University of Cincinnati engineers looked for simple but effective ways to maintain a robot's orientation while working on a broken satellite in zero gravity. They discovered that a second robotic arm acting as a counterbalance could help the robot maintain stability.

Researchers  from the Shenyang Institute of Automation under the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed magnetically controlled microrobots made from diatoms for the treatment of glioblastoma using photodynamic therapy. These microrobots exhibit excellent magnetic responsiveness and programmable motion capabilities, enabling them to precisely target and navigate to glioblastoma lesion areas.

Biochar is widely promoted as a climate friendly soil amendment that can store carbon and improve crop growth. Yet scientists have long debated whether it always benefits soil ecosystems. A new study suggests the answer is more complex. By combining meta analysis with machine learning, researchers show that biochar can either help or harm soil organisms depending on how it is produced and applied.

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly integrates into clinical settings—from predicting patient outcomes to deploying humanoid "robotic nurses"—an article published in the Hastings Center Report warns that the core of nursing, its moral agency, must remain a human-driven responsibility.

The visual cortex is the part of the brain that enables visual perception. In this area millions of nerve cells, called neurons, process stimuli from the outside world. They only react when objects with certain characteristics come into our field of vision. According to textbooks, the first stage of the visual cortex has two main types of neurons that specialize in edges – sharp transitions between light and dark. An international team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Göttingen has now used machine learning techniques to find neurons in mice that use a previously unknown process in the brain to share this cognitive processing. These neurons respond to different “spatial frequencies”, meaning the change in patterns of different objects in the visual field. The research was published in Nature Neuroscience.