AS A sci-fi fan, you learn not to dwell on the films that could have been. Whether it's Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade Dune, Guillermo del Toro's cancelled take on At the Mountains of Madness, or the versions of Return of the Jedi that Davids Lynch and Cronenberg could have made, it's best not to torture yourself over cinematic what-ifs. That's why I had given up hope of there being a new instalment of the most underrated sci-fi film franchise of the 21st century so far. Though well received by critics and audiences alike, none of the four films have won Oscars or seem to have made much of an impact on pop culture. But then, earlier this month, we got confirmation that a fifth movie was on the way.

'Unlike any other species, most humans will burn themselves repeatedly over their lifetime.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Humanity's relationship with fire is unique across all of evolutionary history . Learning to harness the power of flame is arguably our most monumental technological breakthrough as a species--one that allowed to flourish across the planet. But fire is not without its inherent dangers .

The endangered pygmy slow loris is the only known venomous primate on Earth. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. As 2025 drew to a close, the Bronx Zoo in New York welcomed one of the most adorable animals you could imagine into the world: a pygmy slow loris (). In the picture shared by the zoo, the tiny endangered primate baby stares out with its giant dark eyes so intensely you'd think it was born with its eyes open. Indeed, that's exactly how slow lorises come out--as well as completely covered in fur.

Bathing can change the primates' parasites and gut microbes. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When the temperatures plunge and snow falls, it's understandable to envy a snow monkey soaking in a steaming hot spring. Officially called Japanese macaques (), the primates are well known for taking advantage of the warm waters during snowy winters. While the hot water helps keep their bodies toasty in parts of Japan that can be covered with feet of snow for months at a time, there may be more to this unique behavior than meets the eye.

Non-human primates are our closest living relatives, and analyzing their behavior is central to research in cognition, evolution, and conservation. Computer vision could greatly aid this research, but existing methods often rely on human-centric pretrained models and focus on single datasets, which limits generalization. W e address this limitation by shifting from a model-centric to a data-centric approach and introduce PriVi, a large-scale primate-centric video pretraining dataset. PriVi contains 424 hours of curated video, combining 174 hours from behavioral research across 11 settings with 250 hours of diverse web-sourced footage, assembled through a scalable data cura-tion pipeline. W e continue pretraining V-JEP A, a large-scale video model, on PriVi to learn primate-specific representations and evaluate it using a lightweight frozen classifier . Across four benchmark datasets - ChimpACT, PanAf500, BaboonLand, and ChimpBehave - our approach consistently outperforms prior work, including fully fine-tuned baselines, and scales favorably with fewer labels. These results demonstrate that primate-centric pretraining substantially improves data efficiency and generalization, making it a promising approach for low-label applications. Code, models, and the majority of the dataset will be made available.

'Something special is happening on Madagascar.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Lemurs first arrived on the island of Madagascar 53.2 million years ago, probably hitching a ride on a vegetation raft from mainland Africa. The island was predator free, and the lemurs evolved into an abundance of species to thrive in its various habitats--an expansion that hasn't stopped since. Scientists typically expect such rapid species growth to eventually slow down. However, in a study recently published in the journal a team of researchers presents evidence that lemurs defy this evolutionary principle.

The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the universe – and that complexity may be due to a surge of hormones released by the placenta during pregnancy. While numerous ideas have been proposed to explain human brain evolution, it remains one of our greatest scientific mysteries. One explanation, known as the social brain hypothesis, suggests that our large brains evolved to manage complex social relationships. It posits that navigating large group dynamics requires a certain degree of cognitive ability, pushing social species to develop bigger brains. For instance, other highly sociable animals, such as dolphins and elephants, have relatively large brains too.

Intra-cortical brain-machine interfaces (iBMIs) present a promising solution to restoring and decoding brain activity lost due to injury. However, patients with such neuroprosthetics suffer from permanent skull openings resulting from the devices' bulky wiring. This drives the development of wireless iBMIs, which demand low power consumption and small device footprint. Most recently, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have been researched as potential candidates for low-power neural decoding. In this work, we present the next step of utilizing SNNs for such tasks, building on the recently published results of the 2024 Grand Challenge on Neural Decoding Challenge for Motor Control of non-Human Primates. We optimize our model architecture to exceed the existing state of the art on the Primate Reaching dataset while maintaining similar resource demand through various compression techniques. We further focus on implementing a realtime-capable version of the model and discuss the implications of this architecture. With this, we advance one step towards latency-free decoding of cortical spike trains using neuromorphic technology, ultimately improving the lives of millions of paralyzed patients.