# Google publishes Era and Co-Scientist research for AI-assisted scientific discovery

> Google has published two papers in Nature detailing AI systems built to accelerate scientific research. The first, Era, short for Empirical Research Assistance, helps scientists write expert level software for empirical work. The second, Co-Scientist, is a multi agent system designed to reason through genuinely hard scientific problems. The results go beyond benchmarks. Co-Scientist has been applied to real challenges including antimicrobial resistance and plant immunity, areas where progress carries direct public health and food security stakes. Both tools are now folded into Google's Gemini for Science suite, making them available to working researchers rather than staying locked in a lab. The significance is in the shift from AI that writes text to AI that does science. Getting results into a peer reviewed venue like Nature signals these are more than demos, and the multi agent design hints at how future discovery pipelines might be staffed partly by machines that generate, test, and refine hypotheses.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Google Research · Published Sunday, August 2, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Google has published two papers in Nature detailing AI systems built to accelerate scientific research. The first, Era, short for Empirical Research Assistance, helps scientists write expert level software for empirical work. The second, Co-Scientist, is a multi agent system designed to reason through genuinely hard scientific problems. The results go beyond benchmarks. Co-Scientist has been applied to real challenges including antimicrobial resistance and plant immunity, areas where progress carries direct public health and food security stakes. Both tools are now folded into Google's Gemini for Science suite, making them available to working researchers rather than staying locked in a lab. The significance is in the shift from AI that writes text to AI that does science. Getting results into a peer reviewed venue like Nature signals these are more than demos, and the multi agent design hints at how future discovery pipelines might be staffed partly by machines that generate, test, and refine hypotheses.

## Source

[Read the full story at Google Research](https://research.google/blog/a-new-era-of-innovation-google-research-at-io-2026/)

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