Welcome to the first episode of the Nature podcast for 2026. I'm your host, Nick Petrich Howl,

and for this momentous show, we're looking ahead at what might be the biggest stories this coming year.

And joining me to discuss this is Nature Reporter Miriam the Deaf.

Miriam, hi, how's it going?

Hi, Nick. How are you?

I'm good. I'm excited to be doing the look ahead this year with you.

It's the first time that I've done this, but it's actually the fourth time you've done this.

Sadly, the budget does not stretch to any champagne, but congrats nonetheless.

Thank you, Nick. And so, as is usual, you've written an

article for nature all about what might be the biggest stories this coming year. And I was wondering,

before we get into it, how exactly do you do it? Do you actually gaze into a crystal ball or is it a bit

more sophisticated than that? It's a bit more sophisticated than that. I'd hope so.

So I reach out to all the news reporters and editors, everyone at the nature family,

and I ask what they think will be in store for science in the year ahead.

And so far I think it's been pretty accurate,

and I know this is a popular show for our listeners.

So let's get into it and go through some of the things for people to look out for. And to start with,

I wanted to talk about a story that basically seems to percolate everything these days and that's

artificial intelligence. And when I was reading the story, this struck me as maybe this isn't the artificial intelligence that we used to.

This isn't all about chatbots and LLMs, right?

So AI is here to stay, but things will look a little bit different this year.

For example, we are expecting to see more models that move beyond the large language models. So these chatbots that we

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