Science, Space, & Robotics

Colin Angle, the man who brought us the Roomba, is now pushing the boundaries of robotic companionship with a plush, AI-powered pet robot.

Dubbed a "Familiar," the four-legged, stuffed-like device is designed to interact socially, learning and adapting to household routines while offering emotional support.

Angle's new venture, Familiar Machines & Magic, unveiled the AI robot pets at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything conference. These devices feature a full sensory suite, equipped with microphones, vision, and audio systems, and are built to read body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.

Former NASA engineers have cracked a wild solution to save homes from wildfires - using sound waves to literally silence the flames. This isn't just a sci-fi gimmick; it's a real-world breakthrough that could change how communities defend against nature's fury.

Sonic Fire Tech, the California-based startup behind the innovation, has developed a system that uses low-frequency sound waves to disrupt fire by vibrating oxygen molecules. The result? Flames are starved of the oxygen they need to grow and spread. It's a clean, waterless method that could be deployed around homes and infrastructure to create fire-resistant zones.

The tech builds on decades of aerospace research, and, with the help of former NASA engineers, that research is now being repurposed to address one of the West Coast's most destructive threats, particularly in California, which has seen some of the worst wildfires in recent memory.

A piece of SpaceX hardware is tracked to slam into the Moon at extreme speed this August, but despite the dramatic setup, you probably will not see it happen.

According to astronomer and well-known near-Earth object tracker Bill Gray, a Falcon 9 upper stage from a 2025 launch is now on a collision course with the lunar surface, with impact predicted for August 5 at roughly 6:44 UTC. The rocket stage, which completed its mission before drifting into a high orbit, has been tracked for months and is expected to strike near the Moon's limb, close to the Einstein crater.

While the idea of a rocket hitting the Moon sounds like a major event, the reality is more subtle. Traveling at around 8700 kilometers per hour, the object will hit without atmospheric resistance, but the resulting impact is expected to be too small to observe from Earth. This is not the first time space junk has made contact either.

A breathtaking glimpse of Earth from orbit is going viral, with a NASA astronaut capturing a rare "Earthset" moment from the International Space Station.

The post shared on X by astronaut Reid Wiseman has attracted more than 12 million views. The Artemis astronaut described the experience as a "once in a lifetime" view, likening it to watching a sunset from "the most foreign seat in the cosmos." The video was captured using an iPhone with 8x zoom and shows Earth slowly disappearing from view, creating an orbital equivalent of a sunset. According to Wiseman, the footage is uncropped and shot at 8x zoom, closely matching what the human eye sees from space.

The moment wasn't just captured on a phone. Fellow astronaut Christina Koch was simultaneously photographing the event with a high-powered Nikon camera and a 400mm lens, capturing bracketed shots to achieve a higher dynamic range. Nearby, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen were also observing the rare view from different windows aboard the International Space Station.

A Neuralink patient who has spent more than 100 days with his brain-computer interface (BCI) has said he can run around Azeroth in World of Warcraft with just his brain, and after 100 days, it feels completely normal.

British Army veteran Jon Noble took to X to share a lengthy paragraph about his experience with the BCI, specifically the Neuralink N1 implant. According to Noble, the surgery on Day 0 was "surprisingly easy," with practitioners providing Noble with a general anaesthetic, which was followed by a small incision and then the insertion of the N1 implant. The implant was placed into Noble's motor cortex, with each of the 1,024 ultra-thin threads inserted by the "robotic system".

Noble woke up from the surgery and was able to go home the next day, and by Day 3 he was "feeling a lot better," and by Day 7 the little scar on his head was already beginning to fade. According to Noble, "the real fun started in Week 2" when Noble paired the Neuralink with his MacBook. After calibration was complete, Noble was able to move the cursor just by thinking where he wanted it to go. Noble writes that by Week 3, moving the cursor became "second nature".

Elon Musk's brain chip company, Neuralink, has announced that its second patient, who received a Brain Computer Interface (BCI), is now speaking with his mind.

