A Toyohashi University of Technology team tested whether a robot's approach direction changes how fast it seems to move . Across five experiments using a real mobile robot and virtual reality, 92% of participants showed the same bias: at the same physical speed, a robot approaching from behind seemed faster than one approaching from the front. In the first experiment, participants learned two reference speeds--0.5 and 1.0 metres per second--then judged a robot approaching at speeds between those values. Follow-up experiments suggested the effect wasn't explained by the robot's appearance or motor noise. The researchers link it instead to visual factors involved in turning to look at something coming from behind.

"With AI, we need to reconsider what it means to learn" Generative AI has worked its way into every field over the past four years and is prompting us to reconsider our habits. At universities, students are using it to write, find information and solve problems, while scientists have already incorporated it largely into their research. Teachers are being called on to rethink how they do their job now that AI programs can complete - in just seconds - a number of tasks traditionally assigned to students. These are just some of the questions we explore in our special online report on AI at universities, published at the start of this new school year . These are also questions that Schwartz - a professor of educational technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a faculty director at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning - has been studying for the past few years.

More than five million industrial robots are now operating in factories worldwide, according to the International Federation of Robotics' newly released World Robotics 2026 report . Factories installed more than 600,000 industrial robots during 2025, an increase of 11% on the previous year. The global operational stock grew by 9%. China continued to pull away from the rest of the world. Its factories installed 354,000 robots, accounting for 59% of the global total.

MIT engineers' design for a robot that both swims and flies could lead to a new class of vehicles for ocean exploration. Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving through those two mediums requires very different mechanics--or so one might assume. Yet birds like gulls and puffins can plunge into the sea, swim underwater, and leap back into the air to fly away. And now engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can do likewise. The "flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle," or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is equipped with a central fuselage, two flexible wings, and a steerable tail. The body contains a battery and a waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies.

How far can we push computing? Nowadays big advances are made by scaling up--think more chips packed into ever-bigger data centers. But as we near the ceiling of what we can build, there's still plenty of room below, at the fundamental physical limits of computing. Richard Feynman speaks at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1965. On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," on how we might manipulate and control things on an extremely small scale. There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire on the head of a pin, he argued, or from storing every book ever written in something the size of a dust speck--or, ultimately, from arranging matter atom by atom. Biology already did versions of this (a living cell keeps its instructions in a wisp of DNA), so all of this was plainly permitted by the laws of physics. We simply had not built the tools yet.

Technology Engineering Severed robot hand looks like a futuristic Thing from'The Addams Family' The creepy and kooky robot can type on a keyboard, play a video game, and could help future humanoid robots. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Halloween is just around the corner, which means it's the perfect time to present another undeniably spooky robot . Or, more specifically, an -inspired detached robot hand . Like its gothic sitcom predecessor, this fully articulated appendage can balance on its own fingertips and creep around.

Two Britons are among three people killed in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps. The light aircraft crashed high in the mountains near the town of Leukerbad in the southern canton of Valais on Tuesday. The authorities said the Cirrus SR22T took off from Sion airport in the Rhône Valley and, for unknown reasons, collided with a mountain slope about 10 minutes later. Witnesses reported seeing a fire and smoke. Emergency teams from the Valais Rescue Organisation, police and firefighters were sent to the scene along with three helicopters. The Swiss Transportation Safety Board has started an investigation.

Two divisions of Switzerland's government are shifting from Microsoft 365 to open-source openDesk. Two Swiss government groups are moving from Microsoft 365 to openDesk. The Swiss Federal Chancellery and Swiss Armed Forces are moving at different paces. Switzerland's federal government is moving to create an open-source, digitally sovereign workplace for thousands of employees, while the Swiss Armed Forces' Cyber Command is moving much faster to replace Microsoft 365, especially for sensitive work. They're joining numerous other European government agencies, such as those in Austria, France, Germany, and Ireland, that are also cutting out Microsoft 365 and Windows in favor of open-source office suites and Linux.

A tourist coach has crashed in the south-eastern Swiss Alps, leaving several people dead and several injured, local police say. The bus overturned between Susch and Zernez in the Graubünden - also known as Grisons - region late on Thursday afternoon. A large team of rescuers equipped with several helicopters was deployed to the scene. Some 48 Dutch passengers were on board the bus, according to a spokeswoman for the General Dutch Association of Travel Companies on behalf of tour operator OAD, as well as the driver. The spokesperson told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf they could not yet say how many people had been killed or injured.

Every year, the prizes recognize the weirdest research that often raises some very serious scientific questions. Achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. That's the motto of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual competition that--parodying the Nobel Prizes--recognizes some of the world's most unusual scientific studies. The organization Improbable Research has been hosting the event since 1991 with the aim of showing that science also has a humorous side in its quest to meaningfully answer questions about the world. This year the ceremony was held in Zurich, Switzerland, and recognized 10 research projects ranging from an attempt to scientifically define what a kiss is to an experiment that used buried underwear to assess soil health.