Claire chatted to Michelle Lu from Vsim Technology about using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills. Michelle Lu is co-founder and CEO of Vsim Technology . She was previously a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, where she and her co-founder created the world's first end-to-end GPU-accelerated reinforcement learning (RL) framework, Isaac Gym, which set the template for how modern GPU-accelerated simulation-based RL is performed in robotics. In 2022, Michelle and her co-founder left NVIDIA to create Vsim, driven to solve the limitations that plague simulation-based robotics AI: efficiency, scalability and the sim-to-real gap. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

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A company called Fortell made an A.I.-powered device that tries to tune out background noise in real time. Ask Fortell's test subject, Steve Martin. In 2023, the comedian, actor, writer, and banjo virtuoso Steve Martin was walking through SoHo, followed closely by two men holding a laptop. The laptop was connected by an Ethernet cable to a 3-D-printed plastic box, and the box was connected by wires to Martin's head. A passerby recognized him and asked whether the benefits of celebrity included having assistants literally tethered to him.

A California jury has tossed out Elon Musk's high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman. In a unanimous verdict, the case was thrown out because Musk had filed his lawsuit after a statute of limitations to bring such claims had expired. Musk had accused Altman of breaching a non-profit contract by shifting the ChatGPT-maker to a for-profit company after Musk donated $38m (£28.5m). Musk had argued Altman deceived him by accepting his money and then reneging on OpenAI's original non-profit mission to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the benefit of humanity. Jurors spent three weeks viewing internal correspondence and hearing testimony, and arrived at a verdict on Monday after deliberating for roughly two hours.

One of iRobot's co-founders is now making weird little robot companions One of iRobot's co-founders is now making weird little robot companions Colin Angle, the guy who co-founded iRobot and helped put robot vacuums in millions of homes, just unveiled his new company and forthcoming product. The new venture is called Familiar Machines & Magic and it's making robots for companionship, and not for sweeping floors. They are called Familiars and are being described as physically embodied AI systems to perceive, adapt and interact with people in ways that feel natural and consistent. That sounds like a pet, but with loyalty and love replaced by algorithms. The next era of robotics is not just about dexterity or humanoid form -- it's about machines that can build and sustain human connection, he said at Future of Everything conference .

Who doesn't want a camera in their toilet? Image of the Throne Toilet Computer perched on the side of a toilet. Throne has rocked up to CES 2026 to show off its forthcoming toilet computer which uses computer vision to study your poop. It hangs from the side of the bowl and has a camera and microphone to track bowel motions and urination and offer feedback. It was co-founded by (activity tracker) Whoop co-founder John Capodilupo, who explained the hardware is designed to understand what your base state is to be able to identify when you fall out of that pattern.

Proven methods for teaching the readers who struggle most have been known for decades. Why do we often fail to use them? "There's a window of opportunity to intervene," Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, said. "You don't want to let that go." In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include "the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data" and "Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity." I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she'd finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment. Caroline's academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. "I can't remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless," she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to "the end of a row" she couldn't remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia. Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it's more complicated than that.

Ben & Jerry's brand could be destroyed, says co-founder Ben & Jerry's will be destroyed as a brand if it remains with parent company Magnum, the company's co-founder Ben Cohen has told the BBC. His remarks are the latest in a long-running spat between the ice cream brand and its parent company over its ability to express its social activism and the continued independence of its board. The comments came on the day that the Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC) started trading on the European stock market - spinning off from owner Unilever. A spokesperson for Magnum said the firm wanted to build and strengthen Ben & Jerry's powerful, non-partisan values-based position in the world. Ben & Jerry's was sold to Unilever in 2000 in a deal which allowed it to retain an independent board and the right to make decisions about its social mission.

Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried? Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014. It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine. A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road.

Meghan Daley is a NASA project manager who leads teams to develop and integrate simulations for robotic operations to prepare astronauts on the ISS and beyond. We'll be spotlighting five honorees each week throughout October