A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.
Although they’re constantly improving, robots aren’t necessarily known for their gentle touch. A new robotic system from MIT and Stanford takes a unique stab at changing that, with a robot that uses vine-like tendrils to do its lifting.
The system the engineers developed consists of a series of pneumatic tubes that deploy from a pressurized box on one side of a robotic arm, use air pressure to snake under or around a specific object, then rejoin the arm on the other side where they are clamped in place. Once clamped, the arm itself can move, or the tube can be wound up to lift or rotate the object in its grasp. The ability to deploy the tubes and then recapture them is the real breakthrough here, improving on previous vine-based robots by allowing the system to close its own loops.
Thanks to its soft morphing arms, the robot can also handle gentle tasks like lifting and moving a fragile glass vase
Tony Pulsone, MechE
“People might assume that in order to grab something, you just reach out and grab it,” says study co-author Kentaro Barhydt, from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “But there are different stages, such as positioning and holding. By transforming between open and closed loops, we can achieve new levels of performance by leveraging the advantages of both forms for their respective stages.”
In tests, which you can see in the following video, the team demonstrated that the system could lift round objects (0:18); objects in a cluttered environment (3:15); fragile objects like a glass vase (3:56), large objects like a bin from a distance (4:20); a group of objects like a bundle of metal rods (5:16); and a relatively heavy and odd-shaped object like a watermelon (10:50). While those are all impressive, the researchers say the real promise of their vine bot is to help lift human bodies in hospital and elder care facilities (which you can see at 7:30).
“Transferring a person out of bed is one of the most physically strenuous tasks that a caregiver carries out,” Barhydt says. “This kind of robot can help relieve the caretaker, and can be gentler and more comfortable for the patient.”
The most typical way of transferring patients today involves needing to rotate the person to both sides in order to get a hammock-like sheet beneath them, which is then lifted by a winch. This can cause pain to some patients and interfere with intravenous lines and other health-related inputs. Because the tubes can fit through extremely tight spaces, such as under a patient’s body, the robot vine system has the potential to make transfers more gentle and less jarring.
“I am very excited about future work to use robots like these for physically assisting people with mobility challenges,” adds co-author Allison Okamura from Stamford. “Soft robots can be relatively safe, low-cost, and optimally designed for specific human needs, in contrast to other approaches like humanoid robots.”
While the researchers were primarily motivated to create the vine-like robot for help in medical situations, they say it also has applications in the other fields, as demonstrated by the paces they put it through in testing.
“We think this kind of robot design can be adapted to many applications,” Barhydt says. “We are also thinking about applying this to heavy industry, and things like automating the operation of cranes at ports and warehouses.”
The invention has been described in a study published in the journal Science Advances.
The surviving suspect in the mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday, in which at least 15 people were killed, has been charged with murder and terrorism, the police said on Wednesday.
The United States has dramatically intensified its military air campaign in Somalia, carrying out 111 strikes against armed groups, also killing civilians, since President Donald Trump returned to office, according to the New America Foundation, which monitors the operations.
In the most recent one, the US Africa Command conducted an air strike on December 14, approximately 50 kilometres (31 miles) northeast of the city of Kismayo, targeting what it said were members of the Somali armed group, al-Shabaab.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
The escalation began in February when Trump launched his administration’s first strike in Somalia. Months later, a senior US Navy admiral said the US had carried out what he said was the “largest air strike in the history of the world” from an aircraft carrier, marking a sharp departure from the previous administration’s approach.
The strike total this year already surpasses the combined number carried out under Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and it puts Trump on track to potentially exceed even his own first-term record of 219 strikes.
The intensified campaign targets both al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate that has fought Somalia’s government since 2007 and controls large areas of the south-central regions, and ISIL (SIS) in Somalia, a smaller offshoot concentrated in the northeast with an estimated 1,500 fighters.
Somalia’s war with armed groups was Africa’s third-deadliest over the last year, killing 7,289 people, according to the US-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
The United States has been allied with Somalia’s federal government, training elite forces and conducting air strikes in support of local operations. US troops have also been based in the country.
