Despite having tiny brains, bumblebees have demonstrated a remarkable ability to socially learn how to use tools, solve simple puzzles, and cooperate to achieve a goal. It seems they can also solve object-manipulation tasks without any previous training, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. According to the authors, it's the first time this kind of spontaneous problem-solving has been demonstrated in an insect.

In 2024, Olli Loukola of the University of Finland co-authored a study demonstrating that bumblebees could cooperate to solve complex challenges. It's the kind of cognitive task scientists had previously only observed in large-brained mammals like humans and chimpanzees. Loukola et al. trained pairs of bees to push a Lego block to the middle of a mini-arena or push against a door at the end of a tunnel to get a reward.

The team noticed that the bees were more likely to engage in the tasks if their partners also participated, compared to untrained control groups. They concluded that bees can learn to solve novel cooperative tasks outside the hive and may even be intentionally working together, although the researchers cautioned that more detailed monitoring of the behavior was needed to fully understand the partners' roles.

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NASA's MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than an hour, but ground teams didn't hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth.

The loss of communication triggered contingency plans for engineers to try to restore a link with MAVEN, which orbits Mars more than 200 million miles from Earth. To no avail, they listened for faint signals and uplinked commands in the blind. Hopes of saving the mission faded over time, and NASA officials announced Wednesday that they're giving up on it.

"NASA has ceased efforts to search for the MAVEN spacecraft and are beginning activities to decommission the mission," said Mike Moreau, MAVEN's project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. 

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Thousands of electric vehicles in Waymo’s autonomous robotaxi fleet may eventually give up their used batteries for a very different purpose—contributing up to hundreds of megawatt-hours of stationary energy storage to local power grids.

That prospect comes from a “strategic supply agreement” announced by Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions on June 4. B2U has been repurposing thousands of used batteries from various electric vehicles by installing them in large stationary energy storage projects. Such energy storage facilities can capture excess renewable energy during low demand periods and release such energy when local power grids are experiencing peak demand periods.

“Our business is getting the full residual value out of electric vehicle batteries after they're no longer suitable for automotive use,” Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solution, told Ars. “Waymo puts a lot of miles on EVs and their model is expanding rapidly, and so we're just very pleased and honored to be able to work with them.”

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With dozens of companies, from small startups to tech giants, pursuing quantum computing, there's a steady flow of results as they try to find a path to utility. We typically focus on new technologies and major landmarks, which can obscure the fact that any big success will inevitably have been built on a lot of incremental progress.

The past few weeks have seen two companies release progress reports on how they're trying to get the technologies closer to general use. None of these represents a major breakthrough, but all are absolutely necessary for the technology to advance. The idea here is to convey the hard work required to move us closer to something useful.

Microsoft does material science

Microsoft is one of the few companies working on topological qubits, based on the distinct physics that occurs when particles are confined. Microsoft's system relies on a thin superconducting wire placed on top of a semiconductor. In superconductors, groups of two electrons form Cooper pairs. But if the wire contains an odd number of conducting electrons—meaning there's a single unpaired electron—it will end up delocalized to both ends of the wire. (Because quantum mechanics is weird.)

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