AI helping with medicine, biology, climate and other sciences.
Some of the most convincing uses of AI are not products at all. They are tools that help researchers: predicting how a protein folds, reading medical scans, sifting astronomical data, modelling climate. This page follows AI in medicine, biology, chemistry, climate science and physics — the results, the tools behind them, and the clinical and regulatory steps between a promising paper and something that reaches a patient. We also cover the Nobel-level work when it lands, and are careful to say when a result is early rather than established.
An unreleased OpenAI model was set roughly 4,000 open problems and produced 372 families of results. The company has put them all on GitHub, with Lean proofs for some, and says it is working to release the model itself.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on 7 October to Henri B. Kagan of Universite Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science, who share it equally. The citation reads: for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Many molecules come in left-handed and right-handed forms that behave very differently in the body, and the laureates' work explains how a tiny imbalance between the two can amplify itself into an overwhelming one. Kagan, born in 1930, showed that the effect need not be proportional to the purity of the catalyst; Soai, born in 1950, found a reaction that makes more of its own left-handed or right-handed product as it runs. The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor, divided equally.
References: Nobel Foundation API: the 2026 chemistry prize record · The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: press release
OpenAI has published a public repository, openai/math, containing 722 mathematical manuscripts organised into 372 result families, each said to solve an open problem or make substantial progress on one. They were produced by an unreleased internal model: about 4,000 problems were posed to it, and OpenAI says each result took roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking compute on average. The catalogue carries Lean formalisations, which let a computer check a proof's logic, for 162 of the manuscripts; the rest are unverified, and OpenAI's own readme says some of the unformalized results could have issues. Everything is released under an Apache-2.0 licence, along with abridged reasoning summaries for ten of the families.
References: openai/math: the manuscript map, with all 722 titles and abstracts · openai/math: the Lean formalisation catalogue
Three researchers turned a protein from a single-celled alga into a switch that makes a chosen nerve cell fire when blue light shines on it.