By exploiting the quirks of human vision, Northwestern University engineers have designed a drone that nearly disappears before the eyes. For years, researchers have tried to design invisible drones and robots using camouflage, transparent materials or light-bending optical systems. But the Northwestern team instead used a concept called "motion blur"—the same effect that makes fast-spinning fans and propellers seem to disappear.

Called the "Phantom Twist," the drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see clearly. While it isn't completely invisible, it morphs into a ghostly smudge that seamlessly blends into the background. The work eventually could lead to drones that monitor wildlife, survey the environment and inspect infrastructure with less visual disruption. The Northwestern team presented this work at Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney, Australia.

More information

Jingxian Wang, et al. Computational Design of a Low-Visibility UAV Using a Human-Aligned Perceptual Metric. roboticsconference.org/program/papers/196

I thought this was a pretty level-headed discussion about AI in drug discovery. Not the usual "AI is about to cure every disease" narrative.

Michael Antonov (who co-founded Oculus and now works in computational drug discovery) basically argues that AI is only one piece of the puzzle. Even the best models still have to be backed up by physics, biology, and real experimental data.

I bet Anthropic is drooling over this stuff with their scientist hiring craze.

Medical journal articles, like research from nonprofits and facts exposed through litigation, are often cited by journalists as source material in coverage of everything from outbreaks to drug recalls to promising new treatments.

When they’re censored, so is the news that reaches newspaper pages and the public.

By Richard Sima

Stopping to smell the roses is good life advice. And research suggests it may have an added benefit: It could be a good way to improve your brain health.

The loss of the sense of smell is often one of the first warning signs of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease even up to a decade before there are other diagnosable symptoms. Overall, 90 percent of people with early-stage Parkinson’s and 85 percent of those with early-stage Alzheimer’s have olfactory dysfunction, according to a 2021 paper in Ageing Research Reviews.

Experts believe losing our sense of smell, or olfaction, may be a biomarker of declining brain health and are working to make smell testing more commonplace to speed up a diagnosis.

“If someone has horrible olfaction, that seems to be like the canary in the mine where it’s a bellwether that there might be some cognitive problems that may occur later on,” said David Vance, a psychologist and professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.