New Delhi: In a global first, scientists in Italy have made a humanoid robot fly. It is called iRonCub3, and is a jet-powered robot developed by the Italian Institute of Technology. The stunt is a major step toward building robots that can both walk and fly in real-world conditions.
Powered by four mini jet engines (two on its arms and two on its back), iRonCub3 recently lifted off the ground by about 50 cm while staying stable, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, advanced control systems, and careful design. The findings were described in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Communications Engineering on 18 June.
Flying robots aren’t new, but flying humanoid robots are a different beast altogether. Unlike drones, iRonCub3 has a human-like shape, movable limbs, and a shifting center of gravity, which makes staying upright in midair a serious challenge. But after two years of engineering, wind tunnel tests, and AI modeling, the team of Italian engineers made it happen.
The ultimate goal of this model is to one day send robots like this into disaster zones or dangerous areas—minimising risk to human lives. But iRonCub3 has a long way to go before it is ready for something like that.
Simulation to study impact of ‘dark matter’
A University of Southern California-led team has built supercomputer-simulated “twins” of our Milky Way galaxy to help solve one of the universe’s biggest puzzles: dark matter. Three papers published in The Astrophysical Journal described the project and the group’s findings.
Dark matter is this mysterious substance, invisible to telescopes, which makes up about 85 percent of all matter and holds galaxies together.
The project is called COZMIC, short for “Cosmological Zoom-in Simulations with Initial Conditions beyond Cold Dark Matter”. It allows scientists to test new ideas about how dark matter behaves by simulating galaxies under various physical laws. Dark matter is difficult to study because not only is it invisible, it also doesn’t emit any detectable energy. But its presence and effect on the behaviour of galaxies is known.
Until now, most simulations didn’t account for how dark matter might interact with normal matter. COZMIC changes that. It explores several possibilities—from dark matter that bumps into regular particles like billiards balls, to versions that interact with themselves.
By comparing these simulations to real galaxies, the team hopes to figure out which version of dark matter best matches our universe. It’s a major step in understanding this elusive substance and could finally bring scientists closer to answering the question of what dark matter is.
3 years worth of carbon emissions left
A new global climate report by the Indicators of Global Climate Change Initiative shows we’re running out of time to limit warming to 1.5°C.
At current emission rates, the world could burn through its remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C in just over three years. In 2024, global temperatures rose to 1.52°C above pre-industrial levels, with nearly all of it caused by human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation.
The study adds sea-level rise and land precipitation to its climate tracking experiments and finds rapid changes: oceans are hotter than ever, sea levels are rising faster, and warming is accelerating. Even international aviation emissions are back to pre-pandemic highs.
Experts say the climate is heating at double the rate it was in the late 20th century. To slow this, emissions must fall fast. The research will be presented at the Bonn Climate Conference in Germany.
Worms ‘rewrote’ DNA
A team of scientists from the Spanish National Research Council has discovered that when ancient marine worms moved onto land around 200 million years ago, they didn’t evolve slowly—they completely rewired their DNA in a dramatic leap. Their genomes broke apart and reassembled almost overnight; not literally overnight but in a very short evolutionary period of time. This challenges the classic Darwinian idea of slow, gradual evolution. It also supports a 1973 theory of punctuated equilibrium, which says evolution can happen in sudden bursts after long periods of stability.
The peer-reviewed findings were published in the journal nature ecology and evolution on 18 June.
By sequencing worm genomes at a high level of detail, researchers found huge, random rearrangements that helped these creatures adapt to land, possibly allowing them to breathe air or handle sunlight. Such massive changes would normally cause chaos or diseases like cancer but these worms survived and thrived. The findings suggest that flexible genomes might be an evolutionary superpower—and that big leaps, not just baby steps, may have shaped life on Earth more than we thought.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
Also Read: Largest-ever map of universe is as big as a 13×13 feet mural, with 800,000 galaxies