For decades, chemists have relied on handbook values for a molecule's boiling point to identify substances and plan processes such as distillation. But an artificial-intelligence model has revealed that some trusted numbers in one reference database have been wrong all along. Sebastian Pios, a theoretical chemist at Zhejiang Lab in Hangzhou, China, was using an AI system to predict the boiling points of several molecules when it began producing values that clashed with long-accepted entries in a 75-year-old reference database. At first, he thought the model was wrong. But when he manually checked the original literature, he found that the reference data were wrong, not the AI model. In two other cases, Pios's AI model spotted errors in older papers and reference books ' mistakes that have made their way into the scientific canon. One was a typo in a paper; another was incorrect values of century-old boiling-point measurements. Both errors are likely to have caused researchers using...
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