Two 27 kg humanoid robots carried out live animal surgery by remote control, Google Maps eased traffic by rerouting fewer than 2% of trips, and a voice recorded in 1860 was finally heard 148 years later. [DVYio Newsletter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ggVmiyhv) Tech [Two humanoid robots with surgical tools operate on a blurred patient under blue and green surgical lighting.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/YmUtybrf) [Two 27 kg humanoid robots performed live animal surgery by remote control](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/YmUtybrf) Most surgical robots weigh about 800 kg and need a specially arranged operating room. UC San Diego’s experimental humanoids weigh 27 kg each, so they can fit into existing operating rooms and use equipment already built for people. Surgeons remotely guided the robots through live operations on large mammals other than primates. One robot removed a gallbladder with a human assistant at the table. In another procedure, two robots operated together with nobody beside the table. The university says these were the first live surgical procedures performed by humanoid robots. The robots were not making decisions themselves. Human surgeons controlled every movement, while adapters let the robots grip ordinary surgical tools. The operations also took longer than usual, required recalibration part-way through, and were slowed by latency (the delay between a surgeon moving and the robot responding). UC San Diego’s team hope smaller, cheaper machines could eventually let surgeons operate remotely in rural clinics and field hospitals. For now, this is an early experiment, not a system ready for human patients. [Infographic showing that rerouting fewer than 2% of trips around 100 bottlenecks in 10 US cities spread traffic, increased targeted-road speeds by 2%, and reduced fuel use and CO₂e emissions; reported gains include 0.35% average speed, 0.5% peak-hour speed, and 0.5–1% less fuel on targeted roads.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LVyxjPjC) [Rerouting fewer than 2% of Google Maps trips improved traffic speeds in 10 US cities](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LVyxjPjC) Navigation apps usually find the quickest route for each driver. Google Research tested a different idea: rerouting a small number of drivers for the good of the whole road network, rather like spreading supermarket queues across several tills. Over six months, researchers modified Google Maps in 10 major US cities. On alternating days, the app steered some drivers away from roughly 100 known bottlenecks in each city, but only when another route had a similar journey time. Fewer than 2% of observed trips received different directions. Traffic on the targeted roads moved about 2% faster on average. Across all roads affected by the diverted traffic, average speeds rose by 0.35%, increasing to 0.5% during the morning and afternoon peaks. Estimated fuel use on the targeted roads fell by 0.5% to 1%. Google estimates that using the system across one city could avoid the equivalent of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year. The cars moved elsewhere, of course, but spreading them across more roads meant those roads absorbed the extra traffic without creating another large jam. [Chart showing seasonal influenza infections falling most when broad-spectrum preventatives and air-cleaning technologies are combined.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/UTb2UvWS) [The $500 million plan to reclaim the 15–25 days a year we lose to respiratory infections](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/UTb2UvWS) Respiratory viruses kill about 1 million people a year and leave healthy people ill for roughly 15 to 25 days each year. Some infections are linked to less obvious harm too. A rhinovirus infection before age three is associated with a 9.8-fold higher risk of asthma by age six, while flu is linked to a sixfold rise in heart-attack risk during the following seven days. Researchers are still working out some of these longer-term connections, so correlation does not always mean the virus directly caused the later illness. Intercept, a $500 million philanthropic initiative, wants to fund two layers of protection. The first is broad-spectrum preventatives: shots, nasal sprays, or pills designed to stop several families of respiratory viruses at once, including flu, rhinoviruses, and coronaviruses. The second approach cleans indoor air using filtration, far-ultraviolet C (far-UVC) light, and antimicrobial vapours (much as water treatment removes germs before they reach the tap). Evidence for far-UVC’s safety and effectiveness has grown over the past decade, and filtration already works, though both still need larger trials in busy indoor spaces. Antimicrobial vapours are less proven for continuous use. Intercept argues that private investment alone is unlikely to carry these technologies through expensive trials while customer demand remains uncertain. Its money is meant to absorb that early risk, build real-world evidence, and make the successful approaches cheap enough to deploy widely. This Week I Learnt [Theodore Roosevelt sits inside a large steam shovel at the Panama Canal construction site, surrounded by workers.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HiU6FySS) [Theodore Roosevelt broke presidential convention to inspect the Panama Canal](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HiU6FySS) [For the initial 150 years of US history, a serving US president was expected to remain inside the country. Theodore Roosevelt ended that convention in November 1906, becoming the first sitting president to travel beyond the continental United States. He left on 9 November aboard the USS Louisiana and spent 14 to 17 November in Panama, inspecting construction of the Panama Canal. On the journey home, he stopped in Puerto Rico, then returned to the continental US on 26 November. The whole trip took more than two weeks, at a time when presidential travel meant crossing the sea aboard a warship rather than working from an airborne office. Roosevelt later reported directly to Congress on what he had seen at the canal works. Other presidents had travelled abroad, but only before taking office or after leaving it. Today, overseas presidential visits are routine. In 1906, simply leaving the country broke precedent.