Acknowledgments: The authors would like to acknowledge primary support from the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative which has made this research possible, additional support from NASA's PSTAR program, and in-kind support by the NOAA Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute with ship and robotic vehicle operations during 2021 Pacific Ocean demonstrations in the San Pedro Basin. The authors would also like to thank the captain and crew of the R/V Nautilus, the NUI robotic vehicle operations team, and study participants who volunteered to assist with performance testing of the SHARC and conventional robotic manipulation systems. AP would like to acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 2141064 and the Link Foundation. Funding: National Science Foundation, National Robotics Initiative grant IIS-1830500 (RC) National Science Foundation, National Robotics Initiative grant IIS-1830660 (MW) National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Planetary Science and Technology from Analog Research grant NNX16AL08G (RC) Author contributions: Conceptualization: AFD, AP, GB, MRW, RC Methodology: AFD, AP, GB, MRW, RC Investigation: AFD, AP, GB, MRW, RC Visualization: AFD, AP, GB, RC Funding acquisition: MRW, RC Project administration: MRW, RC Supervision: MRW, RC Writing - original draft: AFD, AP, GB, MRW, RC Writing - review & editing: AFD, AP, GB, MRW, RC Competing interests: Authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data are available in the main text or the supplementary materials. NOTE: This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science Robotics on 23 Aug 2023, DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adi5227.

Can you remember what you had for dinner last weekend? That ability is a function of episodic memory, and how well we can recall the time and place of specific events typically declines with age. Cuttlefish also seem to exhibit a form of episodic memory, but unlike with humans, their capability doesn't decrease as they get older, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. "Cuttlefish can remember what they ate, where, and when, and use this to guide their feeding decisions in the future," said coauthor Alexandra Schnell of the University of Cambridge, who conducted the experiments at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Science  has named nine scientific advances as runners-up for the 2020 Breakthrough of the Year. For 5 decades, scientists have struggled to solve one of biology's biggest challenges: predicting the precise 3D shape a string of amino acids will fold into as it becomes a working protein. This year, they achieved that goal, developing an artificial intelligence (AI) program that predicts most protein structures as accurately as laboratory experiments can map them. Because a protein's precise shape determines its biochemical functions, the new program could help researchers uncover mechanisms of disease, develop new drugs, and even create drought-tolerant plants and cheaper biofuels. Researchers traditionally decipher structures using laborious techniques such as x-ray crystallography and cryo–electron microscopy. But detailed molecular maps only exist for about 170,000 of the 200 million known proteins. Computational biologists have dreamed of simply predicting a protein's structure by modeling the amino acid interactions that govern its 3D shape. But because amino acids can interact in so many ways, the number of possible structures for single protein is astronomical. In 1994, structural biologists launched a biennial competition called the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP). Entrants are given amino acid sequences for about 100 proteins with as-yet-unknown structures. Some groups try to predict their structures, while others map the same structures in the lab; afterward, their results are compared. Even in CASP's early years, the predictions for small, simple proteins were on par with experimental observations. But predictions for larger, more challenging proteins lagged far behind. Not anymore. This year, an AI program created by researchers at U.K.-based DeepMind tallied a median score of 92.4 on a 100-point scale, where anything above 90 is considered as accurate as an experimentally derived structure. On the most challenging proteins, the AlphaFold program averaged 87, 25 points ahead of its closest competitor. And because contest rules require competitors to reveal enough of their methods for others to make use of them, organizers say it's only a matter of months before other groups match AlphaFold's success. — Robert F. Service Since the revolutionary genome-snipping tool known as CRISPR burst on the scene in 2012, it has given researchers new power to engineer crops and animals, stirred ethical debates, and earned a Nobel Prize—not to mention Science 's Breakthrough of the Year in 2015. Now, CRISPR is again making waves, scoring its first success in the clinic by treating two inherited blood diseases. People with beta-thalassemia have low levels of the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin protein, leading to weakness and exhaustion; those with sickle cell disease make a defective form of the protein, resulting in sickle-shaped red blood cells that block blood vessels and often cause severe pain, organ damage, and strokes. To treat three sickle cell patients, researchers harvested immature blood cells, known as blood stem cells, from each. They then used CRISPR to disable an “off” switch that—in adults—stops production of the fetal form of hemoglobin, which can counter the effects of the sickling mutation. After the patients received chemotherapy to wipe out their diseased blood stem cells, the CRISPR-treated cells were infused back into their bodies. The patients, treated up to 17 months ago, are now making plentiful fetal hemoglobin, and have not experienced the