Watch a robot swarm “bloom” like a garden
Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that “bloom” like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published…
Tech
How Nissan improved the wireless charging pad for faster phone juice-ups
In-car wireless chargers are notoriously finicky. Your phone can slide off the slippery charging pad at a sudden stop, or overheat and stop charging; the case can also prevent your…
The 10 weirdest and wildest musical instruments of 2026
It’s that time of the year again. No, not the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards—it’s time to announce the finalists for the 28th annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. From…
Zillow removed climate risk scores. This climate expert is restoring them.
Even as exposure to floods, fire, and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the nation’s leading real estate…
Wikipedia volunteers spent years cataloging AI tells. Now there’s a plugin to avoid them.
On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called…
Macaque facial gestures are more than just a reflex, study finds
Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to…
How to really spot AI-generated images, with Google’s help
It’s harder than ever to tell AI-generated images from real photographs and illustrations produced by flesh-and-blood human beings. And in recent years, the fakery produced by AI models has become…
A robot bat sheds new light on how they hunt in darkness
Biologists and engineers have joined forces to build a new robot bat that’s helping us understand how real bats use echolocation to hunt for food. By creating a robot that…
The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis…
British soldier’s long-lost memoir rediscovered in Cleveland
A long-lost second memoir penned by a famed 19th-century British soldier named Shadlock Byfield resurfaced in a rather unexpected place—Cleveland, Ohio. As explained in a study recently published in the…