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HiU6FySS) Poll When you’re stuck on a problem, what actually unsticks you? Stepping away from it Talking it through with someone Writing it out Brute-forcing more attempts Sleeping on it Last Week's Poll What makes a technology feel genuinely futuristic to you? Changes how people communicate 1% Makes something invisible or effortless 24% Gives people a new sense or ability 51% Shrinks something huge into something tiny 4% Looks slightly ridiculous at first 20% Science [Illustration comparing night and day eating: later, richer foods and higher body-fat markers at night versus lighter daytime foods and lower markers.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fYP9ww2u) [Study links night owls to higher body fat and poorer glucose control](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fYP9ww2u) A chronotype is the natural timing of your body clock: some people wake and eat early, while others drift later. Among 287 healthy New Zealand women aged 18 to 45, 34% were classed as evening types. They ate more of their energy, protein, carbohydrates, and fat after 8 pm. Morning and middle types ate more before 10 am. The evening types also consumed more energy across the whole day. Their average body mass index (BMI, a measure based on weight and height) was 31.4 kg/m², compared with 26.1 kg/m² for the other groups. They had more body fat, and their blood tests showed poorer control of fats and sugar. This does not prove that late meals caused those differences. The study simply compared people’s body clocks, five-day food diaries, body measurements, and blood tests. Sleep, lifestyle, and total food intake could all be part of the link. [Illustration shows pressure to work while ill leading to burnout, then quiet quitting; based on a survey of 363 Chinese SME employees.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/bPdhEEeC) [Burnout and quiet quitting were more closely linked when staff felt unable to take sick leave](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/bPdhEEeC) Researchers surveyed 363 employees at small- and medium-sized Chinese firms and found a chain of associations: controlling, authoritarian management was linked with greater burnout, and burnout was linked with quiet quitting (doing only the work required while mentally withdrawing). That second link was stronger among people who felt unable to take sick leave, a pressure the researchers call involuntary presenteeism. An exhausted employee who must keep turning up has few ways to protect their remaining energy, so dropping optional tasks may become the only practical option. The survey cannot show that authoritarian managers cause quiet quitting, or that feeling unable to take sick leave causes people to disengage. But the pattern suggests a rather bleak trade-off: keeping someone at their desk while ill may preserve attendance on paper while leaving them with less energy and less willingness to do anything beyond the minimum. [Diagram showing a layered material absorbing heat from above, being programmed, and emitting it in another direction while retaining its state without power.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/eRiG5NhP) [Programmable material absorbs and emits heat in different directions](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/eRiG5NhP) Heat can travel as infrared light. Normally, a material that absorbs this radiation well from one direction must also release it in the same way, a rule called reciprocity. Osaka Metropolitan University’s prototype breaks that link: it can take in thermal radiation from one direction and send it out in another. Professor Koichi Okamoto and Dr Shunsuke Murai’s team combined two materials. One changes how it handles light inside a magnetic field. The other, called GST, can switch between physical states. Switching the GST between states turns the directional effect on or off, and the material keeps that setting when the power is removed (much like a single bit of computer memory). Earlier versions only worked when light arrived at a steep angle, which made absorbing and releasing heat less efficient. This device works with light arriving almost straight on. The researchers hope smaller versions could eventually route heat rather like circuits route electricity, with possible uses in infrared sensors, energy systems, and memory that stores data using light and heat. [A white, low-slung house sits amid dense vegetation beneath a tall textured grey wall, partly screened by tree branches.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) [Minimalist pale-pink house with angular walls, black volcanic-rock landscaping, and a person entering through a narrow doorway.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) [Minimalist white courtyard house with a circular opening, upper windows, trees, and a wood-panelled living room.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) [Dining room with a large stone table, built-in benches, dark wood walls, and screens opening onto an interior garden.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) [Minimalist interior with a floating wooden staircase, white walls, a rust-coloured textured wall, and rocks on a gravel floor.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) [Minimalist kitchen with white cabinets, dark wood walls and floors, and a full-height gridded window overlooking a gravel garden.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) [Minimalist bedroom with a green bed, dark wood headboard, white walls, and a small window overlooking trees.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) [Kehai House, Mexico](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wZLy5zHc) Data [Heatmap of 3,026 handwritten pages, with brighter horizontal bands showing where the pen travelled most; total ink distance is 6.5 km.