Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. Awarded jointly by the Bavarian State Government and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany. Rus accepted the prize on July 23 at the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residence. The selection committee cited four strands of her work: self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Together they describe a 30-year effort to build machines that hold up outside the lab, in conditions no one scripted in advance. That effort has arrived at a moment when physical AI has become a preoccupation for industry leaders and policymakers alike. When human-robot collaboration comes up, the examples tend to be household chores or the factory floor. Rus is working several orders of magnitude wider than that, developing algorithms and systems that put autonomous robots into transportation, agriculture, medicine, the home, and environmental monitoring. She is also a pioneer of soft robotics, where compliant machines manipulate the world more safely and adapt to it more readily than rigid ones can....

The DNA-shredding approach, reported in two papers in Nature1,2, could provide a way for researchers to kill cancer cells that express 'undruggable' mutant proteins that have been difficult to target using conventional medicines. 'It's a molecular kill switch that recognizes a particular RNA,' says Yang Liu, a molecular biologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, and an author of one of the papers. 'This is basically a programmable chemotherapy.' A therapy that uses this approach to target head and neck cancers caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) is already in early development at Akribion Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in Zwingenberg, Germany. The goal is to produce the first clinical-trial data by 2030, says company co-founder Paul Scholz, who is head of research and development at Akribion and a co-author of one of the papers. CRISPR systems occur naturally in bacteria and other microorganisms, in which they act as a protective immune mechanism. Some CRISPR systems use RNAs that direct CRISPR-associated (Cas) enzymes to target stretches of DNA in viruses and other invaders. The Cas enzyme then cuts the DNA, destroying the interloper. For more than a decade, researchers have harnessed and modified such systems to edit genomes, creating their own guide RNAs to direct the Cas enzymes to a desired site for editing....

In The Odyssey, Homer records the earliest imaginings of autonomous ships guided by what sounds remarkably like artificial intelligence to modern readers. The ships of the Phaeacians, which carry Odysseus home to Ithaca, 'know every city, every fertile land'. They 'have no steersmen', and 'know by instinct what their crews are thinking and propose to do'. Homer's epic tells of the adventures and mishaps of Odysseus as he struggles home from the Trojan War. Along with its prequel, The Iliad, it is a foundational piece of literature with roots as far back as 1600 bc. But for all The Odyssey's fantastical tales of monsters and magic, it also gives glimpses into the science, medicine and technology of the Homeric world. After being transmitted orally for centuries, The Odyssey was written down during the Iron Age, around 800 bc. Accordingly, it reflects an anachronistic mix of metalwork, from iron knives and gates to bronze spears and swords that reflect its late Bronze Age roots. There are also hints of steel production....

Every heartbeat is choreographed not just by the brain but also by a mysterious nervous system embedded in the heart itself. Now, scientists studying mice have started to unravel how this complex system works to keep the heart beating steadily even at times of extreme stress ' findings that challenge the classic view that all cardiac neurons are alike. 'The key is to keep the heart functional no matter what happens. Because if the pump function stops, you will die,' says Rui Chang, a neuroscientist at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and co-author of the new paper. Like the gut's widely recognized 'second brain', the heart contains a mini-brain of its own ' known, more formally, as the intrinsic cardiac nervous system. This network of neurons is embedded in the fat pad surrounding the heart. The system's neurons exchange messages with the brain and with each other, and are the final players in a long chain of neurons that controls cardiac function. But because intrinsic cardiac neurons are exceedingly rare, making up only about 0.01% of the cells in a piece of heart tissue, their precise roles have been hard to pin down, says Chang....