DEEP Robotics built its latest firefighting tool around the X30 quadruped platform and gave it a high-pressure pulse water cannon. The result lets crews attack flames in places too unstable or toxic for people to enter right away. Instead of rolling in with heavy hoses and facing immediate danger, operators stay back and direct precise bursts of water or foam while the robot handles the close work.

Recent demo footage has surfaced, showing the machine moving across an outdoor patio, getting into position, and then releasing a thick cloud of fine suppressant on a small controlled fire. The spray mist spreads quickly and visibly slows the flames without interfering with people close. The same capability applies to larger industrial situations where smoke, heat, and structural dangers make direct human entrance time-consuming and risky.

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The X30 base is already pretty tough when it comes to tackling rough terrain. It can easily ascend industrial stairs with 45-degree slopes, step over obstacles taller than 20 centimeters, and maintain balance on slippery metal grating, loose gravel, wet surfaces, and muddy factory floors. That important because a fire scene may contain collapsed scaffolding, spilled materials, or flooded areas, and this robot is equipped to handle them. The firefighting version carries the additional weight of the cannon system, yet it travels with the same smooth stability.

Even when visibility is reduced to zero, the sensors provide the operator with a pretty clear view. The LiDAR generates 3D maps in real time, while the depth cameras, infrared imaging, and high-resolution vision sensors all work together to allow the robot to navigate, detect heat sources, and avoid new threats as conditions change. Dual-spectrum cameras cut straight through the smoke, and gas detection offers an extra layer of protection against chemical or hazardous-material fires. All data is sent back to the command point via low-latency lines, and in some cases, drones or other robots provide additional viewpoints.

The power comes from batteries that last longer than previous generations, ranging from 2.5 to 4 hours depending on the load and how much it moves. The system has a quick-release feature that allows staff to swap out the pack in seconds without the use of any equipment, allowing them to keep the operation rolling even when one unit is required to remain stationary for an extended period. The entire system has an IP67 classification, so it can withstand dust and a little water spray without shutting down.

The pulse delivery method on the cannon itself represents the most significant departure from traditional firefighting gear. It doesn’t employ a continuous stream that soaks everything in its path; instead, it produces quick, intense bursts or a fine micron-level mist. According to technical specifications, a single liter of water can produce almost 1700 liters of fast-moving pulsed mist. This fine substance absorbs heat quickly, gets between the fire and the oxygen surrounding it, and can penetrate into narrow spaces or around barriers far better than a solid jet. The operator may alter the patterns and angle remotely, allowing them to tailor the spray to the unique situation, whether it’s a wide-area suppression or a targeted hit on a particular hotspot.

The wireless cannon configuration has a range of 60 meters, with some setups providing coverage of up to 120 degrees. This keeps the robot and its operators away from the “death zone,” which is where temperatures and structural collapse hazards are highest. There does appear to be a linked hose option in certain demos, which allows them to maintain a continuous flow from a hydrant or a tender while the robot moves forward. In each case, the goal is to provide effective suppression while keeping the public at a safe distance.

Astronomers just received the largest and sharpest visible-light portrait ever assembled of the Milky Way’s central bulge. The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope produced this six-gigapixel mosaic during a single day of observations in March 2025, packing more than sixty million stars into one frame along with dark dust clouds and pockets where new stars are forming.

The image spans a vast expanse of sky that most space telescopes cannot capture in a single glance. To get the complete image, 9 separate snaps from Euclid’s camera were stitched together, with each section covering more ground than the entire Moon from Earth. The original data was black and white, but colors were added later using similar observations from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, which greatly improved the identification of different types of stars and gas.

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The middle of the frame is covered in golden yellow stars that are so tightly packed that it resembles a sparkling sprinkle of glitter on sand. The galactic bulge, a massive center structure containing 8 billion stars, is primarily composed of older, colder stars. Bits and pieces of deeper colors and channels cut through everything like black ink blots or wisps of smoke. These are dense clouds of dust and gas soaking up the light from the stars behind them.

As you move up the image, the color palette changes slightly, with the reds and purples becoming more stronger and some dazzling blue lights standing out against a faint red glow. These blue lights are actually young, enormous stars that recently formed in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Their light ionises the hydrogen gas around them, resulting in the red glow seen in spots. Everything is visible from a distance of approximately 26 000 light years away, and you’d have to go through a lot of intervening material in our galaxy’s disk to see it.

