A global audience of a half-billion gamers have gotten to know the axolotl, which largely cluster in the canals around Mexico City and look like little dragons with a goofy smile. The videogame "Fortnite" trotted out axolotl characters in 2020, and "Minecraft" followed suit last summer. Roblox, a platform with millions of user-made games, has dozens of axolotl-centric ones, including "Axolotl Tycoon" and "Axolotl Paradise." Axolotls appear in "Adopt Me!," one of the most-played games on Roblox. All of the exposure has spawned axolotl memes, YouTube videos, coloring books and nonfungible tokens.

Pilot program's main goal to deter drivers from speeding past school buses when stop-arm is out The latest breaking updates, delivered straight to your email inbox. Pilot program's main goal to deter drivers from speeding past school buses when stop-arm is out A pilot program at the Sacramento City Unified School District is hoping to improve student safety through the use of artificial intelligence cameras on school buses. The District has partnered with company BusPatrol to put cameras on five school buses to deter drivers from speeding past buses when their stop-arm is out, which is a violation of law. "We use an AI engine named Ava to be able to automatically detect vehicles that illegally pass stopped school buses," BusPatrol CEO Jean Souliere said. Souliere said the cameras on the side of the buses take pictures of the license plates of cars that keep driving.

Millions of ESPN Fantasy Football players are rolling into week 13 of the NFL hoping to survive injuries and bye weeks on their way to the playoffs. But starting last season, players could also count on the trusty advice of Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence platform, in times of need. ESPN's Daniel Dopp, co-host of "The Fantasy Show with Matthew Berry" on ESPN, sat down with IBM Master Inventor Aaron Baughman at the IBM Innovation Lab in New York City to discuss Watson's foray into the arcane science of fantasy football. "It helps to have a compromise between the heart and the brain. We trained Watson on millions of fantasy football stories, blog posts and videos. We taught it to develop a scoring range for thousands of players with their upsides and their downsides. And we taught it to estimate the chances a player will exceed their upside or fall below the downside," Baughman said.

Whenever the Kingdom of Hyrule has been in danger, a young boy named Link has risen to the challenge of saving the land from all manner of pixelated evil. The latest chapter of Link's ongoing quest in the video game series The Legend of Zelda is about to be released. And while the graphics have improved since the 1980s, Link is still an empty vessel for players to inhabit, only facing danger with a push of the joystick. Videogame heroes take up a larger amount of people's imaginations today than they ever have before. In the cultural economy they are as big a force as the heroes in books and movies.

The lightest material on Earth now packs a powerful punch. Scientists from Texas and around the world have created a material that, by density, is lighter than air yet, when electrified, instantly and powerfully contracts. Their work is detailed in this week's issue of the journal Science. "These artificial muscles are very lightweight and can do wonderful things," said Ray Baughman, the study author from the University of Texas at Dallas. While the artificial muscle is unlikely to be used in humans or prosthetic limbs, Baughman says "these sheets of carbon nanotubes ... are of great practical interest for LEDs, solar cells, and other applications."