The surge in strikes follows a directive by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that reversed Biden-era restrictions requiring White House approval for strikes outside warzones, giving AFRICOM commanders greater authority to launch attacks.
David Sterman, a senior policy analyst at the New America Foundation, told Al Jazeera there appeared to be “a demand signal from the White House for escalation” and “a willingness to allow more clearly offensive uses of strikes with less scrutiny and regulation”.
Sterman, who has monitored the strikes, identified two main drivers behind the increase.
More than half the strikes have supported a US-backed campaign by Somalia’s autonomous Puntland region against ISIL-Somalia, launched after the group attacked a military convoy in December 2024.
The strikes have shifted from occasionally targeting senior figures to sustained operations aimed at members of the group who have hemmed themselves into the caves in the mountains in northern Somalia, Sterman added.
The remainder focus on al-Shabaab’s advances against Somali government forces in the south, as US strikes support a Somali National Army that has faced setbacks on the ground this year.
The February 1 operation that opened the campaign saw 16 F/A-18 Super Hornets launch from the USS Harry S Truman in the Red Sea, dropping 60 tonnes of munitions on cave complexes in the Golis Mountains. The strike killed 14 people, according to Africa Command.
Somali civilians under US fire
However, the intensified operations have raised concerns about civilian casualties.
The investigative outlet Drop Site News reported in December that US air strikes and Somali forces killed at least 11 civilians, including seven children, during a November 15 operation in the Lower Jubba region, citing witnesses.
Africa Command confirmed conducting strikes to support Somali troops, but did not respond to Drop Site requests for comment on the civilian deaths.
The US military recently stopped providing civilian casualty assessments in its strike announcements.
According to the military publication Stars and Stripes, the pace of operations now exceeds even the US’s claimed counter-narcotics strikes in the Caribbean.
In the meantime, Trump launched racist verbal attacks earlier this month on Somali immigrants in the US state of Minnesota, as federal authorities prepared to launch a major immigration crackdown targeting hundreds of undocumented Somalis in the state of Minnesota.
His comments have been denounced in several quarters, from Mogadishu to Minneapolis.
As Amazon’s Zoox ramps up its bid to compete with Google’s Waymo, co-founder and chief technology officer Jesse Levinson says one key feature sets the self-driving robotaxi unit apart from its rival.
While a Waymo’s interior resembles a traditional car—with two rows of seats and a screen or steering wheel on the front left—Zoox’s vehicle features two rows of seats facing one another, a configuration Levinson says is better suited for groups.
“It’s just a much better experience, so your time in the vehicle is dramatically nicer,” he said at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco earlier this month. “You have much more space. If you’re with friends, it’s dramatically more social, because you’re facing each other.”
Waymo has largely dominated the robotaxi space since its first public launch in 2020, with a fleet size of more than 2,000, which recently completed 100 million miles driven autonomously. The company reached 10 million rides across the five cities where it is operational in May, double the number of trips recorded five months prior. Zoox, by comparison, is playing catch-up. After launching its first public robotaxi service in Las Vegas with free rides on its app in September, Zoox will begin offering paid rides in Las Vegas in early 2026, and expects to do the same in San Francisco later in the year, Levinson said. A few weeks ago, the robotaxi service, with a test fleet of about 50 across the two cities, passed its one million-mile technical benchmark.
A new driver-less experience
Levinson suggested that what separates Zoox from Waymo and even Tesla’s Cybercab (which is slated to begin production in April 2026, according to CEO Elon Musk) is that it was never designed to have a driver.
“The cars that have been designed over the last 100 years are for humans,” Levinson said. “All the choices, their shape, their architecture, what components they have in them—they were all designed for human drivers.”
Zoox can create a more pleasurable experience for users because it is not a traditional car retrofitted for autonomy, Levinson argued. He also said the battery life is longer than competitors’, an added safety feature that increases the likelihood a passenger will arrive at their destination, even if a hardware component malfunctions.
