IBM

In what's being hailed as an important first for chemistry, scientists have developed a new technology that can selectively rearrange atomic bonds within a single molecule, which could open up exciting possibilities in molecular machinery.

Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs" pose a serious public health threat. New antibiotics are needed to turn the tide, but developing them takes time. Now IBM Research has set AI on the task, producing two promising new drug candidates very quickly.

A tool has been developed that can predict a person’s age based on a microbiome sample. The tool, developed in collaboration between UC San Diego and IBM researchers, is most accurate at predicting a person’s age when using a skin microbiome sample.

Google has announced that it has achieved “quantum supremacy,” the point where a quantum computer successfully performs an operation considered impossible for traditional computers. But rival IBM disagrees that this has been achieved at all.

IBM’s annual 5 in 5 list is here. This time, all five technologies in this year’s list are designed to fix problems in every step of the food supply chain, from seed to your plate.

Researchers have produced a new synthetic molecule that can target and kill five multidrug-resistant bacteria. This synthetic polymer was found to be non-toxic and could enable an entirely new classes of therapeutics to address the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

​IBM and MIT recently launched a new collaborative research lab designed to propel breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence over the next decade. The deal involves a US$240 million dollar investment from IBM, one of the largest ever seen between a university and a private company.

When the universe was a few microseconds old, it was a soupy substance called quark-gluon plasma, exhibiting a host of unusual quantum effects previously only thought to occur just after the Big Bang. For the first time, IBM researchers have now observed a gravitational anomaly in earthly materials

​Watson, IBM’s AI system, is ridiculously prolific. The latest point on the system’s resumé is to help make hospital stays more comfortable for patients and relieve strain on staff through speakers that can answer basic questions and grant patients' control over room temperature, lights or TV.

Viral infections can be difficult to tackle due to their ability to develop resistance to drugs, and major viruses like Ebola and Zika pose a real threat to global health. Help might well be at hand though, with researchers developing a macromolecule that tackles viruses in three separate ways.

​Sometimes, if you want something made right, you've just got to make it yourself. It was with this in mind that scientists from ETH Zurich and IBM recently developed a process for building custom molecules from mix-n-match components.​

IBM scientists have unveiled two crucial advances toward the creation of a practical quantum computer: an effective way to detect and correct quantum errors, and the design of a silicon chip that can scale up to house a large number of entangled quantum bits.