People handle boxes, doors, and tools with an ease that still frustrates most machines. A hand adjusts mid-reach when something feels heavier than expected, pulls against a sticky latch, or tosses an item into a bin without stopping to recalculate. Reward AI built OM-1, short for Omnibody Model 1, to move that kind of everyday competence into robots by recording ordinary human actions and training one policy on those recordings alone.
OQO, a small San Francisco startup, spent years downsizing the specifications of a complete Windows PC before releasing the Model 01 in October 2004, a feat of miniaturization measuring 4.9 by 3.4 by 0.9 inches and weighing only 14 oz. Behind the scenes, founders Jory Bell and Jonathan Betts-LaCroix had left larger companies to pursue a radical vision for an ultra-personal computer capable of delivering the full Windows software experience without the need for a special operating system or stripped-down software. Reviewers it the smallest full Windows XP computer on the market, and that claim was valid because nothing else at the time could fit a sliding keyboard, a color screen, and the full desktop version of Windows into a package that was scarcely larger than a regular PDA.
ANYbotics began shipping ANYmal X to customers this week, giving oil, gas, and chemical plants their first four-legged inspection robot certified to operate in areas where a single spark could ignite flammable gas. Equinor and DSM-Firmenich are among the first recipients. For years the Swiss company refined the machine through an early-access program that put units through hundreds of onshore and offshore missions with BP, Shell, PETRONAS, Petrobras, BASF, and SLB.
Toyota’s CALTY design team in Ann Arbor built a family of five concepts that turn ordinary body-on-frame trucks and SUVs into machines meant for deep, unplowed snow. The Tundra, Tacoma, 4Runner, Land Cruiser, and Sequoia each lose their tires and gain large white powder-coated track assemblies that bolt onto the existing hubs.
Photo credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
Far beyond ordinary sight, a towering filament of dust and gas has taken on the unmistakable outline of a cat sitting with its back turned. Astronomers call the structure the Cat’s Head Nebula, a compact formation nestled inside the much larger Carina Nebula roughly 7,500 light-years from Earth. Intense ultraviolet radiation and winds from massive nearby stars have spent ages carving the surrounding material, leaving denser pockets to resist the erosion and form the long, irregular pillar that now resembles a feline body, head, and downward tail.