For those who don't know, Neuralink is an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk in 2016. The company intends to develop implantable BCIs, which at first will be designed to solve some of the worst medical afflictions in humans, such as paralysis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

In a new video posted to the Neuralink YouTube channel, it's revealed that Kenneth Shock, an ALS patient, adopted Neuralink's N1 implant earlier this year, and this specific BCI is designed to convert brain activity into audible words, which are reproduced in Shock's voice before ALS impacted the sound of his voice.

SpaceX, and by extension Elon Musk, has been focusing on building a colony on Mars for many years. Over the weekend, Musk took to the social media platform X to confirm that SpaceX has "already shifted focus," with the new goal being to build a "self-growing city" on the Moon.

Elon Musk believes this goal could be achieved in less than a decade, while the dream of building a colony on Mars is still a 20+ year project. "The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars," Musk wrote, adding that the ability to launch a Lunar mission once every ten days versus once every 26 months for a trip to Mars played a role in the decision.

This ability to "iterate much faster" should result in the creation of a city on the Moon. This pivot from Mars to the Moon represents a major shift for SpaceX; as recently as last year, Musk referred to the Moon as "a distraction," with SpaceX's goal being to head straight to Mars.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space telescope in the world, has pointed its extremely sensitive instruments at a dying star, showcasing how it is being reduced to dust and gas.

NASA has explained in a recent blog post that the Helix Nebula has been known about for 20 years, and throughout that time, it has been imaged by various telescopes, including the famed Hubble Space Telescope. The space agency explains that Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) has captured the Helix Nebula in unprecedented detail, revealing the complex nature of nebulae and the destruction and reformation of celestial objects.

The space agency explains that the blue in the above image marks the hottest gas, energized by intense ultraviolet light from the white dwarf star at the center. Moving farther from the center, the gas cools and forms yellow regions where hydrogen atoms join to form molecules. The outer edges, with their reddish tones, represent the coolest material, where gas begins to thin, and dust starts to form.

SpaceX is rocketing towards its plans for an initial public offering (IPO) that has the Elon Musk-led company targeting a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, making it the biggest stock-market listing of all time.

In a new report from Bloomberg, SpaceX's management and advisers are pursuing a listing as soon as mid-to-late 2026, according to people who (as usual) asked to not be identified because the matter is confidential. Elon Musk and SpaceX's board of directors advanced plans for the listing and fundraising -- including hiring for key roles and how it would spend the capital.

Starlink is an incredibly awesome technology and service and is continuously growing, as well as the new promise of direct-to-cell business, as well as the development of SpaceX's exciting Starship moon and Mars rocket. SpaceX is expected to make around $15 billion in revenue in 2025, increasing to between $22 billion and $24 billion in 2026, with most of those sales coming from Starlink.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have devised a way to scan people's faces to estimate personality traits and real-world success, and, according to the scientists behind the method, it actually works.

A new study has found that machine learning techniques can identify correlations between facial characteristics and real-world success, leading to the creation of predictors based on facial characteristics for specific aspects of life. The team used an AI system trained to estimate the likelihood of the Big Five personality traits from human face images.

The researchers took headshots from 96,000 MBA college graduates and fed them into the AI. The AI produced results indicating the likelihood of each student's personality traits: neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness. The team then reviewed the AI's results and evaluated how each student's career had panned out, and found a correlation between the AI's predictions and each student's success.

A company has unveiled a new generation of a humanoid robot with synthetic skin designed to make it feel warmer and more intimate.

The company behind the new robot is Chinese EV maker Xpeng, and at its AI Day in Guangzhou, China, Xpeng showcased its IRON humanoid robots, which are the company's eighth-generation and third-generation humanoid design.

Xpeng's new robots aren't headed to factories like many other robotics companies, but instead the company intends for them to be used as receptionists, tour guides, or even a personal shopping assistant. Xpeng wants these latest-generation robots to lead tours of its facility, and also present new products at its stores across China.

