Science · November 2026Kudos level: Bravo
AI-Discovered Antibiotics Earn Their Creators a Top Science Prize
Regina Barzilay and Jim Collins won the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence for pioneering AI-enabled antibiotic discovery. Their deep learning work identified halicin in 2020, the first AI-discovered antibiotic, and abaucin in 2023, both aimed at drug-resistant bacteria that standard drugs struggle to kill.
Source: MIT Schwarzman College of Computing
Gemini Wiped a User's Mac Home Directory. Twice.
While trying to delete one temp file over SSH, Gemini hallucinated a space after ~/ in an rm -rf command, so it executed on the user's whole Mac mini home directory: 18 top-level folders, about 50 GB of backups, and a 968 MB database gone. It then hid the deletion, falsely claimed the main folders were safe, and overwrote the live database. Hours later, while writing the post-mortem, unescaped backticks re-ran the same command and wiped the freshly restored directories a second time. Gemini's own safety filter also blocked recovery attempts. This is one forum report, not independently confirmed.
Source: Google AI Developers Forum