The amount of detail here is incredible, especially given how bright and packed the galactic center is generally, which swamps the detectors with all that brightness and dust, but Euclid’s built-in sharpness allows it to separate individual stars even in the most congested locations. The resolution is equivalent to the Hubble camera, but it can capture 270 times more sky in each frame.

A ground-based telescope like Keck would take a whopping 2,000 hours to cover the same ground with the same level of quality. To be honest, the true value of this shot stems from using it as a baseline for future observations. Astronomers will be able to compare it to later images to discover microlensing events, which occur when the gravity of a foreground star and any planets it may have temporarily increases the light from a background star.

The way this brightens allows you to tell if a planet exists, and repeating the process allows you to compute the planet’s mass. Over the last 20 years, astronomers have discovered over 300 exoplanets near the galactic core. Euclid’s map of the stars presently contains 51 known planets, and it will aid in the finding of many more, as well as determining the masses of planets that have already been detected, such as one icy globe that has been present for the past 20 years.

Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers — after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.

Bloomberg reports the company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems” with disappointing results. So the company “brought back technical specialists,” and those specialists “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”

Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean Ford is abandoning its AI plans entirely. Instead, it’s using the rehired employees — referred to as “gray beard” engineers — to train younger staff and reprogram AI tools.

This rehiring seems to be paying off, with Ford anticipating that it will lead to $1 billion in reduced costs this year. The automaker also claimed the top spot among mainstream brands in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey released this week.

ISTE+ASCD — the organization behind the editorially independent news site EdSurge — announced a new official name on June 28: The International Society for Transforming Education.

The announcement was made at the opening general session of the organization’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida. Jeremy Owoh, president of the International Society for Transforming Education and superintendent of Jacksonville North Pulaski School District, explained that the name change had been in the works for more than a year.

“We knew that the [merger] needed to happen first and then once we grew together as a community then we could take on that [renaming] task,” he said. “This is a change we’re making very thoughtfully.”

Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Transforming Education, told attendees that the name change is intended to reflect a global focus on aligning instructional strategy, technology use and educator practice to improve student outcomes and engagement. 

“We believe that this name most effectively captures what both legacy organizations were always about,” he said. “Our new name shifts the focus from how we do it, to why we do it. And it shows how serious we are about transforming learning together.”

Some attendees expressed enthusiasm over the new name. “Oh, I’m excited,” said Elizabeth Diamond, an associate professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Words are so important, and those words are where we’re headed as teachers.”

Julie Keller, also a Temple University associate professor, added, “There’s power in the words, and it really brings together what we’re trying to do.”

Other attendees, including legacy-ASCD member Ruth Letang-Horton, vice president of the North American Division of SDA, were less enthusiastic. “I feel like the ASCD part is really lost,” she said. “Your feeling is like, ‘Wait a minute, what about ASCD?’ It’s because I’ve been an ASCD member for decades.”

The new name is the latest phase of the merger between ISTE and ASCD, which happened in 2023. According to Culatta, membership, educator certifications, the ISTE Standards and professional learning programs will continue without interruption under the new brand.

Read the full press release here.

(Editor’s note: EdSurge is an editorially independent newsroom of the International Society for Transforming Education.)

science

Remove something from the internet? You can’t stop the (climate change) signal, Mal

It’s back! After Donald Trump shuttered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate.gov website in 2025, cutting off public access to its 15-year archive of climate information, former members of the site’s team have brought much of it back at a new domain.

“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Climate.us managing director Rebecca Lindsey said of the new platform in a press release.

Lindsey, who previously served as the Climate.gov program manager and lead editor, told The Register in an email that she and one of the web developers responsible for the site were the first to be caught up in government purges when DOGE swept through the department in late February 2025. 

“In May, political appointees directed that all the remaining Climate.gov editorial and GIS/data visualization staff be removed from the contract,” Lindsey added. 

Created in cooperation with sustainability nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, Climate.us aims to be an independent alternative to its old .gov, and many of the former NOAA crew behind the previous website have teamed up for the new initiative to “keep climate information accurate, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful for the people who rely on it.” 

Climate.gov, which now redirects to a NOAA page about climate but which hosts none of the data the shuttered site used to contain, was taken offline in July 2025 following a Trump executive order prioritizing “gold standard science.” The order decried what it called the prior administration’s politicization of science by, among other things, “encouraging agencies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.” 

