The companies ushering in food delivery robots aren’t buying themselves much goodwill in the Windy City.

In the short amount of time they’ve been on Chicago streets, the bots have sent residents to the hospital and smashed through bus stops, prompting local officials to set up an exclusion zone prohibiting the companies from operating in a certain section of the city.

Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.

A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when a swarm of delivery robots operated by the firm Coco caused a traffic jam on a sidewalk near Lincoln Park.

Apparently caused by a freak glitch, the video shows Ostein attempting to pass a veritable obstacle course of a dozen squirming robots, their on-board lights flashing as they congregate on a patch of narrow sidewalk. Another bot is seen maneuvering off in the distance, though it isn’t clear whether it’s approaching or fleeing the fray.

“Run route was crowded this morning,” Ostein wrote in her caption of the video.

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The video garnered plenty of reactions in the comments, the majority of which were negative.

“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare,” one user replied.

“They were swarming,” Ostein told CBS News in an interview following the incident. “They didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by.”

In a statement shared under Ostein’s post, Coco apologized, admitting “that’s not how our robots are designed to operate.”

“Our team caught it quickly, and the robots were cleared and operating normally within minutes,” the company continued. “We’ve made sure this won’t happen again.”

More on robots: As If There Was Any Question About Data Centers Being Weak Job Creators, Meta Is Now Deploying Robots to Maintain Them

The post Bizarre Glitch Causes Delivery Robots to Swarm Busy City Sidewalk appeared first on Futurism.

For seafood lovers, there are few things more appealing than a simple slab of raw tuna — a fish whose fatty, savory, and tender muscle tissue has been a delicacy for thousands of years.

Unfortunately for those foodies, fresh raw fish comes with the distinct possibility of parasitic infection. Off the coasts of southern Brazil, that risk is rising, as hauls of the common skipjack tuna come with the near certainty of parasitic contamination.

That’s not an exaggeration. According to a new report published in the journal Ocean and Costal Research and flagged by ScienceAlert, a whopping 96 percent of a recent load of tuna was infested with gut-busting worms.

Out of 53 skipjack, marine researchers counted over 1,600 worms infesting nearly every organ of every fish hauled in from the ocean. Only the kidneys and hearts of the tuna remained worm-free, the researchers noted. Everything else, including the muscle tissue we humans eat, was festering with flatworms and roundworms.

Though most preparation methods will kill the parasites, the images are pretty off-putting. As the researchers explain, the sheer volume of parasitic infection is alarming.

“These results highlight the importance of sanitary inspection and emphasize the importance of immediate evisceration to avoid the migration of larvae from the viscera to the musculature,” the authors write.

Still, parasitologists say the worms aren’t all bad. Though increased presence of worms also comes with more risk of infection, University of Washington parasitologist Chelsea Wood told ScienceAlert in a prior story that they can actually be a sign that the fish is well-sourced.

“Everyone assumes that worms in your salmon is a sign that things have gone awry,” Wood said. “But the anisakid [roundworm] life cycle integrates many components of the food web. I see their presence as a signal that the fish on your plate came from a healthy ecosystem.”

More on food: Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies Because That’s the Future We Deserve

The post Scientists Find That 96 Percent of Delicious Tuna Is Infected With Parasitic Worms appeared first on Futurism.

Consumers are increasingly encountering AI-generated images on food menus such as leathery meat and bread resembling reptile skin

During a recent lunch break, Jill Sennett saw something so unappetizing she had to share it with her 26,000 X followers: Artificial intelligence-generated menu images from a Jamaican barbecue pop-up restaurant in which the meats looked like leather belts crawling with tiny beetles.

The images were reshared by more than 500 people who similarly expressed their disgust. Eating is “such an essential human experience”, said Sennett, a 37-year-old nurse in Denver. “I think it’s a bad cultural thing that restaurants are converting to these horrific, uncanny food images that are unappetizing.”

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© Photograph: Lisa Bonos

© Photograph: Lisa Bonos

© Photograph: Lisa Bonos

Affordable, fast-heating and with a clever air fryer function, this versatile model is a winner for outdoor cooks who are willing to give up the traditional flame

• The best pizza ovens – tested
• Gozney Dome Gen 2 pizza oven review

An electric pizza oven with no flame and no need to rotate the pizza may seem sacrilegious to purists, but the Ninja Artisan electric outdoor pizza oven solves many of the hassles of outdoor pizza making. There’s no lighting or monitoring a flame, no need to keep adjusting the heat, and no need for a turning peel, bulky gas bottle or constant use of an infrared (IR) thermometer (although you may still want one – read on for details).

Equipped with four presets – Artisan, Thin Crust, New York, Pan – plus a custom setting to enable you to bake your pizza exactly how you like it, the Ninja Artisan is as effortless as can be, even next to the simplest plug-and-play gas oven. As you might expect from Ninja, it’s a multipurpose cooker, too, transforming into an outdoor air fryer with a capacity to turn out up to 1.3kg of french fries, or bake six chicken breasts.

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© Photograph: Rachel Ogden

© Photograph: Rachel Ogden

© Photograph: Rachel Ogden