Science continues to produce remarkable discoveries, yet fewer scientists capture the imagination of an entire generation. What changed: the scientists themselves, or the way we celebrate and remember them? Image created by AI Ask any researcher from the 1950s or 60s who inspired them. The answer would be Max Delbrück, Francis Crick, James Watson, Sydney Brenner, Barbara McClintock, or Richard Feynman. These, or any other names from that era, would come effortles

For years, scientists assumed their jobs were safe from AI because discovery requires creativity, intuition, and critical thinking. Three recent Nature papers challenge that assumption, showing that AI is beginning to act less like a tool and more like a research collaborator. AI is moving at a pace that no one could have imagined a decade ago. What feels particularly unusual is how quickly it has entered our lives compared with previous technological revolutions. Electricity

Few scientific papers can match the enormity of James Watson and Francis Crick’s paper on the DNA double helix model, published in the journal Nature on 25 April 1953. This paper described the structural properties of DNA without dwelling much on its functional implications. They provided evidence for these ideas in their second paper, which appeared in the same journal just a month later, on 30 May 1953. This time, they moved beyond describing DNA’s structure to proposing ho