Warning: This advice may cause you to rethink your pharmacy purchases. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Whether shouted at you by an angry schoolteacher or said as a gentle reminder by a cautious parent, "Clean your ears" is something most of us know we should be doing regularly. That's why it's so shocking that so few of us know how to actually do it. Case in point: According to industry analysts, the cotton swab market grew from $795 million in 2024 to $828 million in 2025, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 3.8 percent.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Sweat stains are a white t-shirt's worst enemy. Unfortunately, that notorious fabric yellowing is often unavoidable due to the combination of oleic acid, squalene, and other organic compounds found in your skin oil and sweat. Factor in a chance encounter with natural food pigments like the carotene and lycopene found in tomatoes and oranges, and it's probably only a matter of time before you'll need to break out the bleach or hydrogen peroxide. Even then, the results are often unsatisfactory for your (once) vibrant white shirts.

Anyone who has tried to keep porch plants or a home garden alive through seasonal changes knows it's a task easier said than done. Abrupt temperature changes--like cold snaps--and prolonged periods of drought can stress plants, disrupting their normal biochemistry. If not addressed quickly enough, those stresses can eventually kill the plant. Disappointed growers often only see the tell-tale signs (like shriveling or browning leaves) after it's too late. But a new plant-wearable device developed by researchers at the American Chemical Society could offer an early warning system. The wearable, detailed this week in the journal ACS Sensors, comes in the form of an electromagnetic sensor attached directly to plant leaves.

As AI agents are increasingly adopted to collaborate on complex objectives, ensuring the security of autonomous multi-agent systems becomes crucial. We develop simulations of agents collaborating on shared objectives to study these security risks and security trade-offs. We focus on scenarios where an attacker compromises one agent, using it to steer the entire system toward misaligned outcomes by corrupting other agents. In this context, we observe infectious malicious prompts - the multi-hop spreading of malicious instructions. To mitigate this risk, we evaluated several strategies: two "vaccination" approaches that insert false memories of safely handling malicious input into the agents' memory stream, and two versions of a generic safety instruction strategy. While these defenses reduce the spread and fulfillment of malicious instructions in our experiments, they tend to decrease collaboration capability in the agent network. Our findings illustrate potential trade-off between security and collaborative efficiency in multi-agent systems, providing insights for designing more secure yet effective AI collaborations.

We report a closed-loop control system for paramagnetic catalytically self-propelled Janus microrobots. We achieve this control by employing electromagnetic coils that direct the magnetic field in a desired orientation to steer the microrobots. The microrobots move due to the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, during which they align themselves to the magnetic torques applied to them. Because the angle between their direction of motion and their magnetic orientation is a priori unknown, an algorithm is used to determine this angular offset and adjust the magnetic field appropriately. The microrobots are located using real-time particle tracking that integrates with a video camera. A target location or desired trajectory can be drawn by the user for the microrobots to follow.

MIT chemical engineers have shown that specialized particles can oscillate together, demonstrating a phenomenon known as emergent behavior. Taking advantage of a phenomenon known as emergent behavior in the microscale, MIT engineers have designed simple microparticles that can collectively generate complex behavior, much the same way that a colony of ants can dig tunnels or collect food. Working together, the microparticles can generate a beating clock that oscillates at a very low frequency. These oscillations can then be harnessed to power tiny robotic devices, the researchers showed. "In addition to being interesting from a physics point of view, this behavior can also be translated into an on-board oscillatory electrical signal, which can be very powerful in microrobotic autonomy. There are a lot of electrical components that require such an oscillatory input," says Jingfan Yang, a recent MIT PhD recipient and one of the lead authors of the new study.

Many a middle school science teacher has dripped a few drops of potassium iodide into hydrogen peroxide and watched the delight of their students as a volcano of foam erupted from the container. This experiment is often the way young people first learn about catalysts as something that that can induce a chemical reaction. But catalysts can make more than foam. As those young people grow into young scientists, they learn that catalysis--the acceleration of a chemical reaction by a catalyst--is a key process in the creation of just about everything. From the plastics that make up our medical equipment, to the gasoline in our cars, to the paint that colors our homes--none of these could exist without catalysts.

Violence has been the sire of all the world's values," wrote poet Robinson Jeffers in 1940. "What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine the fleet limbs of the antelope? What but fear winged the birds, and hunger jeweled with such eyes the great goshawk's head?" We've taken these metaphors for evolution to heart, reading them to mean that life is a race to kill or be killed. "Darwinian" stands in for "cutthroat," "survival of the fittest" signifies survival of the ruthless.

While the current generation of industrial robots is primarily made of metal, the research community has been getting interested in the potential for soft-bodied robots. These have a number of advantages, such as being easy to customize via 3D printing and providing a flexibility that lets them squeeze through tight spaces. Many of the research demonstrations created so far, however, have required some compromises. For some iterations, this has meant the control hardware and power sources have been kept separate, connected to the robot via a tether. For other attempts, this has meant the final product is a mixture of hard and soft pieces.

As more of our lives are reliant upon mobile electronics, there is an ever-growing risk of their delicate circuitry being damaged by knocks and bumps. But engineers have developed swarms of tiny autonomous molecular'robots' that can repair broken circuits that are too small for the human eye to see. The technology could help to extend the life of electronics, allowing expensive mobile phones, laptops and tablets to continue working for longer. The molecular'robots' are propelled along electronic circuits until they find an area that is damaged where they congregate to restore conductivity. The nanobots mimic the platelets found in blood, sensing a wound and aggregating at that spot to'heal' the damage.