the calmness it gave switched off your ability to dream? Should that matter? Should you care?

AI is now hacking other AI!!!Breathless headlines. I’m doing radio and tv interviews. NerdNews takes a breath and asks ‘what really happened’ when some AI got out of its sandbox’?

If one of the most famous open problems in graph theory has been solved, in under an hour (!!!), not only is it incredibly quick. It would be the first time a maths proof of this stature would have a machine as its sole author.

Aussie superfish Cam McEvoy just set a world record. But he did it with maths as much as muscle!