News Summary

• Biochemist Anna Pertl typed in her question, pressed Enter and left for the night.
• The artificial-intelligence system that she had prompted is designed to produce innovative scientific hypotheses.
• Unlike a typical chatbot, this AI tool — called Co-Scientist — doesn’t simply generate an answer in a single pass.
• It launches several autonomous AI systems, known as agents, to search for and synthesize information from papers, evaluate competing explanations, refine and critique hypotheses and iteratively test ideas against published evidence.