painful attacks that used to strike every few months, the companies CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals reported in December. One patient, a young mother of three, says the treatment changed her life. The companies also gave the treatment to seven patients who normally receive blood transfusions for beta-thalassemia. They haven't needed transfusions since, the companies reported in the same paper and meeting presentation. With more testing, the new treatment could rival the success of gene therapies that treat the two diseases by adding hemoglobin DNA to stem cells. But like gene therapy, the CRISPR approach requires high-tech medical care and could cost $1 million or more per patient—putting it out of reach for much of Africa, where most people with sickle cell live. — Jocelyn Kaiser More than 40 years ago, the world's leading climate scientists gathered in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to answer a simple question: How hot would Earth get if humans kept emitting greenhouse gases? Their answer, informed by rudimentary climate models, was broad: If atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) doubled from preindustrial levels, the planet would eventually warm between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, a climate sensitivity range encompassing the merely troubling and the catastrophic. Now, they've finally ruled out the mildest scenarios—and the most dire. Narrowing those bounds has taken decades of scientific advancement. Understanding how clouds trap or reflect heat has been a particular challenge. Depending on their thickness, location, and composition, clouds can amplify warming—or suppress it. Now, high-resolution cloud models, supported by satellite evidence, have shown that global warming thins low, light-blocking clouds: Hotter air dries them out and subdues the turbulence that drives their formation. Longer and better temperature records have also helped narrow the range. Studies of Earth's ancient climate, which estimate paleotemperatures and CO2 levels using ice and ocean sediment cores, suggest how greenhouse gases may have driven previous episodes of warming. And modern global warming has now gone on long enough that surface temperatures, 1.1°C hotter than in preindustrial times, can be used to more confidently project trends into the future. This year, these advances enabled 25 scientists affiliated with the World Climate Research Programme to narrow climate sensitivity to a range between 2.6°C and 3.9°C. The study rules out some of the worst-case scenarios—but it all but guarantees warming that will flood coastal cities, escalate extreme heat waves, and displace millions of people. If we're lucky, such clarity might galvanize action. Atmospheric CO2 is already at 420 parts per million—halfway to the doubling point of 560 ppm. Barring more aggressive action on climate change, humanity could reach that threshold by 2060—and lock in the foreseen warming. — Paul Voosen Everyone loves a good mystery. Take fast radio bursts (FRBs)—short, powerful flashes of radio waves from distant galaxies. For 13 years, they tantalized astronomers keen to understand their origins. One running joke said there were more theories explaining what causes FRBs than there were FRBs. (Currently, astronomers know of more than 100.) Now, cosmic sleuths have fingered a likely culprit: magnetars, neutron stars that fizzle and pop with powerful magnetic fields. Because FRBs are so fast, they must come from a small but intense energy source like a magnetar, which are formed when burned-out stars collapse to the size of a city. But although a handful of FRBs had been traced to particular galaxies, no telescope had sharp enough vision to connect them to an individual magnetar at such great distances. Then, in April, an FRB went off in the Milky Way—close enough that astronomers could examine the scene. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, a pioneering survey telescope in British Columbia responsible for the discovery of many FRBs, narrowed the source to a small area of sky, which was soon confirmed by the U.S. radio array STARE2. Orbiting observatories sensitive to higher frequencies quickly found that a known magnetar in that part of the sky, called SGR 1935+2154, was acting up at the same time, spewing out bursts of x-rays and gamma rays. Although astronomers studying FRBs believe they have finally found their perpetrator, they still don't know exactly how magnetars produce the radio bursts. They could come from close to the magnetar's surface, as magnetic field lines break and reconnect—similar to the Sun's flaring behavior. Or they could come from farther out, as shock waves slam into clouds of charged particles and generate laserlike radio pulses. Stay tuned for a sequel: Crack theorists are on the case. — Daniel Clery More than 40,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a prehistoric Pablo Picasso ventured into the depths of a cave and sketched a series of fantastic animal-headed hunters cornering wild hogs and buffaloes. The age of the paintings, pinned down just 1 year ago, makes them the earliest known figurative art made by modern humans. In 2017, when an Indonesian researcher chanced across the scene, the figures alone told him he had found something special. The animals appear to be Sulawesi warty pigs and dwarf buffaloes, both of which still live on the island. But it was the animallike features of the eight hunters, armed with spears or ropes, that captivated archaeologists. Several of the hunters seem to have long muzzles or snouts. One sports a tail. Another's mouth resembles a bird beak. It's possible the artist was depicting the hunters wearing masks or camouflage, the researchers say, but they may also represent mythical animal-human hybrids. Such hybrids appear in other ancient works of art, including a 35,000-year-old ivory figurine of a lion-man found