The Gap: Knowing that a shape in front of you is a “door handle” (recognition) is easy. Knowing whether your arm is long enough to reach it, whether your foot is currently blocking the door from swinging open, or if you’ve already walked past it is where current VLMs fail.

Evaluating whether a vision-language model (VLM) can act through a physical body is challenging. The outcome of an action couples the VLM’s decision with motor control. When a task fails, it is hard to tell whether the VLM made a bad choice or the motor controller simply failed to execute it, e.g., losing balance and falling. In this work, we introduce HumanCLAW, an evaluation framework that decouples action decision-making from low-level execution. At every step, a harnessed, off-the-shelf VLM issues an atomic skill command, and the command is translated into a sub-second chunk of continuous full-body motion with real physical consequences, including gravity and collisions. The body can therefore act freely in the physical world, while execution-side disturbances, balance and motor errors, are factored out.

In this artist’s conception, an electron wave packet (blue) lies at the boundary between space and time. Lasting only attoseconds, an electron flash is generated between the tip of the scanning tunneling microscope and a metal sample. Researchers used a precisely controlled infrared light pulse to trigger the flash. Image: Brad Baxley

This narrative review finds that adequate iodine supports thyroid hormone signaling, leukocyte metabolism, antioxidant defenses, and antimicrobial activity in humans and domesticated mammals. Both deficiency and sustained excess may impair immunity or promote thyroid inflammation, but precise immune-specific intake thresholds remain uncertain.

A double meteor shower peak will occur this week — but sky-gazers might have a difficult time catching a glimpse of the cosmic activity.

The Alpha Capricornids are active from early July to mid-August, and the Southern Delta Aquariids are active from mid-July to mid-August, but both are expected to reach their peaks — the point at which Earth will pass through the densest part of the shower — Thursday night into Friday, according to the American Meteor Society.

A third meteor shower, the Perseids, will also be active this week, though it won’t peak until mid-August.

Pham et al. show that, during Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, NRF2 activation in alveolar macrophages inhibits MHC II but not MHC I, leading to dampening of antigen presentation and CD4+ T cell activation. Although NRF2 promotes a cell-protective program, it unexpectedly impairs innate-adaptive crosstalk and host immunity in the lung.

An eye implant and a pair of high-tech glasses that enable people with a severe form of vision loss to read have been approved for use by a European regulator

Vitamin A is linked to improved lung function both in children and adults with asthma; however, vitamin D shows the same benefit only in adults.

Optimism is a survival skill, not a temperament, and it can be trained.

Imagine a bright, sunny day suddenly turning dark as a solar eclipse sweeps across the sky. Even though humans have watched and recorded eclipses for thousands of years and now understand the science behind them, experiencing a spell of darkness during the day can still evoke awe and surprise.

A rare total eclipse in 2024, which a significant portion of North America witnessed, created an exciting opportunity for researchers to understand how zoo animals behave during a total solar eclipse. They were curious whether the sudden changes in light and temperature caused by the eclipse would trigger different reactions in various captive species.

Most zoo animals showed very little change in their behavior during the total eclipse, but a few reactions stood out. Japanese macaques, zebras, camels and some birds displayed signs of stress, such as climbing high in trees, stopping their usual activities, becoming more active and showing increased alertness as the eclipse unfolded.