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A rectangular robot as tiny as a few human hairs can travel throughout a colon by doing back flips, Purdue University engineers have demonstrated in live animal models.

Why the back flips? Because the goal is to use these robots to transport drugs in humans, whose colons and other organs have . Side flips work, too.

Why a back-flipping robot to transport drugs? Getting a drug directly to its target site could remove side effects, such as hair loss or stomach bleeding, that the drug may otherwise cause by interacting with other organs along the way.

Article on the soldiers of the very near future. This is when Internet of Things is used for military purposes allowing better situational awareness.


ENVG-B is still being fielded across the force, but the Army is already developing a next-gen system, a set of augmented reality targeting goggles — a militarized Microsoft HoloLens — known as IVAS. The Army’s also developing an Adaptive Squad Architecture to ensure all the different technologies going on a soldier’s body are compatible.

“ENVG-B is a system of systems,” Lynn Bollengier of L3Harris Technologies said at this week’s annual Association of the US Army conference. These systems include integrated augmented reality aspects from the Nett Warrior tablet, as well as wireless interconnectivity with weapon sights.

Combined, that means a soldier wearing the ENVG-B can look through their binoculars, turn on the camera in their rifle’s sight, and point that sight around a corner to see and shoot, without exposing anything more than their hands or the rifle.

For the first time, an Ebola therapy has been approved for use. The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved Inmazeb, an antibody cocktail made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

With the approval, there are now both a vaccine — Merck’s Ervebo — and a therapeutic to battle Ebola Zaire, tools that for decades were out of reach for Ebola, which is one of the deadliest infections known to humankind. There is currently an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the third in the last three years in that country.

“This is the first time the FDA has approved a treatment specifically for Ebola, which has caused a number of deadly outbreaks,” said George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s president and chief scientific officer, in a statement. “As we apply the same sophisticated technologies and manufacturing capabilities against COVID-19, we hope this will be one of many demonstrations of how the power of science can be successfully deployed against dangerous infectious diseases.”

It’s the second time in a matter of weeks that one of the insects has evaded researchers. 🤯😬


After issues with their trackers, Washington scientists have lost track of two giant ‘murder hornets’.

Asian giant hornets, often dubbed ‘murder hornets’ due to their blown-out reputation, began falling onto people’s radars in November last year. Earlier in May, it was confirmed the species had arrived in the US, with a total of 18 having been spotted.

ETH researchers are making chocolates shimmer in rainbow colors without the addition of colorants. They have found a way to imprint a special structure on the surface of the chocolate to create a targeted color effect.

Traditional methods for coloring have been around for a long time. But the ETH researchers are able to create the rainbow effect without artificial colorants. The effect is achieved simply through a surface imprint that produces what the scientists refer to as a structural color. The process is similar to a chameleon, whose skin surface modulates and disperses light to display specific colors.

The story begins in the shared corridor of a university building. The food scientist Patrick Rühs, the materials scientist Etienne Jeoffroy and the physicist Henning Galinski chat about chocolate during their coffee break. Although they work in different research groups, their offices are next to each other. They wonder how—and whether—it might be possible to make colored chocolate. Rühs is studying the material properties of foodstuffs, Jeoffroy specializes in complex materials and Galinski has already done in-depth research into optical materials.

Negotiations are a central part of many human interactions, ranging from business discussions and legal proceedings to conversations with vendors at local markets. Researchers specialized in economics, psychology, and more recently, computer science have conducted several studies aimed at better understanding how humans negotiate with one another in the hope of shedding light on some of the dynamics of human decision-making and enabling the development of machines that can replicate these dynamics.

A research team at the University of Southern California has been exploring the possibility of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans. In a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the IJCAI conference, they presented a virtual agent based on a framework called IAGO (Interactive Arbitration Guide Online), which can negotiate with humans in a three-round task. This virtual agent, called Pilot, is one of the finalists of the IJCAI conference’s global negotiation challenge (ANAC).

“Recently, researchers realized the potential applications of building automated systems that can negotiate with humans,” Kushal Chawla, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “These intelligent assistants can be really useful to augment current techniques for training people to have stronger social skills. Examples include teaching business students to negotiate for successful deals or lawyers to accurately assess settlement rates in legal proceedings.”