On Oct 9, a team of Chinese and Australian scientists revealed in a study published in Cell that they used a new machine-learning tool to discover 161,979 new species of ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus. Identified using metagenomics, 70,500 viruses previously unknown to science are uncovered, many of them weird and nothing like known species. Nature magazine features the study as the “potential of AI to explore the ‘dark matter’ of the RNA virus universe.”