Artificial intelligence is increasingly able to simulate human behavior and answer online surveys and political polls, putting the reliability of survey-based research at risk. Consequences can be serious for science and research, but also for policy and participation of people in democratic processes, as surveys are widely used in political polls. Three researchers working at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca and the University of Cambridge express their worry in a comment in Nature, and propose some possible countermeasures.

Hydrogen bonds, best known for holding water molecules and biological structures together, are now shown to play a powerful role in solar energy conversion. In a study published in National Science Review, researchers from Inner Mongolia University and Tsinghua University demonstrate that strategically engineered hydrogen-bond interactions can significantly enhance charge separation, which still remains a major obstacle in artificial photosynthesis. By linking perylene diimide and aminated fullerene through hydrogen bonds, the system creates a polarized “charge bridge” that simultaneously promotes exciton delocalization and accelerates charge migration, resulting in markedly enhanced solar-to-oxygen conversion efficiency. These findings provide new insights into charge dynamics and offer a promising strategy for designing high-performance organic photocatalysts.

Can an AI truly think like a human? A model named Centaur, which can mimic human performance on 160 cognitive tasks, is now under scrutiny. Recent research suggests it may not genuinely understand the tasks but instead relies heavily on statistical patterns from its training data. This finding underscores a crucial challenge: for AI to achieve general cognitive abilities, genuine language comprehension—not mere pattern matching—remains the key bottleneck.

A study, published in Circulation Research, identifies cardiac fibroblasts and resident macrophages as essential contributors to the characteristic electrical activity that maintains this arrhythmia