A new report from the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation found glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026 alone, bringing cumulative losses since 2021 to 19.4%. Glaciologist Matthias Huss of ETH Zurich said some glaciers are now collapsing from internal meltwater cavities rather than just surface melt, and mean glacier thickness dropped 2.5 to 4 meters this year. Separately, MeteoSwiss reported the April-to-September period was the hottest and driest since records began in 1864.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-02
Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab have built a robotic hand detached from any arm or body, capable of crawling across surfaces and balancing its own weight using its five fingers. The device manipulates objects and moves using only its digits, without the wrist and arm assembly typical of conventional robotic hands.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-28
A team at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab has built an off-the-shelf anthropomorphic robotic hand that can walk on its fingertips across multiple surfaces and type on a keyboard while supporting its own weight. The researchers say they largely avoided modifying the hand's fingers or built-in position controller, instead training the robot's behavior, though some physical modifications were needed for it to operate independently.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-27
The developer behind the PJON networking protocol spent two months building TERMy, a natural-language terminal assistant that avoids using large language models entirely. The project began as an attempt to train small transformer models from scratch on aging consumer hardware, including a GTX 1050 Ti and an i7-4790K, but those experiments produced incoherent or unsettling text outputs.
github.com
· 2026-09-04
GoKawiil