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fZtXbHvY) [Heatmap reveals the writing habits hidden across 3,026 notebook pages](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fZtXbHvY) [A reMarkable 2 is a digital notebook tablet that stores pen strokes as coordinates. Each pen stroke is a trail of points, rather like GPS tracking for the tip of the stylus. One owner used that raw data to measure every stroke made since September 2025: 6.5 km of writing across 3,026 pages. The heatmap adds up the distance the stylus travelled through each cell. (To check the scale, they traced an 85.6 × 53.98 mm credit card and got within about 1% of its real size.) The result makes repeated habits visible. Page titles form a bright patch at the top left, while the ruled writing template appears as horizontal bands. A faint triangular pattern near the bottom comes from one particularly labour-intensive doodle. It still shows up because that part of the page usually gets very little ink.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/fZtXbHvY) [“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not yours to determine how good it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is ever pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/evamLL95) [Blessed Unrest, by Martha Graham](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/evamLL95) History [Four-panel timeline showing Blondlot’s N-ray claim, Wood removing a prism, the same result without it, and Nature reporting the claim’s collapse in 1904.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FgeGp8WP) [How removing one prism ended a scientific delusion in 1904](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FgeGp8WP) [René Blondlot claimed in 1903 that he had found N-rays, an invisible form of radiation named after Nancy, the French city where he worked. X-rays had been discovered only eight years earlier, so the idea did not seem far-fetched. Hundreds of papers, mostly from French scientists, soon reported that N-rays could pass through metal, be stored in bricks, and even come from the human brain. The experiments depended on spotting tiny changes in brightness in a dark room. In one test, an aluminium prism was meant to spread the N-rays into a pattern, much as a glass prism spreads sunlight into a rainbow. Blondlot said he could see this pattern as brighter patches on a glowing strip. American physicist Robert Wood visited the laboratory in 1904 and secretly removed the prism. This mattered because, without the prism, there was nothing to split the supposed rays. The pattern should have disappeared. Blondlot reported seeing the same bright patches anyway, unaware that the crucial piece of equipment was now in Wood’s pocket. Wood published his account in Nature on 29 September 1904, and belief in N-rays largely collapsed within months. There is no evidence that Blondlot deliberately lied. The tests were so subjective that expectation could shape what observers thought they saw, while failed attempts were blamed on insufficiently sensitive eyesight (which made the idea almost impossible to disprove).](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FgeGp8WP) [Vintage-style illustration showing tooth-cleaning tools evolving from a frayed twig to a wooden brush and modern toothbrush, beside a woman brushing her teeth at a washstand.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/RyMSsUgk) [Americans had toothbrushes before the Second World War but rarely used them](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/RyMSsUgk) Toothbrushes were sold in the United States from the late 1800s, but almost nobody actually used one. The habit only spread after the Second World War, when soldiers who had been required to brush daily during military service came home and kept doing it. People had been cleaning their teeth for much longer than that. Ancient Egyptians were fraying twigs to scrub their teeth around 3000 BC, and in Islamic tradition Muhammad recommended a specific twig called miswak five times a day from around 610 AD. The modern bristle toothbrush was first mass-produced in England in 1780 by William Addis. Gum disease causes at least a third of adult tooth loss, and poor oral health is correlated with heart disease (though causation has not been established). Researchers at Harvard found remnants of oral bacteria inside hardened blood vessels far from the mouth, though exactly how much skipping brushing raises your cardiac risk is hard to isolate from other factors like smoking and diabetes. Some dental research suggests that one thorough brush each day may be enough to maintain oral health. Most dentists still recommend brushing twice a day, although some studies suggest that brushing more often does not necessarily mean people clean more of their mouth. [Diagram showing a voice recorded in 1860 as a soot trace, laser-scanned in 2008, and converted into audio.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/BdTT3sRL) [A man recorded his voice in 1860 but had no way to play it back. It took 148 years and a laser scanner to finally hear it.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/BdTT3sRL) Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville built a device in 1857 that could capture sound as a wavy line scratched into soot on a spinning cylinder. He called it a phonautograph, and it worked by funnelling sound through a horn onto a membrane (like an eardrum), which vibrated a bristle that traced the wave onto the surface. The problem: he designed it to produce a visual record that humans could read like sheet music, not something you could play back. There was no mechanism to reverse the process. On 9 April 1860, the phonautograph recorded a rendition of the French folk song Au clair de la lune. The recording sat in an archive for 148 years, a squiggle on paper with no way to become sound again. In 2008, a group called First Sounds, made up of audio historians and archivists, used a laser scanner developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to trace the lines without touching them. Software then converted those lines into audio. The first playback sounded like a woman or child singing quickly. Later, they realised the speed was wrong: a reference frequency had been misread, doubling the playback rate. Slowed down, it became a man’s voice singing very slowly, probably Scott’s own. It is now the earliest known intelligible recording of a human voice, predating Edison's famous wax cylinder recordings by 28 years. Edison gets the credit for inventing sound reproduction, because Scott never intended his machine to play anything back. He just wanted to see what sound looked like. Random [Budgetmo app showing New York’s FY 2027 budget as a feed, including $507.8 million for universal pre-K.