BBC Inside Science AI in Science: Promise and Peril
40 snips
Mar 27, 2025 
Gareth Mitchell, a technology expert and science communication lecturer, discusses the transformative impact of AI on scientific research. He highlights Google's new AI tool, Co-Scientist, showcasing its potential in biomedical studies while cautioning against over-reliance on technology. The conversation also touches on the growing threat of AI-generated misinformation in research, with insights from an image integrity analyst on detecting manipulated visuals. Finally, astronomer Catherine Heymans shares tips for observing a rare planetary alignment.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Co-scientist Aids Phage Research
- Dr. Tiago Costa tested Google's Co-scientist, an AI tool for biomedical applications.
- It successfully generated hypotheses about phage infection, some mirroring years of Costa's research.
Co-scientist's Multi-Agent System
- Co-scientist uses multiple large language models (LLMs), each specializing in different tasks.
- This multi-agent system allows for interaction and refinement of hypotheses.
Novel Hypotheses Generation
- Co-scientist generated novel hypotheses not found in existing literature.
- These hypotheses arise from complex associations and iterative refinement.