Inflatable squishy tubes could be used to build soft robots that move when air is pushed through them. Robotic hands made from metal frequently end up crushing delicate objects like fruit when trying to pick them up, so researchers often experiment with making them out of gentler materials. Pierre-Thomas Brun at Princeton University and his colleagues have found that soft, inflatable tubes may just do the trick. The team filled various moulds with a rubber-like material called polyvinyl siloxane that starts off liquid but becomes solid and elastic as time passes.

OpenAI fired its charismatic chief executive, Sam Altman, on 17 November -- but has now reinstated him.Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty OpenAI -- the company behind the blockbuster artificial intelligence (AI) bot ChatGPT -- has been consumed by frenzied changes for almost a week. On 17 November, the company fired its charismatic chief executive, Sam Altman. Five days, and much drama, later, OpenAI announced that Altman would return with an overhaul of the company's board. The debacle has thrown the spotlight on an ongoing debate about how commercial competition is shaping the development of AI systems, and how quickly AI can be deployed ethically and safely. "The push to retain dominance is leading to toxic competition. It's a race to the bottom," says Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a policy-research organization based in New York City.

The artificial-intelligence model that powers ChatGPT can create superficially plausible scientific data sets.Credit: Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Researchers have used the technology behind the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to create a fake clinical-trial data set to support an unverified scientific claim. In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November1, the authors used GPT-4 -- the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs -- paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated -- wrongly -- that one treatment is better than the other. "Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported by real original data, and it is also opposite or in the other direction compared to the evidence that are available," says study co-author Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy. The ability of AI to fabricate convincing data adds to concern among researchers and journal editors about research integrity.

His experience was a sign of how self-driving taxis are increasingly starting to take a toll on city services. In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where passengers can hail autonomous vehicles, the cars have slowed down emergency response times, caused accidents, increased congestion and added to the workloads of local officials, said police officers, firefighters and other city employees. In San Francisco, more than 600 self-driving vehicle incidents were documented from June 2022 to June 2023, according to the city's Municipal Transportation Agency. After one episode where a driverless car from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, ran over and dragged a pedestrian, California regulators ordered the company to suspend its service last month. Kyle Vogt, Cruise's chief executive, resigned on Sunday.

The founder of General Motors-owned Cruise has stepped down less than a month after the driverless car company paused operations after an accident and the loss of permission to operate in California. Kyle Vogt did not give a reason for his departure from the company that he started in 2013 before it was bought by the US automotive manufacturer General Motors in 2016. San Francisco-based Cruise is seen as one of the most advanced autonomous driving companies in the world, and it had started charging passengers for journeys in some US cities. However, it paused all of its driverless cars on 26 October after California regulators revoked its licence to transport passengers without a driver after an accident on 2 October. The company recalled nearly 1,000 vehicles to update their software after the incident.

To overcome this, a team has combined inkjet printing with an error-correction system guided by machine vision, to allow them to print sophisticated multi-material objects. They used this method to make a bio-inspired robotic hand that combines soft and rigid plastics to make mechanical bones, ligaments, and tendons, as well as a pump based on a mammalian heart. Citizen-scientists help identify an astronomical object that blurs the line between asteroid and comet, and how a Seinfeld episode helped scientists to distinguish the brain regions involved in understanding and appreciating humour. Type 2 diabetes affects hundreds of millions of people around the world and represents a significant burden on healthcare systems. But behaviour change programmes -- also known as lifestyle interventions -- could potentially play a large role in preventing people from developing type 2 diabetes. This week in Nature a new paper assesses how effective this kind of intervention might be.

Last month, educational psychologist Ronald Beghetto asked a group of graduate students and teaching professionals to discuss their work in an unusual way. As well as talking to each other, they conversed with a collection of creativity-focused chatbots that Beghetto had designed and that will soon be hosted on a platform run by his institute, Arizona State University (ASU). The bots are based on the same artificial-intelligence (AI) technology that powers the famous and conversationally fluent ChatGPT. Beghetto prompts the bots to take on various personas to encourage creativity -- for example, by deliberately challenging someone's assumptions. One student discussed various dissertation topics with the chatbots. Lecturers talked about how to design classes.

A robotic chemist working autonomously in a lab has developed an oxygen-producing catalyst from minerals found in Martian meteorites. The same procedure could one day be used to provide oxygen for astronauts on Mars. Sending supplies to a future Martian colony by spacecraft would be extremely expensive, which makes producing materials with Mars's natural resources an appealing option. But this can be difficult because there are fewer available elements on Mars than on Earth. Yi Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues have developed a fully automated robot chemist.

In this PWC study, 59% of leaders said they will invest in new technologies, and 46% say they will invest in generative AI specifically in the next 12 to 18 months. The most significant hurdle is adequate cloud bandwidth/computing power to accommodate usage and enable scalability. That means coming to terms with how much money can be spent on new generative AI systems and generative AI enablement. Try reading any tech or business article these days without finding a mention. However, the computing and infrastructure costs of running generative AI models in the cloud are a barrier for many businesses.

A robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday. The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot's sensor operations at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province. The industrial robot, which was lifting boxes filled with bell peppers and placing them on a pallet, appears to have malfunctioned and identified the man as a box, Yonhap reported, citing the police. The robotic arm pushed the man's upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap. He was transferred to the hospital but died later, the report said.