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SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY

Robots Make Increasingly Sophisticated Teachers

The New York Times looked at the latest innovation in education--a three-foot-tall robot. Computer scientists are developing highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks.

In other technology news, physicists at Fermilab last week hastened to deny a rumor circulating on the Internet that they had detected the elusive Higgs boson, which has been called the God particle.

A respected physicist argued in a recent paper that gravity is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

And, finally, thousands of detectors embedded 1.5 miles deep in the Antarctic ice are helping physicists detect ghostly particles smaller than atoms from faraway galaxies that could provide clues about how the universe is made.