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/yxjWoTvX) [New York’s $118.58 billion budget, presented as a Venmo feed](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/yxjWoTvX) [This site turns city budgets into a Venmo-style feed, replacing payments between friends with entries such as New York’s $507.8 million for universal pre-K or $10,000 for a community garden. Each post comes from a real adopted budget, though these are planned allocations rather than proof that money has already changed hands. It covers New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Houston, and San Diego. New York gets the fullest treatment: its $118.58 billion budget for the 2027 fiscal year includes 6,488 budget lines, plus 6,085 discretionary awards worth $600.9 million. You can browse awards by council district, see large costs broken down per resident, and compare the budget with actual spending from NYC Checkbook. A rather more legible way to inspect where the money goes.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/yxjWoTvX) [Line chart showing UK pub numbers falling about 26% since 2001 while pub employment rises about 13%.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mZoSEEdd) [Britain has fewer pubs, but far more people working behind the bar](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mZoSEEdd) Britain has more people working in pubs and bars than it did in 2012: at least 470,000 today, up from 371,000. More venues now serve food, which means larger kitchens and more staff. However, the growth is concentrated in big pubs. Since 2010, Britain has gained 2,910 venues employing at least 20 people, a rise of 58%. Meanwhile, 7,100 pubs with four staff or fewer have disappeared, cutting their number by 35%. That swap works for the jobs figures, but less well for communities. Of the 12,800 pubs that closed between 2022 and 2024, 8,975 were not replaced on the same site. Nearly one in five of those sites had no other pub within 1 km, and poorer areas were more likely to lose their last local. A large city gastropub may employ plenty of people, but it is no replacement for the only pub in a village. Design [Collage of Victorian wildlife illustrations showing birds, mammals, fish, insects, and reptiles in individual panels.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/jJq7z4BQ) [Nicholas Rougeux restores 1,300 Victorian wildlife illustrations for the web](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/jJq7z4BQ) [Scottish naturalist Sir William Jardine published The Naturalist’s Library between 1833 and 1843, bringing wildlife reference books into Victorian homes. Its 40 volumes covered birds, mammals, insects, and fish, with detailed descriptions and more than 1,300 illustrations printed from finely engraved steel plates. Nicholas Rougeux reviewed hundreds of scans to find the best copy of each image, then restored each one while preserving the original artists’ fine lines and colours (rather more work than pointing a scanner at 40 old books). His digital edition reproduces the complete series, with every illustration available as a free high-resolution download. It also includes a bibliography linking to hundreds of historical books Jardine drew upon. He also explains how the restoration was made.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/jJq7z4BQ) [A huge eight-bladed propeller fills a wind tunnel, with a lone engineer standing beneath it for scale.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/SvoHHnXn) [Black-and-white view of six large wind-tunnel fans arranged in two rows of three inside a NASA testing facility.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/SvoHHnXn) [A U.S. Navy seaplane stands beside a huge wind-tunnel fan inside a hangar, with two people showing its scale.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/SvoHHnXn) [Historic black-and-white view of a large wind-tunnel complex beside a canal, with two cars parked outside.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/SvoHHnXn) [A person stands inside a vast curved wind tunnel lined with glowing vertical slats in blue, green, yellow, and red light.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/SvoHHnXn) [Inside NASA’s enormous wind tunnels, from airships to space shuttles](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/SvoHHnXn) [A wind tunnel holds an aircraft still and rushes air past it, letting engineers see how it will behave in flight. NASA’s 40-by-80-foot tunnel at Ames took this idea to a rather large extreme: six fans, each 40 feet across and driven by a 6,000-horsepower motor, could push air over a full-size aircraft at 230 mph. It opened in 1944. Alan Taylor’s 2018 photo collection for *The Atlantic* spans a century of tests by NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), from airships and experimental aircraft to Mercury capsules and space shuttles. It also shows Mary Jackson at Langley, where she worked in a supersonic tunnel before becoming NASA’s first Black female engineer in 1958. By the 1990s, computer models had made it cheaper to simulate many tests, leaving the US government with more wind tunnels than it needed. Several were later demolished.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/SvoHHnXn) [Web](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/E8EVZhBT) · [Twitter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/5VzGUu9Y) · [LinkedIn](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/6zYJKS8R)