Biorobotics researchers at the University of Queensland and biomedical engineers at UNSW have created 'paraborgs'—giant burrowing cockroaches equipped with cameras and miniature auto-injection systems. In tests, the insects hit targets with injections 95% of the time when within 15cm, and completed the full navigate-and-inject sequence successfully in 72% of trials.
A mining-engineering professor in China describes being repeatedly denied underground access for research, despite designing systems meant to operate in those very environments. She notes that laws such as China's 2012 labor-protection statute, along with similar rules in dozens of countries, prohibit women from underground mine work without distinguishing between routine labor shifts and brief, supervised technical visits.
Researchers from Texas A&M, Purdue University and NASA's Johnson Space Center have developed a traffic management system for spacecraft sharing the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon. The system is meant to coordinate multiple vehicles—including Orion capsules, cargo ships and lunar landers—that will operate simultaneously as NASA builds out its planned moon base.
A new industry analysis argues that as AI coding agents rapidly improve and handle longer tasks asynchronously, the traditional sequential product development pipeline—idea, product, design, engineering, QA, production—is being restructured. Implementation, once the dominant time cost in this pipeline, is shrinking, shifting the bottleneck to verification and simulation instead.
A leaked spreadsheet obtained by Business Insider compiled self-reported salary data from about 600 Microsoft employees, revealing wide pay ranges by job level. Entry-level engineers reported base pay between $111,000 and $155,500, while senior levels reached up to $245,000 in base salary, and principal or director roles topped out around $280,000 with bonuses as high as $110,000.
Don Yansen, an MIT-trained electrical engineer who retired to care for his wife, joined an MIT AgeLab study examining how older adults use technology in caregiving contexts. Hearing participants describe how frustrating and confusing modern devices could be, he decided to build a simpler alternative and founded a new company around it.
Clara, a Y Combinator P26 company building an AI-driven primary care service, is hiring a growth engineer to own its entire patient acquisition and retention funnel. The role spans landing pages, SEO and paid channels, onboarding, experimentation, and lifecycle messaging, with the hire expected to code, ship, and analyze results directly. The position also requires close coordination with clinical and compliance teams to ensure marketing claims and experiments meet medical accuracy and HIPAA requirements.
A joint alert from the US State Department, Japan, Canada and the UK warns that North Korean operatives are using falsified identity documents to get hired as remote IT workers at foreign companies, letting them enter corporate networks with legitimate-looking access. Separately, groups like Scattered Spider have used social engineering against help desks to trick staff into resetting passwords or MFA for accounts they don't own, bypassing strong authentication entirely.
Nvidia has increasingly used investments and financing arrangements with AI companies to help drive demand for its chips, effectively acting as a lender and investor to firms that buy its hardware. This financial engineering supports near-term revenue growth but ties Nvidia's fortunes more closely to the success of the AI startups it backs.
In a new essay, Paul Graham says Y Combinator's decades of experience selecting founders show that the best preparation for startup success is deep technical or creative skill, not a formal entrepreneurship curriculum. He argues universities should keep teaching subjects like computer science, engineering and molecular biology, since founders succeed by building products customers want, not by studying management or finance.
An IEEE member recounts discovering that senior membership, a professional grade above regular membership, is far more accessible than commonly believed. Contrary to popular assumptions, the credential does not require an advanced degree, published research, or wide recognition—only about ten years of engineering experience with five years of significant technical contribution.
Autostep, a San Francisco startup building a desktop app that identifies repetitive, costly tasks inside companies and recommends fixes via AI agents or process changes, is expanding its team. The company is recruiting AI and fullstack engineers along with a Chief of Staff as it scales its product. Autostep is part of Y Combinator's current batch and has backing from Neo and executives tied to companies like Cognition, Vanta, and OneTrust.