Open Your Mind

Robots We Actually Want Around Why Empathy Matters in Robotics When people think about friendly robots, their minds rarely jump to real laboratories or university offices. Instead, we picture fictional companions. The kind that beep, panic, joke, or show unexpected kindness. The ones that feel oddly alive even though we know they are not. These robots are not perfect. They get flustered. They misunderstand. Sometimes they are bossy or dramatic. That messiness is exactly why people like them. What makes those characters memorable is not technical brilliance. It is personality. They respond the way a human might respond, or at least close enough to feel familiar. That sense of familiarity is what many real world robots still struggle to achieve. At Purdue University, computer scientist Sooyeon Jeong is working on closing that gap. Not by making robots smarter in the traditional sense, but by making them better listeners, better companions, and more socially aware. Her work is not about s...

Snakes and the Art of Not Being Hungry If you have ever watched a snake eat, really watched it, the experience sticks with you. A python swallowing a deer. A boa wrapping itself around prey that looks far too large to be food. It feels almost unreal, like something out of a myth rather than biology. Yet what comes after the meal might be even more astonishing. Once the prey is gone, once the bulge slowly fades, the snake can simply stop eating. Not for a day. Not for a week. Sometimes for months. In certain cases, nearly a full year passes before the next meal. For a long time, this ability was treated as a curiosity. Interesting, yes, but assumed to be some vague combination of slow metabolism and cold blooded physiology. Recently, however, scientists have begun to uncover something much deeper. Something genetic. Something that challenges how we usually think about hunger itself. An international research team now believes snakes have done something radical in evolutionary terms. The...

The Overlooked Energy Problem That Sand Might Finally Solve Sand as an Unexpected Energy Ally If someone had told me a few years ago that plain sand might help push gas and oil out of heavy industry, I probably would have raised an eyebrow. Sand feels too simple for that kind of job. You picture beaches, deserts, maybe construction sites. Not industrial decarbonization. And yet here we are, watching a quiet experiment in Finland do something genuinely surprising. At the heart of this story is a basic idea that feels almost obvious once you hear it. Sand gets hot. It stays hot. It is everywhere. For decades, energy conversations focused on electrons, grids, batteries filled with exotic metals. Heat, especially industrial heat, sat awkwardly in the background. Necessary, expensive, dirty, and hard to clean up. Sand based thermal storage flips that logic on its head by leaning into heat rather than trying to escape it. This is not science fiction. It is already running inside a brewery. W...

When Plants Are Not Alone There is something quietly reassuring about the idea that plants do better together. Not metaphorically. Not in a poetic sense. Literally. Recent research suggests that when plant leaves physically touch, something subtle but meaningful happens. They begin to share information. Not through words or sounds, obviously, but through chemical signals that seem to prepare each other for hardship. At first glance, this might sound like an over interpretation of plant behavior. After all, plants do not have brains, nerves, or anything resembling conscious cooperation. Still, biology has a habit of surprising us. The more closely scientists look at plant life, the harder it becomes to describe it as passive or simple. This new work adds another piece to that growing picture. It suggests that plants growing close enough to touch can become more resilient to environmental stress, particularly intense light. And that resilience is not accidental. It appears to be communic...

Space Based Data Centers and the Growing Appetite of Artificial Intelligence There is a certain moment in every technology boom when ambition starts to drift away from practicality. Not immediately, of course. At first it feels exciting. New frontiers. Bigger visions. Then someone says something like why not put the servers in space and suddenly the room goes quiet for a second. That pause matters. Lately, the idea of space based data centers has moved from speculative whiteboard chatter to serious investment conversations inside some of the largest technology companies on Earth. The premise is bold. Move massive computing infrastructure off the planet. Power it with sunlight. Cool it naturally. Solve energy bottlenecks and land constraints in one elegant move. It sounds almost inevitable when presented that way. Artificial intelligence needs compute. Compute needs power. Earth is crowded and regulated. Space looks empty and infinite. Therefore, space must be the answer. However, techn...