While Waymo is partnering with companies like DoorDash to deliver takeout and groceries, Zoox is less focused on automated delivery—an area Amazon has been developing outside the subsidiary, particularly by optimizing last-mile delivery to lower costs and improve reliability. Instead, Zoox is focused on building what Levinson calls “a whole new category of transportation,” designed solely to move people from one point in a city to another.
“So they’d love to save money, obviously, but that’s not as exciting as creating this market,” he said. “And the addressable market for moving people around cities is just profoundly huge.”
South Africa has accused the US of using Kenyan nationals who did not have work permits at a facility processing applications by white South Africans for refugee status.
Seven Kenyans were arrested after intelligence reports revealed that people “had recently entered South Africa on tourist visas and had illegally taken up work” at the centre, said a statement from South Africa’s department of home affairs.
The BBC has approached the US State Department for comment.
While the US is trying to reduce overall levels of migration, it says that members of South Africa’s white Afrikaner community can get asylum because they face persecution – a claim South Africa’s government strongly rejects.
The US has reduced its yearly intake of refugees from around the world from 125,000 to 7,500, but says it will prioritise Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers.
This is one of the issues that have caused a sharp deterioration in relations between South Africa and the Trump administration.
South Africa says the Kenyan nationals arrested in Tuesday’s raid will now be deported and will be banned from entering the country for five years.
They had previously been denied work visas but were found “engaging in work despite only being in possession of tourist visas, in clear violation of their conditions of entry into the country”, the statement said.
South Africa also expressed concern that foreign officials appeared to have coordinated with undocumented workers and said it had reached out to the US and Kenya to resolve the matter.
The home affairs department said the raid showcased the commitment that South Africa shared “with the United States to combating illegal immigration and visa abuse in all its forms”.
No US officials were arrested and the operation was not at a diplomatic site, it said.
While the State Department is yet to respond to the BBC’s request for comment, in a statement issued to US publications, Tommy Pigott, principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department, said the department was “seeking immediate clarification from the South African government” on the issue and expected “full cooperation and accountability”.
“Interfering in our refugee operations in unacceptable,” US publication The Hill quoted Pigott saying.
The processing of applications by white South Africans is being done by two companies, RSC Africa and Amerikaners, according to the US embassy in South Africa.
RSC Africa is a Kenyan-based refugee support centre operated by Church World Service (CWS) while Amerikaners is a South African platform aimed at providing information to white South Africans interested in the US resettlement offer.
The BBC has asked RSC Africa for comment, while Amerikaners told the BBC they could not talk to the media.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that Afrikaners are being subjected to a “genocide” in South Africa, even though there is no evidence that white farmers are more likely to be the victims of crime than their black counterparts.
He offered Afrikaners refugee status earlier this year after South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law allowing the government to seize land without compensation in rare instances.
A first group of about 50 people flew to the US on a chartered plane – it is not clear how many others have moved, or are in the process of applying.
Because of the legacy of the racist apartheid system, the majority of privately owned farmland in South Africa is owned by the white community and South Africa’s government is under pressure to provide more land to black farmers. However, it stresses that no land has yet been seized under the new law.
South Africa has repeatedly tried to mend fences with the Trump administration, most famously when Ramaphosa led a high-level delegation to the White House earlier this year.
One video featured firebrand South African opposition figure Julius Malema singing: “Shoot the Boer [Afrikaner], Shoot the farmer”.
However, a South African court has ruled that this song, which Malema often chants at his political rallies, is not hate speech.
Last month, the US boycotted the G20 summit in South Africa and has said it would not invite South African officials to its meetings since it took over leadership of the grouping of the world’s biggest economies.
Elsewhere at Island, the label promoted Marshall Nolan to Executive Vice President, Head of Commercial Strategy, in April.
Ellis joined Island Records in 2020 as Senior Director, A&R.
Prior to that, Ellis “nurtured talent” at Interscope Records, working with The 1975, The Japanese House, Jack Garratt and Pale Waves.
