Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley roboticist and professor of engineering, said new models make it possible for teams of AI agents to develop robot-control programs, test them in simulated environments and revise the code when something doesn't work. Goldberg, with Spencer Huang, director of robotics engineering at NVIDIA, and a team of researchers call the new approach "agentic robotics." They said it could offer a way around two obstacles in the field: the enormous amounts of data needed to train robots and the intense engineering efforts required to program them, both of which can demand vast amounts of physical and technical resources to accomplish.

Organic pollutants such as pesticides and industrial chemicals commonly pose risks to aquatic ecosystems, even in protected rivers and streams. This is the conclusion of a new study by RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, based on the analysis of more than 180 million water measurements from the French long-term monitoring program “Naïades” The study shows that pollutants are detectable in nearly all of the water bodies examined and that groups of substances often overlooked in earlier studies contribute significantly to environmental risks.

Researchers have turned distiller’s dried grains with solubles (DDGS), a typical solid waste from China’s baijiu industry, into self-adhesive particleboard without any added glue, offering a new utilization pathway for a byproduct stream exceeding 20 million tons per year.

Summary: Researchers at Tianjin University have proposed an atomic-scale interface engineering framework for improving the selective hydrogenation of CO₂ to ethanol. Rather than simply adding more catalytic sites, the framework aims to coordinate CO₂ activation, hydrogenation, and asymmetric C–C coupling within a structurally defined environment. The authors note that ethanol selectivity in fixed-bed reactors is often below 30%, depending on the basis used for selectivity calculations, and argue that better coordination of catalytic functions—not merely more sites—is needed.