COVER STORY This issue: Demis Hassabis—AI Laureate.  Demis Hassabis is reshaping what’s possible in science. His work at DeepMind—most notably the development of AlphaFold, which earned him a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—is already accelerating discoveries across biology and medicine. The ripple effects are real: labs around the world, including my own, are using his AI tools to tackle rare genetic diseases, antibiotic resistance, and even climate-driven challenges…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Researchers are racing to understand why. Dr. Frank Frizelle has operated on countless patients in his career as a colorectal surgeon. But there’s one that stayed with him. In 2014, he was treating a woman in her late 20s suffering from bowel cancer—already a rare situation, given her age. But it became even more unusual when her best friend visited for in the hospital and told Frizelle that she had many of the same symptoms as his patient…

The release of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley in January, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many over-looked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese artificial intelligence model functions—a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity’s ability to control sophisticated new AI systems. It’s all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained—one that led to surprising…