Environment Conservation Ocean Perplexing blue button jelly looks like something out of'Lord of the Rings' Coincidentally, these odd jellyfish relatives are gobbled up by blue dragons. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. At first glance, it looks like an alien eye--a gorgeous blue iris around a carmel-colored pupil, thick eyelashes radiating out like sun rays. The reddish/orange center looks a bit like the Eye of Sauron, but we aren't in Mordor. We're on the surface of the ocean, where a mysterious jellyfish relative is floating along, snacking on zooplankton .

'You can't just give an algorithm a soundtrack and say, "here are the sounds, figure it out''' a subtitled scene from Stranger Things. 'You can't just give an algorithm a soundtrack and say, "here are the sounds, figure it out''' a subtitled scene from Stranger Things. Artificial intelligence is making steady advances into subtitling but, say its practitioners, it's a vital service that needs a human to make it work I s artificial intelligence going to destroy the SDH [subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing] industry? It's a valid question because, while SDH is the default subtitle format on most platforms, the humans behind it - as with all creative industries - are being increasingly devalued in the age of AI. "SDH is an art, and people in the industry have no idea. They think it's just a transcription," says Max Deryagin, chair of Subtle, a non-profit association of freelance subtitlers and translators.

Miniature robots are untethered actuators, which have significant potential to make existing minimally invasive surgery considerably safer and painless, and enable unprecedented treatments because they are much smaller and dexterous than existing surgical robots. Of the miniature robots, the magnetically actuated ones are the most functional and dexterous. However, existing magnetic miniature robots are currently impractical for surgery because they are either restricted to possessing at most two on-board functionalities or having limited five degrees-of-freedom (DOF) locomotion. Some of these actuators are also only operational under specialized environments where actuation from strong external magnets must be at very close proximity (< 4 cm away). Here we present a millimeter-scale soft robot where its magnetization profile can be reprogrammed upon command to perform five surgical functionalities: drug-dispensing, cutting through biological tissues (simulated with gelatin), gripping, storing (biological) samples and remote heating. By possessing full six-DOF motions, including the sixth-DOF rotation about its net magnetic moment, our soft robot can also roll and two-anchor crawl across challenging unstructured environments, which are impassable by its five-DOF counterparts. Because our actuating magnetic fields are relatively uniform and weak (at most 65 mT and 1.5 T/m), such fields can theoretically penetrate through biological tissues harmlessly and allow our soft robot to remain controllable within the depths of the human body. We envision that this work marks a major milestone for the advancement of soft actuators, and towards revolutionizing minimally invasive treatments with untethered miniature robots that have unprecedented functionalities.

A mysterious virus has left ordinary rabbits in the US with shocking deformities, including faces full of horns and tentacles. The mutated rabbits have been spotted multiple times in Colorado, specifically in the city of Fort Collins. The sightings date back to 2024, when a Fort Collins resident shared a picture online, showing the creature's entire head covered in black, tentacle-like protrusions. It's believed the horns are due to a virus that causes cancerous growths and has no known cure. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has urged anyone who sees rabbits in the wild with these growths to stay away and not touch them.

Question Answer Generation (QAG) is an effective data augmentation technique to improve the accuracy of question answering systems, especially in low-resource domains. While recent pretrained and large language model-based QAG methods have made substantial progress, they face the critical issue of redundant QA pair generation, affecting downstream QA systems. Implicit diversity techniques such as sampling and diverse beam search are proven effective solutions but often yield smaller diversity. We present explicit diversity conditions for QAG, focusing on spatial aspects, question types, and entities, substantially increasing diversity in QA generation. Our work emphasizes the need of explicit diversity conditions for generating diverse question-answer synthetic data by showing significant improvements in downstream QA task over existing widely adopted implicit diversity techniques. In particular, generated QA pairs from explicit diversity conditions when used to train the downstream QA model results in an average 4.1% exact match and 4.5% F1 improvement over QAG from implicit sampling techniques on SQuADDU. Our work emphasizes the need for explicit diversity conditions even more in low-resource datasets (SubjQA), where average downstream QA performance improvements are around 12% EM.

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in many areas lately, yet it has had comparatively little success in general-use robotics. We believe one of the reasons for this is the disconnect between traditional robotic design and the properties needed for open-ended, creativity-based AI systems. To that end, we, taking selective inspiration from nature, build a robust, partially soft robotic limb with a large action space, rich sensory data stream from multiple cameras, and the ability to connect with others to enhance the action space and data stream. As a proof of concept, we train two contemporary machine learning algorithms to perform a simple target-finding task. Altogether, we believe that this design serves as a first step to building a robot tailor-made for achieving artificial general intelligence.

As predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano, recent breakthroughs in AI have been accompanied by a new wave of fears of some version of "the singularity," that point in runaway technological innovation at which computers become unleashed from human control. Those worried that AI is going to toss us humans into the dumpster, however, might look to the natural world for perspective on what current AI can and cannot do. Those octopi alive today are a marvel of evolution--they can mold themselves into almost any shape and are equipped with an arsenal of weapons and stealth camouflage, as well as an apparent ability to decide which to use depending on the challenge. Yet, despite decades of effort, robotics hasn't come close to duplicating this suite of abilities (not surprising since the modern octopus is the product of adaptations over 100 million generations). Robotics is a far longer way off from creating Hal.

The robot's soft legs are filled with sensors that measure brain activity A soft robot inserted through a tiny hole in the skull can deploy six sensor-filled legs on the surface of the brain. A version of this soft robot has been successfully tested in a miniature pig and could be scaled up for human testing in the future. The concept offers a less invasive approach for placing electrodes on the brain's surface compared with the traditional method, in which surgeons cut a hole in the skull the size of the fully extended device. If it proves safe and effective in humans, it could eventually help monitor and even treat people who experience epileptic seizures or other neurological disorders. "There's actually a really large surface area that you can reach without doing a large craniotomy," says Stéphanie Lacour at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

The thought of humans having wings, tentacles or an extra arm may all seem rather unlikely. But these scenarios could actually become reality in the next few decades, thanks to leaps in human augmentation. Researchers have already designed a'Third Thumb' controlled by foot movements, which allows the wearer to unscrew a bottle, peel a banana or thread a needle using just one hand. Now, experts believe the thumb is just a first step towards larger, more dramatic additions to the human body. Tamar Makin, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Cambridge University, said the brain's ability to adapt to an extra limb was'extraordinary'.

The success of soft robots in displaying emergent behaviors is tightly linked to the compliant interaction with the environment. However, to exploit such phenomena, proprioceptive sensing methods which do not hinder their softness are needed. In this work we propose a new sensing approach for soft underwater slender structures based on embedded pressure sensors and use a learning-based pipeline to link the sensor readings to the shape of the soft structure. Using two different modeling techniques, we compare the pose reconstruction accuracy and identify the optimal approach. Using the proprioceptive sensing capabilities we show how this information can be used to assess the swimming performance over a number of metrics, namely swimming thrust, tip deflection, and the traveling wave index. We conclude by demonstrating the robustness of the embedded sensor on a free swimming soft robotic squid swimming at a maximum velocity of 9.5 cm/s, with the absolute tip deflection being predicted within an error less than 9% without the aid of external sensors.