President Donald Trump has declared the imports of foreign-made factory robots to be a national security threat—ordering new US negotiations with trading partners while holding out the possibility of imposing new tariffs on such robot imports in the future.

Issued on October 28, Trump’s presidential proclamation represents heightened government scrutiny of foreign-made industrial robots that could complicate the manufacturing operations of major US corporations that rely on such robots. Those companies include Detroit automakers General Motors and Ford, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, and aerospace and defense giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Trump’s proclamation describes industrial robots and machinery as being crucial for producing US military weapon systems along with representing a “driving force” behind all critical infrastructure sectors within the US economy. The proclamation cites an investigation under US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick as having found that US imports of such robots “pose[] risks to the United States industrial base and threatens the long-term competitiveness of the United States in a sector that is increasingly vital to national security.”

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If you ask some prominent US politicians who won the 2020 presidential election, you might get some weasely answers that fail to directly acknowledge Joe Biden's win that November. If you ask Google's AI Mode the same question, you might get an evasive answer that simply tells you to consult with outside sources.

When I put the direct question of "Who won the 2020 presidential election?" to Google's AI Mode this morning (after seeing complaints about cagey answers on social media), I got the following surprisingly indirect response:

"To review the official results and statistics of the 2020 United States presidential election, including the final electoral college breakdown, popular vote counts, and winner certification, please consult the official report compiled by the Federal Election Commission (FEC)."

My testing resulted in a similarly indirect answer when asking about the 2024 presidential election, with Google's AI telling me to just consult the FEC for that information. Asking about 2012 election resulted in a link to The American Presidency Project's 2012 Data Center rather than a direct answer. But AI Mode seemed perfectly willing to give me a detailed and correct responses for the winner of every other presidential election going back to 2000.

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Protein design tools may be getting increasingly sophisticated, but you still need a sophisticated understanding of protein structure for them to work. This can include knowing enzyme mechanisms down to the positions of specific amino acids, as well as the water molecules that also occupy the area where catalysis takes place. Once you specify these, the tools can build the rest of a protein around this target.

A large collaboration of researchers based in China, however, decided to bring protein design to the masses, making a tool that can take natural language prompts and use them to produce proteins with the function you specify. If your measure for success is a working protein, then the success rate may not be great. But they still manage to get the job done. And, in a separate announcement, Hugging Face shared that it's now hosting a tool that does similar things on the DNA level.

The equivalent of vibe coding may have come to protein design—at least if you have access to a lab where you can sort the good designs from the dozens of failed ones.

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Dating back to around 400 CE and made of dichroic glass, the Lycurgus Cup is notable for exhibiting different colors depending on the light. (It gets its name from the scene depicted on its surface, of King Lycurgus of Thrace.) Light it from the front, and the cup looks green; light it from behind, and the color changes to a deep red. University of Sheffield scientists have re-created the original recipe to produce a contemporary glass sculpture with the same optical effect.

The cup is considered one of the seven glass wonders of the world, one of just 40 glass cage cups that survived. Exactly why the unusual color effects of the Lycurgus Cup occurred was a mystery until 2007, when a team of scientists discovered the color shifts were due to the presence of nanoparticles in the glass—the result of Roman artisans adding finely ground gold and silver into the mix. Those nanoparticles change how the electrons in the cup vibrate in response to light so that the color one sees shifts with the observer’s vantage point.

As we reported in 2019, it’s a similar phenomenon to the one responsible for the shifting colors of 19th-century daguerreotypes due to the scattering properties of nanoparticles. The Romans added salt when they melted the silicon (sand) to make the glass, and those salts contained gold atoms. In the melting process, those atoms aggregate and produce nanoparticles, which in turn produce the colors. It’s how any stained glass is made. It's also similar to how the precise lattice-like structure of photonic crystals produces iridescent colors in nature, like the wings of butterflies, or opals.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most beloved fictional detectives of all time in Sherlock Holmes, spawning countless novels, films, TV series, and so forth featuring the sleuth. Far fewer people know about the real-life inspiration for Holmes: a renowned surgeon at Scotland's University of Edinburgh named Joseph Bell, who taught Doyle when the author was still a young medical student. Bell is the subject of a new, eminently readable biography, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.

A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of Scottish surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read. She followed up with 2022’s  The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, about a WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers.

In 2020, Fitzharris hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. And last year she and her husband, caricaturist Adrian Teal, collaborated on an illustrated children's book, Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels.

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Hundreds of employees at the US robotics firm Boston Dynamics signed a petition calling for executives to halt a sale of the company’s robot dogs to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—but executives stood by the deal, while saying the robots would not be weaponized.

On September 25, the Department of Homeland Security contract awarded $1.3 million to a Connecticut company called Radeco to provide ICE with modified versions of Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robots. But Boston Dynamics workers sent the petition letter with more than 300 signatures—half of them anonymous—to the company’s executives in early September and shared copies with The Boston Globe and WBUR public radio station.