Astronomers have detected the biggest black hole burp ever recorded using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), tracing the event back to the supermassive black hole located at the center of a galaxy 10 billion light-years away.

A black hole burp, or what is scientifically referred to as a flare, is an astronomical event that occurs when a black hole consumes an object. In the instance of this flare, researchers traced the eruption back to the supermassive black hole known as J2245+3743 and a star estimated to be 30 times the mass of the Sun getting stuck in the gravitational pull of the black hole. The result is the star being absolutely torn apart, and its material being added to the swirling, flattened disk seen around active black holes.

Researchers call this devouring of a star a tidal disruption event, and according to researchers, the flare emitted as much energy as 10 trillion suns. Notably, the flare was initially spotted in 2018 by the ZTF, but it wasn't until 2023 and data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii that showed the true nature of the flare, further cementing the theory that the black hole consumed an unusually large star.

NVIDIA has just announced a huge partnership with Uber, to use its NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 reference system, providing self-driving fleets, with Uber combining human riders and robot drivers in a worldwide ride-hailing network powered by DRIVE AGX Hyperion-ready vehicles.

The partnership will see the scale up of the world's largest level 4-ready mobility network, using Uber's next-generation robotaxi and autonomous delivery fleets using the new NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 autonomous vehicle (AV) development platform, and NVIDIA DRIVE AV software purpose-built for L4 autonomy.

On the tech side of things, NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 specs and features: NVIDIA has two performance-packed DRIVE AGX Thor in-vehicle platforms, which are based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. Each of the platforms can deliver over 2000 FP4 teraflops (1000 TOPS in INT8) of real-time compute, with NVIDIA AGX Thor fusing 360-degree sensor inputs and is optimized for transformer -- vision language action (VLA) models and generative AI workloads -- which provides safe, level 4 autonomous driving backed by industry-leading safety certifications and cybersecurity standards.

Amazon is reportedly planning to cut as many as 600,000 human jobs over the next 7 years, which will eventually be replaced by robots.

Internal documents obtained by The New York Times show Amazon's plans to automate approximately 75% of all its operational processes, which will result in approximately 600,000 job losses by the year 2033. For those who don't know, Amazon is one of the United States' largest companies by the number of employees it has under its banner, having tripled its workforce since 2018 to a staggering 1.2 million.

However, Amazon's board has reportedly informed management that it will no longer need to hire additional US employees in the future due to advances in automation. The internal documents reportedly revealed that Amazon projects to save as much as $12.6 billion after the 600,000 workers are replaced by automation, and it will reduce the cost to sell each product it ships by approximately 30 cents. Amazon already has more than 1 million robots working for the company, and these robots support the 1.6 million workers.

It was last week when reports surfaced about a mysterious object potentially from space colliding with the windscreen of a United Airlines plane while it was traveling over Utah, with theories pointing to space debris possibly from a defunct satellite re-entering Earth's atmosphere, or even birds.

However, it was neither of those theories, and the object that struck the windshield of flight UA1093, which caused enough damage to shatter the windshield and injure one of the pilots in the cockpit, was a weather balloon from the company WindBorne. Speaking to Ars Technica, WindBorne agreed that it was likely one of its balloons after calculating the position of the balloon and cross-referencing it with the flight path of the plane.

The theory of a mysterious space-based object colliding with the 737 MAX aircraft came after one of the pilots described the object that impacted the aircraft as "space debris". Notably, the collision didn't cause any fatalities, only injuries, as images shared to social media show one of the pilot's arms being cut up by seemingly small shards of glass that sprayed into the cockpit following the impact.

Not a single human has set foot on the surface of the Moon since December 14, 1972, which was when Apollo 17 astronauts completed their final moonwalk. Since then, only robots have explored the surface of Earth's closest neighbor. However, that is about to change in the coming years.

