Painter Bob Ross taught us that “happy accidents” can make beautiful art. Happy accidents also happen in science when experiments take research in unexpected directions. One dramatic example is Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin.

Four years ago, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher Cyrus Daugherty developed an algorithm to virtually unroll the tightly wrapped layers of a cylindrical lithium-ion battery.

Self-driving cars are often controlled by deep learning models that sometimes fail in unexpected situations. For instance, the car might inexplicably brake and block the path of an oncoming emergency vehicle.

When doctors need to deliver precise doses of medicine on a strict schedule, they often administer it intravenously. Intravenous drug delivery methods need to carefully control the flow of medicine into a patient.

Researchers at MIT have overcome a major challenge holding back the real-world deployment of microwave quantum technologies for advanced signal processing and secure communications.

A sound that’s slightly off before a bearing fails. A smell that shows up before a chemical reaction runs hot. A texture that feels wrong before any instrument confirms it.

When President Donald Trump announced a wave of tariffs in early 2025, he launched a war of words. Threats and counterthreats flew across the Atlantic and Pacific in a swirl of escalation, retaliation, and reprieve.

There’s a number that stopped me in my tracks recently. U.S.

Engineers often use vision-language models to produce new designs, such as for airplane or automobile components.

Quality inspection has always depended on people who know what they are looking at. That remains true as automated visual inspection becomes faster and more widely deployed. The strongest systems don’t try to remove expert judgment completely.