in the German Alps. Parts of the paintings were covered in white, bumpy mineral deposits known as cave popcorn. Uranium in this popcorn decays at a fixed rate, which allowed researchers to date minerals on top of the pigment to about 44,000 years ago. The cave scene must be at least that old—about 4000 years older than any other known figurative rock art, they reported in late December 2019. It decisively unseats Europe as the first place where modern humans are known to have created figurative art. If the figures do depict mythical human-animal hunters, their creators may have already passed an important cognitive milestone: the ability to imagine beings that do not exist. That, the researchers say, forms the roots of most modern—and ancient—religions. — Michael Price Within days of a racially charged confrontation between a white dog owner and a Black birdwatcher in New York City's Central Park in late May, scientists flocked to Twitter to celebrate—and support—Black nature enthusiasts. The #BlackBirdersWeek hashtag was soon followed by others, in disciplines from neuroscience to physics, all aiming to create community among Black scientists on Twitter, Zoom, and other platforms. “We're few and far between, so having us come together as a conglomerate in one virtual space—it really helped,” says Ti'Air Riggins, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student at Michigan State University who helped organize #BlackInNeuro week. The social media events took place against the backdrop of the anguished response to police killings in the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement, and discussions within science about the need to create a more equitable, welcoming environment for people of color. Through those discussions, many scientists hoped to reach colleagues who had paid little attention to these issues in the past. “People of color across the board are struggling,” says Tanisha Williams, a botanist at Bucknell University who spearheaded #BlackBotanistsWeek. “It's a systemic problem.” Although it's too early to tell whether the events of this year will spur lasting change, many are hopeful. “This year feels different,” says Shirley Malcom, a senior adviser at AAAS (publisher of Science ) who has worked on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues since the 1970s. “All of a sudden, after George Floyd and everything else that came out after that time, you could at least get people's attention,” she says—adding that many scientists now seem more open to the idea that systemic racism is a problem in their community. “I definitely feel like our voices are being heard, and in a different way [than before],” Williams says. “But it's not going to be a quick fix … we have a long road.” — Katie Langin HIV, like all retroviruses, has a nasty feature that allows it to dodge attack: It integrates its genetic material into human chromosomes, creating “reservoirs” where it can hide, undetected by the immune system and invulnerable to antiretroviral drugs. But where it hides may make all the difference. This year, a study of 64 HIV-infected people who have been healthy for years without antiretroviral drugs reveals a link between their unusual success and where the virus has hunkered down in their genomes. Although the new understanding of these “elite controllers” won't lead directly to a cure, it opens up a novel strategy that may routinely allow other infected people to live for decades without treatment. Many studies have examined elite controllers, who make up about 0.5% of the 38 million people living with HIV. But this new work stood apart in size and scope, comparing integrated HIV in the 64 elite controllers with that in 41 HIV-infected people on treatment. HIV does best when it slots itself within genes. When the cell transcribes the genes, the integrated HIV, or “provirus,” can produce new viruses that infect other cells. If it parks in “gene deserts,” portions of chromosomes that rarely transcribe DNA, the provirus sits around like a fully functioning car stuck in a place that doesn't sell gas. The study found that in the elite controllers, 45% of functioning proviruses resided in gene deserts, compared with just 17.8% for the people on treatment. Presumably, immune responses in the elite controllers somehow cleared proviruses from the more dangerous parking spots. Now, the challenge is to figure out interventions that will train the immune systems of the vast majority of people living with HIV to behave similarly. That new insight suggests long-standing, frustrating attempts to cure people by eliminating HIV reservoirs may be too ambitious an approach. Instead, success may depend on shrinking—and then making peace with—these reservoirs, and minding the old real estate dictum of location, location, location. — Jon Cohen Scientists have spent decades searching for materials that conduct electricity without resistance at room temperature. This year they found the first one, a hydrogen- and carbon-containing compound squeezed to a pressure approaching that at the center of Earth. The discovery is setting off a hunt for room temperature superconductors that work at typical surface pressures; such materials could transform technologies and save the vast amounts of energy wasted when electricity moves through wires. Superconductivity got its start in 1911 when physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes found that a mercury wire chilled to 4.2°C above absolute zero, or 4.2 K, conducted electrons without the usual heat-producing friction. In 1986, researchers found the same was true of a family of copper oxide ceramics. Because these superconductors worked above 77 K—the temperature of liquid nitrogen—they spawned a new generation of MRI machines and particle accelerator magnets. There were hints that copper oxides might superconduct at room temperature, but they were never verified. Confirmation now comes