Researchers led by MIT built Ataraxos, an AI that beat the world's strongest Stratego player, a game where most of the opponent's information is hidden. → It beat the top human player 15-1-4, and went 39-2 against top players at the world championship → It outperformed DeepMind's earlier Stratego AI, DeepNash → It needed under 1/100th of DeepNash's training examples and under 1/30th of the self-play games → It combines self-play learning with planning, using a generative model to guess hidden pieces Source:

Researchers are challenging the notion that depression has one underlying brain signature, with a new review finding that conditions map to different brain circuits, which could impact treatments. Read more:

Researchers in Kenya have found that wild elephants seek out specific plants when they’re sick, injured or dealing with stomach problems. Of course they do. They live in that landscape their whole lives. They remember water across decades, recognize hundreds of individuals and mourn their dead. Why wouldn’t they know which plants help ailments too? There is a quiet wonder in how often humans are still surprised when animals know the world they belong to better than we ever could.

Research|Optics: ECOC 2026 Takeaways, NPO Gains Momentum as Slow and Wide Takes Shape We attended ECOC 2026 in Málaga last week. The debate between slow and wide and fast and narrow was a recurring topic in presentations and plenary sessions. Companies presented microLED and micro-VCSEL designs and discussed their performance, manufacturing challenges and production timelines. NPO was also in focus, with live NPO demos on the show floor and more discussion of how and when it ramps. This note covers our takeaways from the presentations, demos and conversations with companies, including developments in NPO, scale-in, external lasers, retimers, DSPs, coherent-lite and test and measurement. Detailed Report

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have determined that the 10-mile-wide subsurface Ames impact crater was formed during a meteor impact 100 million years later than previously believed, linking its formation to a violent extinction event that wiped out much of Earth’s marine life 372 million years ago.

Research: OpenAI agents scanned a UN data hub 16K+ times between April and the end of June, and circumvented a filter that was blocking their requests for data (@bobmcmillan / Wall Street Journal) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed ORCA — the Open Radar Code Architecture — a free, open-source software framework that turns commercially available software-defined radios into functioning radar systems for environmental science, without requiring users to have a radar engineering background. The problem ORCA solves is a well-known frustration in radar research: every new student joining a lab typically spends up to a year rebuilding the same basic control code from scratch before any actual science can begin. "Every new student is just recreating the wheel over and over," said assistant professor Nicole Bienert. With ORCA, researchers buy a software-defined radio — now available for a few thousand dollars compared to hundreds of thousands for traditional radar systems — attach off-the-shelf antennas and cables, download the code, and have a functioning radar. Current applications include measuring glacier ice thickness in the Arctic, determining water content within trees, and studying ice sheet base conditions. The platform has grown through monthly meetings and online forums with participants from multiple universities across continents, and researchers can contribute their own code via GitHub. The initiative aims to make radar accessible to geophysicists, ecologists, and other scientists who have environmental questions but lack the technical background to build radar systems from scratch.