Exploring new approaches to improve the capabilities and accuracy of robots, a team of researchers in Singapore has turned to an unexpected source: plants. Robots have been dispatched to move cars, lift weighty inventory in warehouses and assist in construction projects. But what if you need to delicately lift a tiny object 1/50th of an inch? To accomplish that task, the Singapore team turned to a Venus flytrap, one of nature's more fascinating plants. The flytrap, a native of North Carolina, contains tiny hairs on two leaf lobes that, when stimulated by an insect, shut tight and slowly devour the prey.

Fortnite got a huge update this morning, and not everything contained inside was right there on the surface. We also got a heap of new cosmetic items that should be making their way to the shop over the coming weeks, and Epic continues to bring an excellent mic of skins both in and outside of the Season 4 theme. There's two in there that feel like they might be connected to a limited time mode, as well. The skins appear to have been first mined by DieBuddies, some dataminers that often get to this stuff first. Flytrap/Ventura: Ventura is clearly the female version of the Venturion skin, one of the more explicitly superhero-themed skins that have made their way into the game this Season.

There's no denying that human intelligence makes our species stand out from other life on Earth. Our modern brain is an evolutionary feat more than 520 million years in the making, and it is the key to everything that makes us human. But while human brains are extraordinary, we don't have a monopoly on intelligence. "Reserving the term'cognition' for typically human problem-solving abilities ... and dismissing simpler behavior as mechanistic, reflexive, and hard-wired does not do justice to the behavioral complexities of even the simplest of organisms," University of Gronigen psychologist Marc van Duijn and his colleagues write in a widely cited 2006 paper on cognition. You might think of tool use as an exclusively human activity, but macaques on an island off Thailand have learned to use stones as tools to shuck oysters.

Snap! – and the robot's got it. An artificial Venus flytrap can seize items hundreds of times heavier than itself when they come within reach. Using a combination of smart materials and optical fibres, the artificial flytrap can sense when something should be grabbed. The artificial flytrap is only a couple of millimetres wide and less than a centimetre tall. The leaves are made of a light-responsive material containing small molecular switches that change shape when hit by light.

The Venus flytrap may be known for its jaws of death, but the carnivorous plant has inspired a gentle device. Engineers have developed a soft, gripping device that can sense and pick up objects up to 100 bigger than itself, mimicking the ferocious plant. And the simple soft object, capable of identifying its targets, could be used to handle delicate items autonomously one day which could transform manufacturing. Venus flytraps recognise their prey using touch-sensitive trigger hairs located on the trap's inner surface. When stimulated, these hairs generate an electric signal that is transmitted to the plant.