Nitin Sanket at The Conversation:
To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation.
Current robots rely heavily on cameras or light detection and ranging, known as lidar, or both. But these sensors fail in visually challenging conditions, such as smoke, fog, dust, snow or complete darkness.
I’m a scientific engineer who develops bio-inspired microrobots. To solve this challenge, my research team looked at nature’s experts at navigating in poor visibility: bats. They thrive in dark, damp and dusty caves and can detect obstacles as thin as a human hair using echolocation while weighing as little as two paper clips. They emit sound waves and listen to weak echoes reflected from objects.
However, enabling this sensing on aerial robots is extremely challenging because propellers generate a lot of noise. It is a bit like trying to listen to your friend while a jet engine is taking off next to you.
More here.
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Transcription is his first book written as an elegy, a mode that comes with a thornier-than-usual crop of formal mandates. What kind of verbal machine is an elegy supposed to be, let alone one for intellectual giants like Waldrop or Kluge? To honor the departed mentors in true mimetic fashion, the ideal book should both describe and ventriloquize them, incorporating these writers’ love of slippage and fragmentation, their aversion to cliché and self-seriousness, their taste for the marginal and off-kilter over the exhaustive and august. It should constellate their favorite metaphors and métiers: dreams, angels, ghosts, “apothegms.” It should resist hyperbole. It should purloin language and motifs from their own books and letters, enacting the alchemy of artistic influence. It should alert us to the limits of memory and bend our sense of linear time. It should also, preferably, and wherever possible, approximate the conditions of death itself.
It’s been 80 years since 
When KJ Muldoon was born in the summer of 2024, his parents were told he had a disease so rare, it strikes about one in 1.3 million newborns. His condition, a severe deficiency of an enzyme known as CPS1, left his tiny body unable to properly break down protein, flooding his blood with toxins that could cause brain damage or death. A liver transplant could correct the problem, but KJ was too young and too fragile to undergo one. With each passing day, the risk of irreversible neurological damage grew. What happened next may become the most important medical story of the decade. In just six months, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine designed a personalized therapy that could correct the single misspelled letter in KJ’s DNA using a gene editing technology known as CRISPR. To get the therapy inside KJ’s cells, doctors relied on the same kind of mRNA technology that powered the Covid-19 vaccines. He received his first dose at 6 months old. One year later, KJ is walking, talking and thriving at home with his family.
No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.
As I walk through the broomsedge in June, dozens of grasshoppers clatter away with every footstep. Bees and wasps wing past, leafhoppers spring, and beetles scurry for cover. This productivity is why so many birds depend on grasslands for their breeding or wintering. Grasslands, especially those in humid areas with good soil, provision their local food webs as richly as do forests.
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Take Self-Portrait (Rigid) (1982), one of the most straightforward examples of what Close is up to. In this work, the bearded and bespectacled face of the artist, familiar from his paintings, is assembled as an orderly array of handmade paper chicklets, small squares in twenty-four shades of gray that Close has marshalled into a pixelated image. Close’s characteristic grid structure maps the material surface of the image’s support, marking the lines of division between individual image units: inexpressive squares of pulp paper that measure out the surface of the page one cell at a time. But in many of Close’s later paintings that make the geometric structure of their composition visible, the grid also serves as a kind of screen to look through onto a pictorial space that, although shallow, is certainly volumetric and illusive. One cannot help but think of Leon Battista Alberti’s famous veil: the gridded scrim the painter interposed between his eye and his subject as a means of regimenting the perception of space. Remnants of this optical experience remain in the pulp paper works, even those as decisively material- and surface-oriented as Self-Portrait (Rigid).
The development of the human brain, with its extraordinary range of cognitive abilities, is an awe-inspiring feat of evolution. Each of its tens of billions of cells must be born at precisely the right time, migrate to the correct locations, differentiate into as many as 3,000 distinct cell types, and form exquisitely specific synaptic connections with one another. Most of this happens before birth, but development continues for nearly three more decades.
The artist known as Banksy has made a fortune in graffiti and irony and ironic graffiti. No, he’s not the guy—we now know that Banksy is a middle-aged Englishman named Robin Gunningham—who taped a banana to the wall with silver duct tape. (Maurizio Cattelan sold Comedian at a Sotheby’s auction in 2024 for $6.2 million.) Nor is he responsible for the pair of glasses left on the floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a stunt that the museum took in stride as a Marcel Duchamp-style prank. (The culprits were 17-year olds who in the spirit of “I could have made that” passed off the glasses as art.) Or the two men who, just weeks after the October 2025 Louvre heist, smuggled a fake painting into the museum, a portrait of the two “artists” in Renaissance garb in a frame made of Legos, and hung it on a gallery wall. They filmed themselves and the stunt, of course, went viral.
Some thirty-five years ago, biologist Richard Dawkins coined the phrase “paradox of the organism” to encapsulate a conundrum. If