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A high school robotics team has built the world’s smallest and cheapest network switch.

The device was created by Murex Robotics and formed by students from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

The invention was necessary because they could not find an affordable embedded ethernet switch for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) they were building for an underwater drone competition.

Reconstructing a scene using a single-camera viewpoint is challenging. Researchers have deployed generative artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve this. However, the models can hallucinate objects when determining what is obscured.

An alternate approach is to use shadows in a color image to infer the shape of the hidden object. However, the method falls short when the shadows are hard to see.

To overcome these limitations, the MIT researchers used a single-photon LiDAR. A LiDAR emits pulses of light, and the time it takes for these signals to bounce back to the sensor creates a 3D map of a scene.

Large language models have emerged as a transformative technology and have revolutionized AI with their ability to generate human-like text with seemingly unprecedented fluency and apparent comprehension. Trained on vast datasets of human-generated text, LLMs have unlocked innovations across industries, from content creation and language translation to data analytics and code generation. Recent developments, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, showcase multimodal capabilities, processing text, vision, and audio inputs in a single neural network.

Despite their potential for driving productivity and enabling new forms of human-machine collaboration, LLMs are still in their nascent stage. They face limitations such as factual inaccuracies, biases inherited from training data, lack of common-sense reasoning, and data privacy concerns. Techniques like retrieval augmented generation aim to ground LLM knowledge and improve accuracy.

To explore these issues, I spoke with Amir Feizpour, CEO and founder of AI Science, an expert-in-the-loop business workflow automation platform. We discussed the transformative impacts, applications, risks, and challenges of LLMs across different sectors, as well as the implications for startups in this space.

A new approach to care may help people with cancer better manage depression, pain, and fatigue. With this approach, people may be offered weekly cognitive behavioral therapy sessions from a counselor and medicine for their symptoms.


Stepped collaborative care is an approach for managing symptoms such as depression, pain, and fatigue in people with cancer. It includes psychotherapy and medication if the symptoms are not reduced by psychotherapy alone.

A person’s symptoms are assessed every 4 weeks. If the symptoms are not in the normal range, health care providers change the frequency or type of treatment.

With a “stepped” care approach, health care providers can individualize treatment based on a person’s needs and provide support for people who require different levels of care in a cost-effective way.

Evelina Fedorenko, Steven T. Piantadosi & Edward A. F. Gibson MIT June 2024 https://nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w.

Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has…


Evidence from neuroscience and related fields suggests that language and thought processes operate in distinct networks in the human brain and that language is optimized for communication and not for complex thought.