Twenty-five years from today, Santa Ana winds will scream through Los Angeles on a dry autumn morning, turning a small hillside campfire into a deadly, fast-moving blaze. At that moment, the city will spring into action. Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis -- or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone. Satellites will team up with anemometers, pairing live aerial footage with wind patterns to tell firefighters exactly where the fire is going.

Forests offer essential resources and services to humanity, yet preserving and restoring them presents challenges, particularly due to the limited availability of actionable data, especially in hard-to-reach areas like forest canopies. Accessibility continues to pose a challenge for biologists collecting data in forest environments, often requiring them to invest significant time and energy in climbing trees to place sensors. This operation not only consumes resources but also exposes them to danger. Efforts in robotics have been directed towards accessing the tree canopy using robots. A swarm of drones has showcased autonomous navigation through the canopy, maneuvering with agility and evading tree collisions, all aimed at mapping the area and collecting data. However, relying solely on free-flying drones has proven insufficient for data collection. Flying drones within the canopy generates loud noise, disturbing animals and potentially corrupting the data. Additionally, commercial drones often have limited autonomy for dexterous tasks where aerial physical interaction could be required, further complicating data acquisition efforts. Aerial deployed sensor placement methods such as bio-gliders and sensor shooting have proven effective for data collection within the lower canopy. However, these methods face challenges related to retrieving the data and sensors, often necessitating human intervention.

Netflix has an excellent international library, including German sci-fi gem Dark -- one of the best series on Netflix full stop. This adult animated anthology series spans a range of genres, with plenty of episodes hitting the Black Mirror comparison button. Robots in a post-apocalyptic city, farmers piloting mech suits and a space mission gone wrong all pop up in the first season. While the episodes can be hit and miss (some have been criticized for their treatment of women), you'll find plenty of thought-provoking and impressive animation. This apocalyptic sci-fi from Belgium will probably turn you off from flying any time soon.

New research suggests combining educational topics and research disciplines to help researchers breathe life into lifelike intelligent robots. The comment piece suggests that teaching materials science, mechanical engineering, computer science, biology and chemistry as a combined discipline could help students develop the skills they need to create lifelike artificially intelligent (AI) robots as researchers. Known as Physical AI, these robots would be designed to look and behave like humans or other animals while possessing intellectual capabilities normally associated with biological organisms. These robots could in future help humans at work and in daily living, performing tasks that are dangerous for humans, and assisting in medicine, caregiving, security, building and industry. Although machines and biological beings exist separately, the intelligence capabilities of the two have not yet been combined.

Gazing up at the night sky in a rural area, you'll probably see the shining moon surrounded by stars. If you're lucky, you might spot the furthest thing visible with the naked eye – the Andromeda galaxy. When the Department of Energy's (DOE) Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera at the National Science Foundation's Vera Rubin Observatory turns on in 2022, it will take photos of 37 billion galaxies and stars over the course of a decade. The output from this huge telescope will swamp researchers with data. In those 10 years, the LSST Camera will take 2,000 photos for each patch of the Southern Sky it covers.

Gazing up at the night sky in a rural area, you'll probably see the shining moon surrounded by stars. If you're lucky, you might spot the furthest thing visible with the naked eye--the Andromeda galaxy. When the Department of Energy's (DOE) Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera at the National Science Foundation's Vera Rubin Observatory turns on in 2022, it will take photos of 37 billion galaxies and stars over the course of a decade. The output from this huge telescope will swamp researchers with data. In those 10 years, the LSST Camera will take 2,000 photos for each patch of the Southern Sky it covers.

There are a lot of serious topics covered in Altered Carbon, a new science fiction series from Netflix. It delves into misogynistic power structures and the nature of identity. It touches on just how much of our morality is driven by the fact that we die and what might happen if death suddenly stopped being an endpoint and, instead, became a minor stopgap in an ultimately immortal life. But that is not what I'm here to talk to you about. Because while watching Altered Carbon -- even the stuff I didn't like all that much -- my primary critical reaction was, "This is so RAD!!!!" Imagine me sitting in the back of eighth-grade study hall, filling my notebook with scrawled images from this show (that my parents don't know I've seen, because if they did, my Netflix consumption would be seriously questioned), occasionally clicking over my four-color pen to red to write the word "rad" in all caps in the margins.

Altered Carbon, a maximalist cyberpunk series arriving on Netflix this Friday, is the story of Takeshi Kovacs, a half-Japanese, half-Slavic fighting machine who, after being unconscious for 250 years--more on the logistics shortly--is revived in the body of a white cop. This is a particularly complicated version of whitewashing, the Hollywood habit of casting white actors in historically nonwhite roles, insofar as Altered Carbon is based on a novel by Richard K. Morgan, in which an Asian man is stuck in the body of a white man and not happy about it. "I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me," Kovacs says in the book, after seeing his new visage for the first time. Altered Carbon is not Ghost in the Shell, the boondoggle of a film in which a (cybernetic) Asian character was played by Scarlett Johansson. In flashbacks, Kovacs is played by the Asian actor Will Yun Lee, and in future seasons the character may be played by a nonwhite actor.

We've long been used to talking to our technology. Apple's Siri first launched six years ago, after all. But industry experts say that entirely voice-controlled gadgets, like Amazon's Echo smart speakers, are getting us more comfortable than ever with bossing around our tech. The Echo works like this: You put one in your home and connect it to your Wi-Fi network. Then, after a bit of customization, you're able to order it to do certain tasks using one of several "wake words," like "Alexa."

Flying can be exhausting when you're a tiny, bee-sized robot, but researchers from Harvard have created a new way to let little winged bots take a break. Using static electricity, robots no bigger than a quarter can latch onto the underside of any flat surfaces, a process that uses between 500 and 1,000 times less power than flying. In a study published in this week's issue of Science, researchers say this new perching ability could be key to creating insect-sized aerial robots that can help with a long-term observational tasks -- traffic control, to search-and-rescue. The mechanism was developed by researchers from Harvard for the RoboBee: a tiny flying robot first unveiled by a team from the university in 2013. The RoboBee weighs just 0.08 grams (that's 31 times lighter than a penny), and has a pair of tiny wings that can beat up to 120 times per second.