Microduck is a robot built to fall down—and learn new tricks
Sorry, cats and dogs, there’s another goofy pet vying for your owner’s attention, and this one doesn’t have fur or stink up the apartment. In fact, this companion is not…
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Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants?
A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out…
Scalable robot fish can easily swim in a creek or lake
Robot fish have come a long way from the novelty Big Mouth Billy Bass of the late 90s. Today, marine life researchers worldwide embed various types of more advanced robots…
Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago
A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America. Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s…
Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks
Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them…
AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions”
Earlier this year, Meta created a “plan” to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company “AI native,” Reuters reported today, citing two…
Butterfly wing crystals inspire new eco-friendly glitter
In her 80 years on planet Earth, Dolly Parton objectively made the world a better place, and her legacy will only continue to improve lives. It’s difficult to summarize the…
Researchers get two genetic codes to work at the same time
The genetic code is what life everywhere uses to convert the information contained in DNA into specific protein sequences. With minor variations, the same genetic code is used by every…
Continental Tire’s newest line takes on the oldest tradeoff in driving
Car tires can appear deceptively simple at first glance, but a surprising amount of research goes into keeping you safe and comfortable on the road. Tire design is a much…
New Next-Gen Dish Adds Muscle to NASA’s Deep Space Network
Antennas soak in the summer Sun in August 2026 at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, including the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 (shown in the…