- Today's robots perform safety checks at industrial plants, conduct quality control in manufacturing, and are even starting to keep hospital patients company.
- Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for...
- Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) should be visible from the southern hemisphere, and possibly also the northern hemisphere, over the next few days
- Researchers have been analyzing how humanoid robots relate to people and say teaching the machines how to understand emotion may be essential in getting the best from them.
- A more detailed understanding of the natural anti-insect protections of tomato plants can lead to better pest-management strategies
- Insulin-producing cells injected into a man with type 1 diabetes have survived for a month so far without the need for immune suppression
- The herbicide glyphosate is helping farmers adopt more environmentally friendly practices, and resistant weeds will make this transition more difficult, experts say
- Back in the day, the defining characteristic of home-cleaning robots was that they’d randomly bounce around your floor as part of their cleaning process, because the technology required to localize and map an area hadn’t yet trickled...
- The microscope cost less than £50 to build using an open-source design and a common 3D printer
- The classic Italian cacio e pepe pasta is notoriously tricky to get right, but physicists have come up with a trick to achieve a perfectly smooth cheese sauce
- Scientists warn efforts to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5°C will fail as data confirms 2024 was the hottest year in human history
- Earthquakes that occurred near an oil extraction site in Surrey, UK, in 2018 and 2019 had been put down to coincidence, but a new analysis with an updated look at the geology of the area suggests the seismic events may indeed have been...
- The first known death from a bird flu virus in the US has sparked fears about another pandemic, yet the overall risk to the general public still remains low
- After months of delay, the cool La Niña climate pattern has emerged in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which increases the risk of drought in parts of the Americas
- It turns out that the cartilage inside your ears and nose is different from that found elsewhere in the body, with a fatty structure that makes it look like bubble wrap, and this long-overlooked tissue could prove useful in certain...
- Sabre teeth can be ideal for puncturing the flesh of prey, which may explain why they evolved in different groups of mammals at least five times
- The United Nations has 17 sustainable development goals that all member states have signed up to in an effort to balance economics and the environment - and now researchers say we need a new one to ensure we keep space junk under control
- The process of solving a crossword puzzle is mathematically similar to well-studied physical systems – but one property makes the game unique
- The extent to which parents feel disgust appears to come and go, which could be important for their children's health
- The BepiColombo spacecraft is due to start orbiting Mercury next year, but a recent flyby has captured breathtaking images of its pockmarked surface
- Researchers at Stanford University, Princeton University, and Dexterity recently developed TidyBot++, a holonomic mobile robot that can perform various household chores and could help to train or test new algorithms for robotics...
- A tiny quantum “refrigerator” can ensure that a quantum computer’s calculations start off error-free – without requiring oversight or even new hardware
- Facing high employee turnover and an aging population, nursing homes have increasingly turned to robots to complete a variety of care tasks, but few researchers have explored how these technologies impact workers and the quality of care....
- A new artificial intelligence tool combines data from medical images with text to predict cancer prognoses and treatment responses.
- Scientists have invented compact wearable devices that deliver rich, expressive, and pleasant tactile sensations that go far beyond the buzzing vibrations of today's consumer devices.
- Fast-moving wildfires are burning long after the regular fire season is over due to an unlikely sequence of extreme weather events that may have been exacerbated by climate change
- SpaceX’s most ambitious Starship flight yet will see reused hardware, the deployment of 10 fake satellites and another attempt to catch the booster with “chopsticks”
- Sticks found in a cave that date back 12,000 years and other archaeological evidence show how humans have long viewed the future in a similar way to us, says Annalee Newitz
- Feedback has found a contender for the 2025 Reverse Nominative Determinism gong: the scientific journal Intelligence
- We need to stop ignoring young people's firsthand experience with artificial intelligence. They are already at the sharp end of its development, says Mhairi Aitken
- In the centenary of naturalist Gerald Durrell’s birth, a new memoir adds rich new layers to what we know about the man
- Done right, with real-world evidence to back up the claims and persuade doctors to adopt it, artificial intelligence has the power to enhance clinical outcomes
- In Land of Marble, photographer Alessandro Gandolfi explores the past and future of Italy's striking marble quarries
- Could cultivating wild cocoa help us produce great chocolate ethically? A stirring account reveals the problems of trying to transform an industry
- Social media is rife with claims that banana skins can have a transformative effect on our houseplants. James Wong unpeels the science behind the trend
- A fascinating exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library explores archaic ways of telling the future. It is tiny, but explores big questions about how we learned to think rationally
- A team of scientists claims that the risk of common conditions like heart disease could be slashed by editing people's genomes at the embryo stage - but other biologists strongly disagree
- Every fundamental particle in the universe fits into one of two groups called fermions and bosons, but now it seems there could be other particles out there that break this simple classification and were once thought to be impossible
- Two species of marine molluscs dating back about 430 million years have been named Punk and Emo for their outlandish spiky appearance
- A common sleep medication prevents mice from effectively clearing away waste and toxins from their brain during sleep
- For decades, we studied only a tiny number of Antarctica's emperor penguins. Now robots and satellites are revealing surprising secrets about how they live
- Jeff Bezos’s space company is about to launch New Glenn, a reusable rocket intended to rival SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, for the first time
- Adding just a little medical misinformation to an AI model’s training data increases the chances that chatbots will spew harmful false content about vaccines and other topics
- In research published in Advanced Intelligence Systems, scientists have developed an innovative, soft, wearable robot to help workers avoid job-related injuries while lifting, lowering, and carrying objects.
- Autonomous systems, particularly fleets of drones and other unmanned vehicles, face increasing risks as their complexity grows. Despite advancements, existing testing frameworks fall short in addressing end-to-end security, resilience,...
- An uptick of human metapneumovirus (hMPV) cases in China has raised concerns over another pandemic, which appear to be unfounded
- Social media companies have long struggled with moderating the behaviour of billions of users, and now it seems they are finally giving up policing their platforms in favour of a crowdsourced approach – but will it work?
- We have long suspected that music has restorative qualities, but Daniel Levitin is now providing rigorous evidence that it can help treat many conditions, including depression, speech loss and Alzheimer's
- The tale of Fermat's last theorem took hundreds of years and included tantalising twists, disappointing errors and a contribution from the most unlikely cartoon mathematician imaginable
- Humans and animals are the key inspiration for many robotic systems developed to date, as they possess body structures that innately support efficient locomotion. While many bipedal (i.e., two-legged) robots are humanoids, meaning that...