“Caroline has impeccable taste and a rare ability to connect with artists, building the kind of trust that fuels great music.”
Jackie Winkler
“Caroline has impeccable taste and a rare ability to connect with artists, building the kind of trust that fuels great music,” said Winkler. “Her exceptional ear and steady temperament are true assets to the team, and I’m thrilled to see her step into this richly deserved role as VP of A&R.”
“The legacy of Island Records is never lost on me; it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to help shape the future of the label.”
Caroline Ellis
“The legacy of Island Records is never lost on me; it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to help shape the future of the label,” said Ellis.
“I feel very fortunate to be part of a team that’s so deeply invested in the quality and craft of music, as well as the experience of the artists behind it.”Music Business Worldwide
Israeli authorities are engaged in multiple major efforts, including building settlements and pursuing annexation, to ensure there will be no Palestinian state in the future.
Israeli authorities are expected to advance plans to build 9,000 new housing units in an illegal settlement on the site of the abandoned Qalandiya airport in occupied East Jerusalem, in another attempt to cut off Palestinian lands from each other and block any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state ever emerging.
The so-called Atarot neighbourhood in northern East Jerusalem, reminiscent of the E1 plan to undermine Palestinian statehood, is to be discussed and have its outlines approved on Wednesday by the District Planning and Building Committee, according to Israeli group Peace Now.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
The advocacy group said the new settlement is envisioned to be built within a densely populated Palestinian urban area, stretching from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and Kafr Aqab in the north through the Qalandiya refugee camp, ar-Ram, Beit Hanina and Bir Nabala.
It would build an Israeli enclave in an area where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live in close proximity, with the aim of blocking development in a key area and further damaging the likelihood of a sovereign Palestinian state being established.
“This is a destructive plan that, if implemented, would prevent any possibility of connecting East Jerusalem with the surrounding Palestinian area and would, in practice, prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel,” Peace Now said.
Translation: The massacre government is working to establish a new ultra-Orthodox mega-settlement across the Green Line north of Jerusalem. The new political attack called ‘Atarot’ is planned to be built in the heart of the Palestinian state that will be established alongside Israel. This involves 9,000 housing units that Israel will have to evacuate. Isn’t it a shame?
The organisation said the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seizing every moment to bury chances for a future of peace and compromise.
“Especially now, when it is clear to everyone that the ideas of ‘managing the conflict’ and ‘decisive victory’ have led to a security disaster for Israel, we must act to resolve the conflict.”
The plan’s advancements date back to early 2020, when Israel’s Housing Ministry sent it to the Jerusalem municipality to prepare it for approval. It completed the bureaucratic preparation process within months, but faced objections from the Environmental Protection and Health ministries, according to Peace Now, which said the administration of United States President Barack Obama had also opposed it.
It would need further government consideration and approval before being given legal effect and moving towards tender processes to select construction contractors.
Most of the plan area is designated as “state land” by Israeli authorities, meaning they would not have to seek permission from Palestinian landowners.
Israel has been quickly advancing with several major projects to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory and pursuing annexation of the occupied West Bank, alongside its genocidal war on Gaza that started in October 2023 and has now killed more than 70,000 people.
The E1 plan, which would see the construction of thousands of illegal Israeli homes in the occupied West Bank, is hailed by Israeli officials despite international condemnation.
Israel’s security cabinet last week signed off on plans to formalise 19 illegal settlements across the West Bank.
Demolitions and widespread arrests
Israeli forces continue to launch raids across the occupied West Bank and support violent settlers in attacking Palestinian lands while issuing permits to demolish Palestinian homes.
Israeli authorities began carrying out demolition operations Wednesday morning in the town of Biddu, located northwest of occupied East Jerusalem, under the pretext that the Palestinian buildings lacked permits.
In the central part of the West Bank, settlers, who have been rampaging with impunity often backed by the Israeli military, burned Palestinian vehicles and wrote racist slogans in the village of Ein Yabrud in Ramallah on Wednesday.
Several Palestinians were also arrested during raids across the West Bank, including in Nablus.
A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.
