Breakthrough in Nonreciprocal Light Speed Manipulation via Cavity Magnonics

Imagine you’re standing on a road where cars drive in both directions. Generally, the speed limit is the same whether you’re heading north or south. That’s exactly how light usually works in most systems, the “speed limit” stays the same no matter which way it’s going. This is called reciprocal control, the system treats both directions equally. 

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Ping Pong Power: MIT’s Robot Is Getting Really Good at Table Tennis

MIT engineers have built a robot that can seriously play ping pong, and not just bat the ball back. This bot can understand the spin, predicts where the ball is going, and interestingly puts its own spin on returns. The whole project is from MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab. It surely must be fun to build such robots, but embedding dexterousness through table tennis is a smart move as it pushes the robot to deal with speed, spin, unpredictability, and quick decision-making, all at once.

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Interview: Dohyeon Lee, Robotics Scientist at Pohang University of Science & Tech, South Korea 

Last week, I came across something that genuinely blew my mind – a flying squirrel-inspired drone with foldable wings. Yep, a drone that mimics how a squirrel glides through the air. It was one of those rare “wait, what?” moments that made me want to dig deeper. So, I reached out to the team behind it. Dohyeon Lee, one of the researchers on the project, said yes to an email interview. 

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Terrell-Penrose Effect: Visualizing High-Speed Relativity

I’ll be honest, I have always thought ‘thought-experiments’ can never be visually demonstrated. And so, we would have to keep imagining intangible concepts in our minds, like, what happens to an object traveling at the speed of light, where time would seemingly stop and length would contract. However, a group of researchers in Austria did something unbelievable. They visually demonstrated the Terrell-Penrose effect, a phenomenon predicted all the way back in 1959 but never actually observed. 

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Scientists Use VR to Teach Robots Swarming Behavior by Studying Fish

A team of biologists and robotic engineers recently used virtual reality (VR) to crack the code of how fish school, with the goal of teaching robots to swarm in the same way. Imagine you’re at a party where everyone’s dancing to the same rhythm, but there’s no DJ or leader telling people what to do. Everyone just knows how to stay in sync, avoid bumping into each other, and respond to changes in the crowd. That’s basically what schools of fish do, and it’s something that robots have struggled to…

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Interview: Dr. Nicholas Jacobson, Computational Psychiatrist at Dartmouth College, US

When I first came across Therabot, Dartmouth’s AI-powered therapy chatbot, I was immediately intrigued. The idea that technology could play a meaningful role in mental health treatment fascinated me, so I reached out to Dr. Nicholas Jacobson, a leading expert in this space, for an interview. To my delight, he agreed.

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AntGrip: Enhancing Gripper Performance with Ant-Inspired Hairs

Whenever I find myself really fascinated by biomimicry, I often discover new things inspired by it. This time, it’s a robotic hand that takes ideas from how ants work. Imagine you’re picking up a slippery soda can with a simple two-finger robot gripper. No suction cups, no fancy sensors, just friction. Sounds tricky, right? That’s exactly the kind of challenge researchers tackled by taking inspiration from “ants”.

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ULVAC and IBM Quantum Team Up to Revolutionize Quantum Computing Cooling

Quantum computing is one of the most promising technological frontiers, but it comes with a major challenge, which is, maintaining the extreme cold temperatures that is required for qubits to function. Today’s quantum computers rely on dilution refrigerators, complex and highly specialized cooling systems that keep qubits operating near absolute zero. However, these systems are expensive, tough to maintain and don’t scale easily.

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Is the AI Moat Gone? DeepSeek’s Low-Cost Model Challenges Tech Giants’ Dominance

Disruption is the new normal! – This happens to be the current motif of the AI landscape. DeepSeek has posed some serious challenges to the conventional approach to AI model development. It has proved, at least looking at the current scenario, that there is no need for massive capital expenditures on training the LLMs. In fact, the advancement of AI isn’t just about the amount of data you put in, but how well you can prompt it! This reminds of a talk when asked where an Indian startup with limited…

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Interview: Prof. Dr. Michael Gerlich, Head of Foresight & Sustainability, SBS Swiss Business School, Switzerland

Recently, I read one research paper titled, “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking” by Prof. Dr. Michael Gerlich. It is one of those research pieces, which I find extremely interesting and want to get into the depth and collect more insights. So, I tried to touch base with the research scientist and asked for his time for an email interview fortunately, he agreed. Research scientists, like Dr. Gerlich are my intellectual heroes who, despite their towering intellect and busy schedule, remain grounded…

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