What happens when an octopus jumps on a shark for a ride around town? A “sharktopus,” of course. The rare sighting, captured on video off the coast of New Zealand and shared by scientists affiliated with the University of Auckland, shows a Maori octopus riding on top of a mako shark, which is the fastest … Read more
NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could. Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over. But this month, a robotic lander named Blue … Read more
Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and ’70s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting — correctly, it turned out — that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Winchester, Mass. … Read more
Former Greens leader Bob Brown has urged the minor party not to preference Labor ahead of the Liberal party in Tasmanian seats at the upcoming election if the Albanese government legislates to effectively exempt salmon farming from national environment laws. Conservationists have sharply criticised Anthony Albanese’s pledge that he will rush through legislation next week … Read more
Nasa has dropped its longstanding public commitment to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, in response to Donald Trump’s directives to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices at federal agencies. The promise was a central plank of the space agency’s Artemis program, which is scheduled to return humans to … Read more
A jury in North Dakota ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace in 2019, alleging that it had orchestrated a vast conspiracy against the company by organizing historic protests on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in 2016 and … Read more
Someone has responded to YouTuber Mark Rober’s Tesla fake wall test with a video that also tries to address the question of whether the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features would detect a Wile E. Coyote-style road obstruction in the real world. Creator Kyle Paul posted his video Thursday and included two Teslas with FSD: a … Read more
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. European Robotics Forum: 25–27 March 2025, STUTTGART, GERMANY RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND … Read more
My colleague Molly Higgins, who is vegan, simultaneously tested out her own very different goals and preferences on Hungryroot. These involved no chicken at all. Ostensibly, when you sign up, a Hungryroot dinner will cost you $13 a serving, while lunch costs $12 and breakfast is a mere $4.50. But in practice, the number of … Read more
Comparison of oxidation products from chamber and ambient measurements. Credit: Nature Geoscience (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-025-01645-z Anthropogenic organic aerosols are carbon-containing particles emitted by humans into the air, which are classified as particulate matter. They pose a significant health threat and contribute to millions of deaths worldwide each year. Especially in large cities, incomplete combustion processes … Read more