Twenty-three years after a television crew tried and failed to kill a Toyota Hilux, the company took the same idea to an old airfield in Suffolk and aimed it at the battery version. Bentwaters, a former military strip, stood in for the studio lot. A crane did the lifting, and Reddit did the choosing.
Boston Dynamics spent this morning showing Atlas a new pair of hands, and the first thing that stands out is a missing digit. There is no pinky. Four fingers sit on a palm a little larger than an average human hand, and the assembly is a little stronger than the gripper it replaces. Engineers reached that count with a blunt test: they taped a pinky to a ring finger and spent a day trying to work. The missing finger never blocked the jobs they cared about. Chief technology officer Zack Jackowski put the lesson in plain shop language. The best part is no part.
Four small propellers sit over a single spring leg, and the pair turns a quadcopter into a machine that travels the way a pogo stick does. Researchers at the University of Toronto’s CLIMB Lab send it up with rotor thrust, then let a passive telescopic leg take the landing and hand that energy back as the next hop. Early copies ended in a sharp metal spike. On a clean floor the spike was enough. On anything softer or slicker it skated, punched in, or left the robot tipped and finished.
Cosmic rays have been running a slow version of this experiment for as long as air has been thick enough to hit. A fast proton from space strikes a molecule high overhead, the collision throws off short-lived fragments, and some of those fragments decay into muons. A muon behaves a lot like an electron, except it carries about 200 times the mass. Extra mass means the particle sheds energy slowly, so it can cross meters of rock or metal that would stop an X-ray in a thin sheet. Archaeologists already use that natural drizzle to hunt hollow rooms inside pyramids, and engineers use it to look for gaps in ground that drills have not reached. Nature only supplies about one muon per square centimeter each second, which is why a careful scan can take months.
Mike Tomlin left the Steelers sideline in January 2025 after nineteen seasons, a Super Bowl, and a record that never fell below .500. Eight months later he told Craig Melvin on the Today show that he had been working on one city in Minecraft creative mode for about twelve years, and that his oldest son, Dino, kept telling him people ought to see it.