from high-pressure physics, in which scientists smash flecks of materials between the flattened points of two diamonds at pressures millions of times higher than those at Earth's surface. With such a diamond anvil, researchers in Germany in 2019 compressed a mix of lanthanum and hydrogen to 170 gigapascals (GPa), yielding superconductivity at temperatures up to 250 K, just under the freezing point of water. This year, researchers in the United States topped that result with a hydrogen, carbon, and sulfur compound compressed to 267 GPa. It conducted without resistance to 287 K, the temperature of a chilly room. So far, the new superconductors fall apart when the pressure is released. But the same isn't true of all high-pressure materials: Diamonds born in the crushing depths of Earth, for example, survive after rising to the surface. Now, researchers hope to find a similarly long-lasting gem for their own field. — Robert F. Service Their eyes are beady and their brains are no bigger than a walnut. But two studies published this year suggest birds have startling mental powers. One reveals that part of the avian brain resembles the human neocortex, the source of human intelligence. The other shows that carrion crows are even more aware than researchers had thought—and may be capable of some conscious thought. In humans, the neocortex consists of horizontal layers laced with interconnected columns of nerve cells, which allow for complex thinking. Bird brains, in contrast, were thought to be arranged in simple clusters of nerve cells. By using a technique called 3D polarized light imaging, neuroanatomists took a closer look at the forebrain of homing pigeons and owls and found that nerves there connect both horizontally—like the layers in the neocortex—and vertically, echoing the columns seen in human brains. Another team of scientists probed this part of the brains of carrion crows—well-known for their intelligence—for clues that they are aware of what they see and do. The researchers first trained lab-raised crows to turn their heads when they saw certain sequences of lights flashing on a computer monitor. Electrodes in the crows' brains detected nerve activity between the moment the birds saw the signal and when they moved their heads. The activity developed even when the lights were barely detectable, suggesting it was not simply a response to sensory input, and it was present regardless of whether the birds reacted. The scientists think the neural chatter represents a kind of awareness—a mental representation of what the birds saw. Such “sensory consciousness” is a rudimentary form of the self-awareness that humans experience. Its presence in both birds and mammals suggests to the researchers that some form of consciousness may date back 320 million years, to our last common ancestor. — Elizabeth Pennisi

> Science's COVID-19 coverage is supported by the Pulitzer Center. In a normal summer, Appledore Island, a 39-hectare outcrop 12 kilometers off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, becomes a classroom. Students from high school to graduate level live in close quarters, eat in a communal dining hall, and work shoulder to shoulder to explore the biology of the shore and waters in 18 courses organized by the Shoals Marine Laboratory. But this summer, with the pandemic surging, students have stayed home. Instead, a skeleton staff on Appledore is streaming field trips and dissections of fish and invertebrates and setting up cameras to gather data for students. Rather than leading students around the island, coastal restoration ecologist Gregg Moore from the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham, hauls a backpack full of equipment: “a dual modem with two different cellular carriers, a signal-boosting directional antenna, and a large DC power source,” he says. The equipment allows him to teach 12 remote students—twice the course's usual enrollment—basic techniques of coastal ecology. Moore's is just one of hundreds of lab and field courses forced online by COVID-19—“a seismic shift for those who were not already involved in distance or online education,” says Martin Storksdieck, a science education researcher at Oregon State University, Corvallis. Some researchers worry students will miss out on certain practical and problem-solving skills and won't be able to judge whether the hands-on work of a scientist is a good fit for them. But instructors are developing high-tech ways to simulate the field and lab experiences. “I would say [these courses] are not virtual,” says Jennifer Seavey, director of the Shoals lab. “They are real.” And some advantages are emerging. By lowering geographical and financial barriers, Seavey says, “Virtual field courses are democratizing fieldwork.” The shift has taken ingenuity. “Professors must get creative and use a combination of what is available,” including online videos and free or commercially available online labs, says Mildred Pointer, a physiologist at Howard University who is working on a fall course in general biology. No single tool meets all their needs, Pointer says. As the pandemic gained momentum, emails flew among the leaders of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. Many U.S. geology majors must take a “capstone” field course to graduate. The cancellation of more than three-quarters of these courses jeopardized graduation for many majors. So the association invited instructors to develop learning objectives that did not depend on students doing fieldwork. It also compiled online exercises to help the 29 field courses that have moved online this summer. Lessons range from “Orienteering in Minecraft” to “Geology of Yosemite Valley,” which includes a 43-stop Google Earth tour with photos and embedded text. Like Moore, geoscientist Jim Handschy wanted to give remote students “as close to the real experience as possible.” He runs Indiana University's Judson Mead