Johns Hopkins University engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart.

The bots, designed to replace risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV-drug therapy to treat life-threatening heart infections, could also be used to less invasively and more precisely treat other hard-to-reach diseases including cancer.

Traditional air quality models struggle with changing emissions, while pure AI systems operate as opaque "black boxes" that can break the laws of physics. To solve this, researchers developed ProNet, a framework that embeds AI directly into atmospheric equations. Tested across 338 cities, ProNet outperformed experienced human forecasters and accurately predicted extreme events—like severe dust storms—without producing "AI hallucinations." Crucially, it also acts as a scientific diagnostic tool, using routine hourly data to uncover and correct hidden flaws in existing chemical models.

To the point:

Late arrivals: Birdwatchers' observations show that New Zealand banded dotterels reach Australia after fall migration about four days later each year on average, cutting their estimated stay in their non-breeding residencies by about a quarter in just over a decade.

Climate change connections: The delay is linked to changes in Southern Ocean westerly winds, bringing New Zealand calmer, milder weather in winter.

Potential loss of behaviour: If this trend continues, scientists suspect the migration could all but disappear, leaving most birds in New Zealand all year.

Using satellite observations, researchers tracked water storage recovery after 468 severe droughts in large river basins worldwide. Most events were followed by recovery, but persistent deficits clustered in drylands and some inland basins. Recovery trajectories varied across basins and events, reflecting water availability after drought. Recurrent droughts and intensive human water use were associated with prolonged deficits.

Researchers have developed a multimode band-engineering framework in one-dimensional grating-based photonic crystal waveguides designed to meet the growing demand for scalable and flexible filtering in mode-division and hybrid multiplexing systems. Published in PhotoniX Synergy, the work combines multimode photonic band engineering, scalable higher-order-mode filtering, and reusable filter building blocks to enable broadband manipulation of spatial modes, polarizations, and wavelengths, providing a unified route toward compact and multifunctional silicon photonic devices.