The ocean is big, and our attempts to understand it are still largely surface-deep. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, around 80 percent of the big blue is "unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored." Ships are the primary way to collect information about the seas, but they're costly to send out frequently. More recently, robotic buoys called Argo floats have been drifting with the currents, diving up and down to take a variety of measurements at depths up to 6,500 feet. But new aquatic robots from a lab at Caltech could rove deeper and take on more tailored underwater missions.

Wind-generated electricity has expanded greatly over the past decade. In the U.S., for example, by 2018 wind was generating 6.6% of utility-scale electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The criteria for efficient design and reliable operation of the familiar horizontal-axis wind turbines have been well established through decades of experience, leading to ever-larger structures over time, both to intercept more wind and to reach faster winds higher up. As these gargantuan turbines are assembled into large wind farms, often spread over uneven terrain, complex aerodynamic interactions between them have become increasingly important. To address this issue, researchers have proposed protocols that slightly reorient individual turbines to improve the output of others downwind, and they are working with wind farm operators to assess their real-life performance.

WASHINGTON – It may sound more like science fiction than science fact, but researchers have created bionic jellyfish by embedding microelectronics into these ubiquitous marine invertebrates with hopes to deploy them to monitor and explore the world's oceans. A small prosthetic enabled the jellyfish to swim three times faster and more efficiently without causing any apparent stress to the animals, which have no brain, central nervous system or pain receptors, the researchers said. The next steps will be to test ways to control where the jellyfish go and develop tiny sensors that could perform long-term measurements of ocean conditions such as temperature, salinity, acidity, oxygen levels, nutrients and microbial communities. They even envision installing miniscule cameras. "It's very sci-fi futuristic," said Stanford University bioengineer Nicole Xu, co-author of the research published this week in the journal Science Advances.

New hero Yrel, announced today as part of the Echoes of Alterac release for Heroes of the Storm. Three years ago, Blizzard Entertainment took the heroes from Warcraft and StarCraft and Diablo, dumped them into three lanes, and yelled, "Fight!" Heroes of the Storm marked its third anniversary as Blizzard's massive online battle arena (MOBA) game this weekend, and as part of the festivities, I caught up with game director Alan Dabiri to chat about the state of the Nexus. It hasn't always been a smooth lane (we're looking at you, Hanamura map) and Heroes has sometimes been overshadowed by its bigger brothers in the Blizzard stable of games, but the title has come a long way in three years. For the first time in its history, it recently started launching bits and pieces of its own original story. That's crucial in a company where every game now has its own narrative. In much the same way that Blizzard's Hearthstone started as a digital card game that happened to involve Warcraft characters, then evolved into a game with single-player stories and an impact on intellectual property parent World of Warcraft, Heroes is taking the first step into being a fully-fledged IP in its own right. From map mod to full game: Heroes went from a proof of concept, showing how DOTA could exist as a StarCraft II map, to an actual game. Will the heroes still come from Blizzard's other games? But how did they get here, and why are they fighting? Blizzard's storytelling teams are finally ready to start answering that question, and the game design teams are taking what they learned from Hanamura and other missteps. It's a good time to be a Hero.

Here's a critter that would be a showstopper in your aquarium: By layering rat heart cells over a gold skeleton, scientists have built tiny swimming artificial stingrays that can be driven and guided by light. These little ray-bots, described in the journal Science, may offer insight into building soft robotics, studying the human heart -- and perhaps even building an artificial one from scratch. Senior author Kit Parker, a Harvard bioengineer, first got the idea for these tiny ray-bots when his young daughter tried to pet a stingray at an aquarium and it quickly and gracefully evaded her hand. Parker watched the rippling body, which reminded him of the stringy cord-like trabeculated muscle on the endocardial surface of the heart, and a thought struck him: He could probably build something that moved like that. "It kinda hit me like a thunderbolt," he said.