Koalas face numerous challenges, but chlamydia is one of the gravest. As the disease spreads through populations, Australia has approved a vaccine that could become an important new tool for protecting the vulnerable species. Find out more:

ALERT: Teacher found guilty of s*xually grooming a 15-year-old student, gave him a “koala hug,” showed him her collection of s*x toys, and put on a “Harley Quinn” costume. Melanie Rock, 34, was an assistant teacher at Medina College, a secondary school in the Isle of Wight. Rock contacted the 15-year-old student on Instagram and convinced him to go to an arcade with her, where she gave him $25 and bought him a tracksuit and vapes. Rock then took the boy to her house and said he could call his mom from her room, and when they got to her room, she showed him a bag of s*x toys, lingerie, and bondage gear. She then gave the teen a “koala hug,” wrapping her arms and legs around him while he was on her bed, and then proceeded to put on a Harley Quinn costume with “tight shorts.” A few days later, Rock took the boy to Pizza Hut and saw a fellow staff member of the school and lied, saying the boy was her godson. Rock was convicted of meeting a child following s*xual grooming and s*xual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust.

A gripper with two thumbs! 🐨 Handheld data collection is how a lot of manipulation datasets get built now. Someone picks up a gripper-shaped device, does the task by hand, and the recording becomes training data. Voila! 🤌🏼 The catch is that these devices are usually shaped to match whatever robot gripper already exists. The human ends up working around the robot's morphology, which costs both ergonomics and the quality of the demonstration being recorded. The @rai_inst team designed The Koala Gripper. It includes two devices with full parity: a capture device a person holds, and a robotic device that executes the learned policy. Anything you can do with one, the other reproduces. The shared feature set gets updated as the design iterates, so neither side quietly compromises the other. The morphology is where it gets interesting. Two independently controlled underactuated fingers are opposed by a single pivoting "dual thumb", which is where the koala name comes from. → Each finger is a 9-bar linkage with one actuated and one underactuated degree of freedom, with the spring sitting proximal to the phalanges to drive preshaping → Fingernails on the distal link for precise pinches, contoured pads for secure wrap grasps → The handheld trigger traces a natural fingertip arc instead of a straight line, lengthening the stroke and giving the operator better mechanical advantage → On the robot side, a frameless motor with an integrated high-pitch ballscrew keeps reflected inertia low, so the fingers stay backdrivable at an effective mass of tens of grams The dual thumb is what buys tool stabilising, singulating one object out of a pile, and tabletop pinches. Congrats to @zubinbot and the RAI Institute team behind it 👏🏼 🔗 Project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

The market got the kind of CPI print risk assets usually like, and crypto still isn't giviving traders a clean breakout. $BTC is stuck in the range, majors are rotating unevenly, $XAU is back in focus, and the macro tape is still being pulled between softer inflation, rate expectations, and headline risk. We talk through it all tomorrow on Traders Talk, plus what the move to Avantis V2 changes for traders from here! Live tomorrow at 12:30pm ET with @trader_koala, @raymdong and the crew 🐆