NASA has announced the date for Artemis II, the mission that will take four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the Moon. Artemis II comes after Artemis I, which was an uncrewed mission that involved the Orion spacecraft being sent on a test journey around the Moon to see how the spacecraft would fare with mission goals and general journey. Artemis I was a success, and now NASA is moving to Artemis II, a crewed mission that will follow a similar path to Artemis I, but this time with humans aboard the Orion spacecraft.

Artemis II will be the foundation of future Artemis missions, with each of the four astronauts undergoing strenuous testing both before and after they return from the journey. For example, blood samples will be taken before the crew leaves and then taken again after they return, as researchers want to know if the human body experiences any significant changes throughout the mission, which, if found to be the case, preventative measures will be made before Artemis III, the mission where humans will walk on the surface of the Moon.

When engineers or companies discuss the future of humanoid robotics, they often focus on replacing menial tasks and monotonous jobs, allowing individuals to pursue more fulfilling endeavors. But what if you just wanted to kick the crap out of your new humanoid robot?

Unitree has demonstrated that technology has already been achieved, as the company behind the Unitree G1 humanoid robot has endured a beating, with the above video showing Unitree engineers running and kicking the poor robot to the ground over and over again.

Now, this isn't a demonstration of how buyers of this robot can kick the crap out of the G1; it's a demonstration of the G1's "Anti-Gravity" mode. Unitree is showcasing the G1's impressive stability and how it's able to pick itself back up quickly if it falls to the ground..

Tesla has just received a $10 billion order for its Optimus 3+ humanoid robots, with big pharma securing the robots and deploying them into farm operations, the making of prescription drugs, and lower-level jobs that are said to push Americans into higher-paid jobs.

Firstly, this marks some rather big history for Tesla and the future humanoid robot market, with up to 10,000 Optimus 3+ humanoid robots. Tesla is leading the charge, and big pharma will use the humanoid robots to restore US drug manufacturing sovereignty.

Bright Green Corporation has announced its merger with PharmAGRI Capital Partners, a federally aligned pharmaceutical infrastructure platform architected to restore U.S. drug manufacturing sovereignty. Effective immediately, Lynn Stockwell has been appointed CEO and chairwoman of PharmAGRI, with Stockwell to appoint a new board that will be made up of directors from her Drugs Made In America Corps, which includes a series of 4 Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) formed to acquire DEA-licensed and FDA-compliant pharmaceutical businesses.

NASA has accelerated its plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon's surface, as part of its broader strategy to establish a sustainable lunar presence through a base.

NASA's Artemis program is part of the space agency's effort to establish a lunar base on Earth's closest neighbor by 2030. One of the most critical components of such a base is sustainable power. The nuclear option seems the most viable, as solar won't work due to the Moon's rotation being so slow. There are two-week periods where the Moon is in darkness. Nuclear reactors will enable a round-the-clock energy supply needed to keep bases maintained at healthy operational levels, ensuring human survival.

According to a report from Politico, NASA's interim chief Sean Duffy is set to announce a new ambitious plan in the next week that will involve NASA soliciting industry proposals for a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor to launch by 2030, and that within the directive it states the first nation with a Moon reactor could "declare a keep-out zone, which would significantly inhibit the United States." The race for the first lunar-based nuclear reactor is between the US, China, and Russia, who announced a partnership to create their own lunar base.

The biggest earthquake to strike since 2011 has hit Russia, resulting in tsunami warnings issued for multiple Pacific regions.

Almost two million people are currently under evacuation advisories across 2020 municipalities along the Pacific coast of Japan, while Hawaii is bracing for impact as a "wall of water" approaches. The director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Chip McCreery, said it could be "several hours" before the warning level in Hawaii is reduced. Reports indicate the biggest wave recorded so far is 4ft tall, and waves are arriving every 12 minutes. This figure was measured by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Haleiwa, Oahu.

Hawaii Governor Josh Green has urged people to evacuate all coastal zones as the state braces for a "forceful wall of water that will move across the shoreline into the community." Green also provided an update shortly after the expected arrival time of 7:10 pm local time for the first wave, "So far we have not seen a wave of consequence," but they have seen significant water recede.