The defense ministry has announced that it's funding research and development at SWARM Biotactics to create technology that can "steer cockroaches and send them on reconnaissance missions," CBS News reported. CEO Stefan Wilhelm said the cockroaches are "super resilient" and can crawl through "tiny spaces," climb up walls, go into pipes, and navigate through rubble. How does this work? Neuroscientists at the company put electrodes on the critters' antennae to "stimulate the insects' natural ability to navigate."
In the future, a caregiving machine might gently lift an elderly person out of bed in the morning and help them get dressed. A cleaning bot could trundle through a child's room, picking up scattered objects, depositing toys on shelves and tucking away dirty laundry. And in a factory, mechanical hands may assemble a next-generation smartphone from its first fragile component to the finishing touch.
In it, viewers get a closer look at Mabel, an animal lover who seizes an opportunity to use a new technology to "hop" her consciousness into a life-like robotic beaver and communicate directly with animals.
We're all living in a cyberpunk novel now. Unconstrained billionaires have space programs and robot armies. People are falling in love with and marrying AI chatbots. You can make movies where you're the star by typing a few sentences. Companies offer designer babies as a service. We've got brain implants for controlling computers, flying cars, robotic surgery, AI-controlled prosthetic limbs, and millions of drones in the sky. So why is the most effective form of communication still a hand-written note?
Enter Tesla's secret lab at its engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where according to a new scoop from Business Insider, its goal is to record practically every mundane human movement imaginable, performed hundreds of times each day by a tireless crew of dozens of workers. The AI industry is as much powered by armies of human grunts who work behind the scenes to make the tech appear seamless as it is by the actual gigawatts of energy consumed by its enormous data centers.
Mbodi wants to make training robots easier and quicker with the help of AI agents. The company will be showcasing this tech as one of the Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. New York-based Mbodi built a cloud-to-edge system, a hybrid computing system using both cloud and local compute, that is designed to integrate into existing robotic tech stacks. The software relies on a multitude of AI agents that communicate with each other to gather the needed information to help a robot learn a task faster.
"We behave differently when we're anxious or when we're experiencing fear, versus when we are feeling courageous. And mice do the same," explained Alexandra Klein, postdoctoral researcher at UCSF, during a lab tour, adding that there are multiple experiments conducted in the lab to analyze a mouse's behavior - all this to understand human brain functions better and potentially cure diseases. The tour even showcased a real mouse brain in a test tube.