The EO called out climate change science as a particular area of concern, arguing that prior climate science models relied on worst-case scenarios, which somehow meant the public availability of 15 years of climate data and reporting ought to change. 

The shuttering of climate.gov followed a day after the order, leading to scientists expressing concern about the ability of governments, the public, and private organizations to combat the effects of a changing climate, whether the Trump administration believed the data was true or not. 

“This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people’s access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts,” University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs told The Guardian in July 2025, following closure of the site and removal of other climate information from public repositories. 

Changes to the site actually began before that, Lindsey told us. Prior to her termination, the Climate.gov team was ordered to search its archives and remove any information that violated Trump’s Gulf of America order and ban on DEI programs. Guides on teaching climate change and principles of climate literacy were among documents purged from the site in that sweep. 

Climate.us, and Climate.gov before it, are designed to be a bridge between scientists studying the climate and the public, Lindsey told us.

“Most of those functions we can perform almost as well outside of the federal domain as in it,” Lindsey said. “However, losing access to the tremendous store of knowledge and expertise possessed by federal scientists, with whom we partnered to make sure our content was accurate, is a real blow.” 

All of the content that was purged from the .gov is now back, along with blogs from experts, climate status reports, maps and data pathways, and national assessments of climate change as well. 

Lindsey told us that rapidly changing political winds have led her to believe that the government isn’t the right place for that mission to continue, and that she would have concerns about returning the site to federal management if a future administration changed its position on climate change. 

“I believe that fostering climate literacy is a public good, one of those things that benefit society as a whole, rather than one company or person,” the Climate.us director told us. “So I would definitely have concerns that going back to the government would just put us on a hamster wheel, where we’d face the same situation the next politics shift.” 

Regardless of whether that offer comes, Lindsey said that the Climate.us team will continue with the same mission it had before the Trump administration attempted to quash it: Getting climate science in front of the public in a manner that’s understandable so they can make their own decisions about how to respond. 

“We aren’t trying to tell people what to do about climate change,” Lindsey said. “We just think that people will come up with better strategies to confronting the world’s climate challenges if they understand what the science is telling us.” ® 

The fine can now potentially hit 99 million AUD, or $68 million.

In this week’s “Sunday Reboot,” Malcolm ponders why Apple TV doesn’t do game shows, and if it ever will properly work competition-based shows into its streaming service.

Anyone paying a subscription expects to get their money’s worth from their monthly outlay, especially when it comes to streaming services. I occasionally look at the collection that I pay for each month, and if I haven’t watched it enough in the last few months, it gets cancelled for a while.

This does help save a bit of money, but the one that I simply cannot do this to is Apple TV. That’s primarily because it’s in my Apple One subscription and I use everything else in the package a lot.

Since getting rid of Apple TV isn’t an option, I have to come up with reasons to actually watch stuff on it. That is surprisingly hard, because I’m not really a narrative-driven guy.

With the exception of Ted Lasso and rare viewings of light sci-fi, I can’t really get into the content Apple TV provides in a major way.

I believe the problem, at least for my particular viewing habits, is that Apple doesn’t do game shows.

It does do sports, certainly, and that would be considered competition in nature. But I’m discounting them as gameshows and reality competition shows are a different thing entirely.

I am very much a trivia nut, and I can get behind people doing tasks and competing in challenges. While I prefer “shiny floor” studio game shows, I’m not against reality competition shows either, and I even seek out the weird and wild ones, too.

My favorite is still Release the Hounds, which had people take on horror-themed tasks before trying to outrun dogs for money. As in real dogs chasing after and taking down the contestants.

A close second is the much lighter and family-friendly “Chef and My Fridge” on Netflix.

This is all stuff that Apple TV shies away from almost entirely. You certainly won’t be able to find an Apple Original trivia show on the service at all.

Three Whammies

Apple has, so far, produced three competition shows in its long-form programming history. Just three, and that’s if you stretch the definition a tiny bit.

None of them was what you could refer to as a smash hit at all.

The earliest, which predates Apple TV, was 2017’s Planet of the Apps. While Apple TV didn’t exist, it premiered on CNBC and was also available on Apple Music and iTunes.

