After outliving Booker T. Bones, their second service dog, Brenda and Brian Marquis still needed help with some of the more difficult parts of daily life.

They found Robbie, a robot that rolls out of a hallway into their living room several times a day.

“Do you want to exercise now? Please answer yes or no,” the caregiver robot asks 59-year-old Brian Marquis, who has been living with a traumatic brain injury since a 2012 car crash.

“Yes,” he responds...

An international team led by astronomers at the University of Sydney has uncovered the clearest evidence yet for the origin of an unusual class of cosmic signals. In doing so, they have identified a rare stellar system that is providing scientists with a natural laboratory to study extreme physics.

Using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, the team discovered a small, dense star, called a white dwarf, shredding material ...

Osteoporosis is a silent disease where bone loss develops gradually before fractures occur. Current clinical screening recommendations mainly focus on older women and selected high-risk groups, leaving some men, younger adults, and individuals with normal body weight completely outside routine screening pathways.

To close this care gap, researchers from St. Paul’s Hospital and National Taiwan University have demonstrated how AI can leverage routine chest X-rays to detect asymptomatic bone loss, closing critical gaps in screening healthy Asian populations. Their paper is published in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

Strikingly, the study found that more than half of the confirmed abnormal bone-density cases...

Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on moving large amounts of data between memory and processors, a design that limits speed and increases energy use. The human brain works differently: it combines memory and computation within synapses, allowing fast, efficient learning and perception. Replicating this approach in hardware is a central goal of neuromorphic computing, especially for tasks like vision, where most real-world information is gathered and processed.

A fully optical artificial synapse
In...