An interactive game, developed by the Horizon 2020 REST-COAST project, places the users at the heart of large-scale coastal decision-making.

Coastal Challenge is a new serious video game developed within the EU-funded REST-COAST project to support climate adaptation decision-making in coastal areas. Available through the REST-COAST project website, the game offers an interactive and accessible platform for exploring how one’s choices shape the future resilience of coastal systems. 

A bioinspired robotic eye can automatically adjust its pupil size in response to changing light levels, enabling it to recognize objects even in unevenly lit or overexposed environments. The system can also simulate the irregular pupils of different animals, such as a cat’s vertical pupil (which enables focus for precise hunting) or a sheep’s horizontal pupil (which provides panoramic views to avoid predators). Kun Liang and colleagues propose that the flexibility of the artificial vision system “highlights its potential for bioinspired robotic systems, advanced machine vision, and autonomous driving.” Living organisms have evolved a range of visual systems that can adapt to different environments to promote survival. However, existing bionic systems lack the flexibility of their biological counterparts and often struggle to recognize images across dynamic lighting conditions. To address these challenges, Liang et al. designed a bioinspired robotic device that mimics the human eye. The device includes an artificial retina that comprises a bowl-shaped photodetector array, along with liquid metal-based artificial visual neurons and actuators. The liquid metal can shape-shift under electrical stimuli to simulate neuronal spiking signals. In addition, the liquid metal actuator can deform to regulate pupil size, similar to the iris. The researchers demonstrated that their system could replicate the human pupillary light reflex by automatically dilating or constricting the pupil to regulate light entering the eye. Liang et al. also developed a spiking neural network that enabled the bionic visual system to identify numbers from overexposed images, and to detect objects in dashcam footage that transitioned from dimly lit tunnels to sunny environments. Finally, the authors manipulated the liquid metal actuators to resemble several animal pupils, including the W-shaped and heart-shaped pupils of cuttlefish and frogs, respectively, for extended horizontal depth of vision.

For reporters interested in trends, a Science Robotics study published in October 2025 described a bioinspired soft lens that can adapt to varying light levels, similar to a human eye: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adw8905