Researchers analyzed communication across the animal kingdom, including firefly flashes, cricket chirps, frog croaks, birds’ mating displays and more. Across species, many communication signals repeat at two beats per second. Brains are most effective at processing signals that arrive about twice per second. Findings suggest communication signals may have evolved to match the rhythms the brain processes most easily.

Insilico Medicine has expanded its Science MMAI Gym, a large-scale training and benchmarking platform for artificial intelligence, with the launch of three public leaderboard portals designed to evaluate AI performance across scientific research and drug discovery. Positioned as both a training environment and benchmarking system, MMAI Gym enables the development of domain-specific AI models while rigorously assessing their capabilities on real-world tasks.

The newly launched benchmark categories include ScienceAI Bench, which evaluates general scientific reasoning across disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and materials science; the Drug Discovery Benchmark (DDB), focused on end-to-end pharmaceutical R&D tasks; and Insilico Bench, a proprietary suite targeting complex and emerging scientific challenges. Together, these benchmarks draw from both curated industry datasets and proprietary, experimentally grounded data, enabling multi-dimensional evaluation across more than 200 tasks.

The platform reflects a broader shift toward standardized, scalable evaluation of scientific AI systems. Previous results from Insilico demonstrate that models trained within MMAI Gym can achieve up to tenfold performance improvements on key drug discovery benchmarks. In collaboration with Liquid AI, Insilico also developed a compact foundation model that achieved state-of-the-art performance across multiple drug discovery tasks, with findings presented at ICLR 2026.

By integrating training, benchmarking, and public evaluation, MMAI Gym aims to accelerate the adoption of reliable, high-performance AI systems across pharmaceutical research and beyond.

Five early-career scientists have been named recipients of the 2026 BioOne Ambassador Award, an annual honor recognizing early-career scientists who excel at communicating their work to broader audiences, fostering public understanding and appreciation of science.

Now in its ninth year, the award highlights rising talent within the BioOne community of 157 scientific societies and publishing partners. BioOne Ambassadors are nominated by BioOne publishing partners, and each winning author receives a $1,000 award and has their work recognized in the BioOne Ambassador Award showcase.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo clarified how membrane lipid composition determines the surface charge of extracellular vesicles (EVs). They show that differences between exosomes and membrane-derived EVs arise from phospholipid asymmetry, particularly phosphatidylserine distribution. The study proposes zeta potential as a key indicator for EV classification and quality control, offering a foundation for standardization and rational design of EV-based therapeutics. This work was conducted as part of a JST COI-NEXT program, led by Innovation Center of NanoMedicine (iCONM).