Market volatility and scientific breakthroughs dominated the news cycle this week, with developments ranging from the impact of artificial intelligence on the tech industry to corrections in immunology research and the ongoing search for life beyond Earth.
Shares of software-as-a-service companies like Adobe, Intuit, and Salesforce declined sharply after AI-company Anthropic released new add-ons to Claude, according to Time. Legacy tech giants with large AI businesses like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were also hit hard. A trillion dollars in market cap was wiped out in a week before regaining some ground on Friday, Time reported. Analysts are still unpacking what it all means given the various factors at play.
In the realm of science, a correction was issued to a Nature article published on January 28, 2026, regarding environmentally driven immune imprinting and its role in protecting against allergy. The original article's images presented as Extended Data Figs. 8 and 9 were interchanged, and the corrected versions are now updated in the HTML and PDF versions, according to Nature News.
Also in Nature News, an artificial-lung system kept a patient alive for 48 hours until a transplant. The Nature Podcast discussed this and other scientific breakthroughs, including how lung cancer in mice hijacks neurons to outwit the immune system.
Meanwhile, in the field of environmental science, oil- and gas-producing regions in the continental United States are giving off up to five times more methane than the companies extracting them are reporting to government regulators, according to Nature News.
The search for extraterrestrial life also made headlines. The New York Times ran a major piece on December 9, 1906, under the headline, "There Is Life on the Planet Mars." NASA announced on August 6, 1996, that chemicals and formations in a Martian meteorite that crash-landed on Earth 13,000 years ago were the fossilized remains of ancient bacterial life, Time reported. The newspaper said this discovery is being hailed as startling and compelling evidence.
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