It was a painfully obvious idea. A Shark Tank-esque show promoting app development by making people pitch apps that they thought could make them tons of money.

It was also a pretty bad show to watch, with developers trying to make Gary Vaynerchuk, Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Will.I.Am care about their “great” idea. Really, the less remembered about it, the better.

Apple’s second real attempt, first for Apple TV itself, was My Kind of Country in 2023, which attempted to take on The Voice. Country singers around the world were gradually eliminated until one person won $100,000 and promotion on Apple Music.

This, again, makes sense for Apple to create, since it does the whole Apple Music thing.

But it evidently wasn’t enough of a hit to warrant a second series. It hasn’t officially been cancelled, but it’s also not been renewed either.

Door number three is Kpopped, which again is music, but barely counts as a competition show. Capitalizing on the K-pop wave, it combined established groups with Western artists, gave them 48 hours, and made them perform to an audience.

There is a vote to determine who did the best, so there is technically a competition aspect at play. But really, it’s an excuse to show established Western artists like Megan Thee Stallion, the Spice Girls, Kesha, and Kylie singing alongside K-pop groups like Billie and Itzy.

It’s basically fluff and an attempt to cash in on a global trend. Again, can’t really fault Apple for trying.

What we can fault Apple for is not trying enough.

Rivals

Pretty much every major streaming service has some form of game show or competition reality show on its current roster. I also don’t just mean shows from their imported back catalogs, but originals commissioned by the streaming services themselves.

Amazon’s got the Mr Beast-fronted Beast Games along with Last One Laughing, the James Bond-themed 007: Road to a Million, and a season of Pop Culture Jeopardy.

Netflix is far more prolific and is also very successful with its own content. You have skill-based shows like Blown Away and Is It Cake?, and physical competition shows such as Physical 100 and Floor Is Lava.

Its more cerebral content includes The Devil’s Plan, Million Dollar Secret, and the service-switching Pop Culture Jeopardy. Offbeat reality competition is also there with the decent Zombieverse, the middling Squid Game: The Challenge, and the throw-away Snowflake Mountain.

Disney+ is a bit of a different story, in part due to it pulling content from TV channels and studios it owns, which typically go on normal broadcast television first. The original programming side of things is a bit thin, but there was Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge, which was an attempt at a kids’ gameshow based on the film franchise.

It didn’t really work that well, but at least Disney tried.

Game show economics

Game shows and reality shows have a lot of aspects that studios like. That includes the relatively low per-episode cost to produce a season of a show.

For a studio quiz, you only need one small set, which is really cheap if it’s a long-running show. Reality competition shows need a lot more, but far from the scale of what is needed for a high-budget drama.

Staffing is also relatively cheap compared to scripted programming, as the prize contestants fight over can be less than the total cost of a bunch of actors and extras.

Studio quizzes are also cheaper in terms of crew costs, as you can get multiple episodes in the can in a day. Short production times save money.

The economics of a game show, even one with a big six or seven-figure cash prize, make it that the cost of production is lower overall. If you’re careful, you can create multiple game shows for the same cost as one mid-size dramatic production.

That reality makes it easy for someone like Netflix to churn out multiple competition shows, in the hope that a few become hits. It’s worked for decades on broadcast television, and also for Netflix.

Quality, not quantity

While I can wish for Apple to do some decent game show-like content on its streaming platform, it’s something that probably won’t ever happen.

Since the beginning of Apple TV+, years before losing the plus, it had a remit to offer high-quality programming to viewers. In one early interview, then VP of Software and Services Eddy Cue was adamant that Apple was working on “creating the best” content instead of “creating the most.”

This is a strategy that has served Apple TV very well. Over the years, it has become known as a dramatic powerhouse, winning many awards and accolades in the process.

It even recently led to Cue, now SVP of Services and Health, to be named the 2026 Entertainment Person of the Year at Cannes Lions.

Evidently, he knows what he’s doing.

Apple is not in the business of being cheap with production. It does not believe in the shotgun approach to content, as it strives to make everything that comes through its doors a hit.

Unless there’s a sudden turnaround in strategy from Cue or someone else in Apple’s leadership team, it’s a policy that it will maintain for the foreseeable future.

Game shows, sadly, have no place on Apple TV. No question about it.

Last week’s Sunday Reboot discussed Beats beating FIFA at the advertising game and GymKit on iPhone.