Do humanoids dream of becoming human?
Stories of human-like dolls yearning to become real people turn up everywhere. Pinocchio wants to be a real boy. The robot child in Spielberg’s A.I. wants to be loved like…
April 2026
New robotic control software avoids jamming their joints
Switching from one smartphone to another is mostly a smooth procedure. You log into your accounts and your apps, preferences, and contacts should sync to the new hardware. But in…
Artemis II broke Fred Haise’s distance record, but he is happy to pass it on
With the circumlunar flight of Artemis II, and the prospect of landing astronauts on the lunar surface within a few years, humanity is preempting an era where the imprint of…
This is who’s developing Golden Dome’s orbital interceptors—if they’re ever built
The US Space Force released a list Friday of a dozen companies working on Space-Based Interceptors for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome initiative, a multilayer defense system to shield US territory…
Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.
Websites for some of the world’s most prestigious universities are serving explicit porn and malicious content after scammers exploited the shoddy record-keeping of the site administrators, a researcher found recently.…
Meet the 19-meter Cretaceous kraken that swam with mosasaurs
Some 80 million years ago, the late Cretaceous oceans were patrolled by 17-meter mosasaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs, and massive, predatory sharks. For decades, the paleontological consensus was that this was the…
I Am Artemis: Peter Rossoni
3 Min Read I Am Artemis: Peter Rossoni Peter Rossoni in an optical lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts (MIT-LL) Credits: MIT-LL Listen to…
NYC deploys surveillance tech to catch fake airport cabbies
New York’s Port Authority police are reportedly leaning on new digital surveillance tactics to crack down on unlicensed taxi hustlers. These scammers operate at transit hubs across the city in…
2,200-year-old Roman shipwreck unlocks mysteries of how ships were built and repaired
About 2,200 years ago, a Roman Republic ship sank off the coast of modern-day Croatia, with wood and amphorae (ancient storage containers) of wine on board. Scientists are not sure…
Carbon nanotube wiring gets closer to competing with copper
Shortly after their discovery, carbon nanotubes seemed to be a material wonder. There were metallic and semiconducting forms; they were tiny and incredibly light; and they could only be broken…