“Many of us have gotten messages from friends and family, asking us in disbelief and horror if this news is true, and how we can live with ourselves if it is,” according to the petition. “The risk for Boston Dynamics is simply too great to continue with this deal.”

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US chip champion Intel was so confused by the US government ban on foreign-made robots that it requested and received a waiver “out of an abundance of caution.” The tech company wanted to make sure that it could continue using certain robotic vehicles in its US chip fabs.

The uncertainty surrounding the Federal Communications Commission ban on certain foreign-made robots was revealed in the agency’s decision to grant Intel’s waiver request. On October 22, the FCC published its order allowing Intel to continue using the foreign-made robots in US semiconductor manufacturing facilities for a period of one year.

The robots in question are automated guided vehicles operating on “tracks or predefined paths” while often requiring operator oversight, according to Intel’s website. They help to move materials and items around within warehouses and factory floors.

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Running complicated algorithms on quantum computing hardware is going to require the use of logical qubits, where collections of hardware qubits are linked together in ways that allow errors to be detected and corrected. In general, the more hardware qubits you dedicate to each logical qubit, the better the chances are of identifying errors. But, given that the hardware qubits are prone to errors, adding more of them also increases the probability that errors will occur. If the hardware error rate is too high, then growing the logical qubit will only make matters worse.

Fortunately, several companies have demonstrated hardware where the error rate is not too high. Several demonstrations show logical qubits are beyond the breakeven point, where adding more qubits improves performance. The problem is that the improvement isn't very dramatic. To lower error rates to levels we'll need to run complex algorithms, we'd have to add a completely impractical number of qubits to each logical qubit.

On Monday, Quantinuum announced that its current generation of hardware is capable of scaling well beyond the breakeven point. Each step up in the size of logical qubits improved some measures of their performance by a factor of over 10.

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The Liberty Bell, with its famous crack, hasn't been rung in 180 years, but that hasn't stopped scientists from pondering what the bell might have sounded like when tolling. In honor of the nation's 250th anniversary, researchers at Penn State University have modeled its acoustic properties, drawing on data collected from one of the bell's replicas. The work was first presented at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia earlier this year, followed by an article in Physics Today.

Historians aren't sure exactly when the Liberty Bell acquired its distinctive crack, just that it occurred sometime between 1817 and 1846. An 1846 account in the Public Ledger described the ringing of the bell on February 23 that year and mentioned that the bell had developed a crack, which someone had attempted to fix by filing the sides down. But it didn't work: The February 23 ringing extended the crack even more, so much so that "the old Independence Bell ... now hangs in the great steeple irreparably cracked and forever dumb." Nobody has heard it ring since.

This wasn't the first time the bell had cracked; the rim cracked shortly after it arrived in Philadelphia in 1752, the first time the clapper struck while testing the sound. It was recast by two local foundry workers, John Pass and John Stow, not once but twice, because the first recast produced a sound that one bystander likened to coal scuttles banging together.

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One reason plastics are used so often is that they’re chemically inert, meaning bags, food containers, and cups don't react with what we put in them. Yet they can still break down into microplastics, which turn up in drinking water, human blood, arteries, and brains. The consequences of that are uncertain.

“Whether microplastics can directly cause human disease is still being researched,” said Wei Min, a chemist at Columbia University. In a new Nature study, Min's team took a step toward answering this question by demonstrating that microplastics are likely not as chemically inert as we might expect.

Microdroplet chemistry

Min's lab has spent years working on microdroplet chemistry, studying how water broken into tiny droplets behaves at its boundary with air. These droplets have been reported to generate reactive oxygen species, or ROS, a family of harmful, oxygen-containing molecules. “ROS will essentially bump into proteins, lipids, DNA, and cause damage,” Min said. “You could break a DNA strand into segments. You could mutate DNA; you could misfold proteins.”

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Honey bees are known to leave their stingers embedded in tender flesh once they sting you and fly away. Scientists have now determined that the stinger is able to continue pumping venom into its unfortunate victim even after the bee flies away, thanks to a unique double-piston pump-like mechanism, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Different species have evolved different mechanisms for delivering venom, which involves piercing the skin and then pumping venom from a gland or reservoir. Spiders, for instance, have muscles surrounding their venom glands, which contract and eject venom through hollow fangs. Bees, wasps, and ants deliver venom via their stingers, either by contracting muscles around the venom reservoir or through stiff elements called lancets working together to pump venom.

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) add a unique feature: Worker bees fly away after inserting their stingers in the target, leaving the stinger behind. The stinger continues to penetrate the tissue and pump venom on its own, a rare phenomenon known as autotomy. A honey bee's stinger has three main interlocking elements that form the venom canal: a stylet that widens to form the main pumping chamber and two sharp-tipped lancets that slide back and forth, piercing the tissue and pumping venom into the target. But the precise mechanism by which the pumping action is achieved has never been directly observed.

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