Geologic Field Station in Montana, which had enrolled 60 students before classes were canceled in March. He and a few instructors visited each outcrop in their course plan, filmed the rocks and landscape, and captured magnified views of samples. Each week, the class delves deeper into the rock layers and their history. For their final project, students digitally map a 3100-hectare landscape. Shannon Dulin, a geologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who just finished teaching a field course, sees the value of learning how to survey a landscape without setting foot on it. On their class evaluations, her students said they gained unexpected skills. “And these are skills they are going to need on the job,” she adds, as geologists are increasingly being asked to evaluate sites they don't visit. In other fields, hands-on learning takes place in labs. Typically, students work in pairs and share equipment, “so there are a lot of issues about virus transmission,” says Heather Lewandowski, a physicist at the University of Colorado (CU), Boulder. At her university this fall, lab exercises as diverse as building an electrical circuit or analyzing solar flare data will most likely be completely remote. Luckily, physics already had a foot in the virtual lab world—especially at CU. There, back in 2002, Nobel laureate Carl Wieman developed the Physics Education Technology (PhET) Interactive Simulations project to provide “games” that teach students basic physics concepts. The PhET web portal now has 106 physics-based simulations and another 50 or so for other disciplines. It became a go-to place this spring for faculty shifting to online teaching; traffic increased fivefold, says Director Katherine Perkins. In addition, several universities have adopted a handheld device called the iOLab that rents for $50 a semester. With it, students can measure magnetism, light intensity, acceleration, temperature, gravity, and atmospheric pressure, and do basic physics experiments at home. “They like that we trust them and are not just giving them instructions,” says iOLab inventor and physicist Mats Selen at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lewandowski and her colleagues surveyed physics instructors and students about their experiences and posted their findings on arXiv, the physics preprint server, on 2 July. Respondents said online labs work best when projects are open-ended, and online class meetings are kept small. They complained about technical difficulties, students having unequal access to the internet and materials, and longer prep times for both students and instructors. But they reported they could meet most key learning objectives, Lewandowski says, even though “there are lots of things we can't replicate in remote experiments,” such as such as building vacuum chambers or troubleshooting equipment. Some institutions decided this spring that virtual just wouldn't do. The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, simply canceled its summer courses. “MBL courses are world-renowned for the intensity of the hands-on nature of the lab work,” says Director Nipam Patel. Students spend long hours with famous faculty and do their own projects using organisms collected locally. “We felt that it would be exceedingly difficult to replicate these experiences as a virtual lab course.” Other institutions will try for a mix of in-person and virtual labs. Suely Black, chemistry chair at Norfolk State University, expects only half of his students will be in lab each week this fall, while the other half will be in online classes analyzing data and writing reports. “The crisis has caused us to more critically evaluate what activities students must experience in the lab setting,” he says. Similarly, this fall, organic chemistry students at the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, will rotate into the lab in small groups, giving each a taste of the hands-on experience. Personal protection equipment is standard for this course and all the work is done in hoods with excellent air exchange, so “they are really fully protected,” says UM biochemist Kathleen Nolta. Storksdieck, an advocate of online learning, questions the value of smelling fumes or using a pipette. “We have to ask whether all the hands-on taught so far was all that great,” he says. Dominique Durand, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University, says after he put a master's program in biomedical engineering completely online 5 years ago, he concluded that solving problems was more important than hands-on experience. And University of California, Santa Cruz, ecologist Erika Zavaleta thinks virtual courses will open fieldwork to far more students. “There are things you can do online that you can't do in person,” she adds, such as visiting more places than possible by driving. Even so, Handschy laments that his geology students will not have the 12-hour-a-day immersive interactions with each other and faculty that past classes have had. Natalie White, a rising junior at UNH who took Moore's course on Appledore last year, agrees: “You don't have all the time in between when you walk around the island and can ask impromptu questions.” Appledore Island is the source of some her fondest memories. “I think they are missing out on the community.”

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 2001 Fall Symposium Series November 2-4, 2001 at the Sea Crest Conference Center in North Falmouth, Massachusetts. The topics of the five symposia in the 2001 Fall Symposia Series were (1) Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data in Single and Multiple Robot Systems, (2) Emotional and Intelligent II: The Tangled Knot of Social Cognition, (3) Intent Inference for Collaborative Tasks, (4) Negotiation Methods for Autonomous Cooperative Systems, and (5) Using Uncertainty within Computation. This article contains brief reports of those five symposia.