NGC 6723 is a globular cluster, an ancient inhabitant of the Milky Way galaxy. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, G. Piotto) Quick facts What it is: NGC 6723, the “Chandelier Cluster” Where it is: 27,000 light-years away, in the constellation Sagittarius When it was shared: June 26, 2026 In this single Hubble Space…
Every second of every day, Earth is bombarded by particles from outer space. Some of these particles are obstructed by our planet’s atmosphere but can spray down other particles, while others can zoom through the atmosphere and easily pass through anything, including us. You won’t feel these particles darting through you, but it raises a…
Inflatable structures are all around us, from pool floaties and archways at the Tour de France to life-saving emergency resuscitators and vehicle airbags. As useful as these structures are, they are limited to only two stable states—inflated and deflated.
The ‘edge AI wall.’ Click here to enlarge. Credit: Zhengis Tileubay My previous article for The Robot Report examined the problem of computational instability in autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs. Since then, the rapid development of artificial intelligence over the past year has led to a broader perspective about edge AI. The article, “Phase stability…
Earth’s temperatures are steadily rising, with the past decade experiencing all 10 of the warmest years on record. As heat waves become more frequent and intense, concerns are growing about how this heat could impact people’s health. Higher temperatures can have serious effects on the human body, including dehydration, heat exhaustion and heatstroke. But extreme…
Archaeologists in Russia have unearthed a medieval hoard of 2,600 silver coins, including more than 350 coins of a type never seen before. The hoard may have been buried by a nobleman who later fell victim to a plague. The coins were found in an elegant ceramic jug, according to an Aug. 26 translated statement…
A new Leading AI models have been criticized for being expensive to run. (Image credit: Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images) A transformer model forms its responses to user queries by looking at the full prompt simultaneously and then predicting what the next word in the sequence of its reply should be. It does this word…
There’s a commonly cited idea that water in a drain swirls in opposite directions in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. But is there any truth to it? When you pull the plug from a bathtub, does the water circle one way in New York and the other way in Sydney? Although the idea is based…
In 2013, MIT neuroscientists Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu Ramirez says we need a wide discussion about the ethics of memory of manipulation to understand the potential risks of misuse before we have the technology. (Image credit: Marina133/Getty Images) HO: In your experiments, you’ve used optogenetics to manipulate memories in mice, but that technique isn’t…
A small sample of Amazon’s vast deployed warehouse fulfillment fleet. Source: Amazon Swarm robotics systems rely on power architecture because energy distribution influences coordination efficiency and fault tolerance in multi-agent environments. Centralized models depend on unified infrastructure and coordinated energy management. Meanwhile, decentralized approaches distribute power control and operational decision-making across individual robotic units within…
