Mercury

Serendipity

Three small wonders, picked by hand

Image of the Day May 23, 2026

Messier 2 resolved into a city of old stars

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for May 23 returns to Messier 2, a dense globular cluster in Aquarius. The Hubble image works as a weekend image because it turns stellar archaeology into something almost tactile: hundreds of thousands of ancient stars, packed into a bright gravitational swarm roughly 37,000 light-years away. Messier saw a mist; modern astronomy sees a fossil population that helps test how old stars age, migrate and survive in the Milky Way’s halo.

Credit · ESA/Hubble & NASA, G. Piotto et al.; via NASA APOD

On This Day 59 years ago

1967

The solar storm that looked like an attack

On May 23, 1967, a powerful solar flare disrupted radio and radar systems, including U.S. early-warning radar. Later historical work reported by AGU showed that Air Force space-weather forecasters helped identify the Sun, not the Soviet Union, as the cause. It is a useful Cold War footnote for a technology newspaper: invisible solar physics briefly entered nuclear command-and-control history, and the difference between escalation and restraint was a group of people who understood the signal before the politics hardened around it.

Paper of the Day arXiv · cs.LG

TacO: Benchmarking Tactile Sensors for Object Manipulation

Anya Zorin, Zilin Si, Myungsun Park, Junsung Park, Alexiy Buynitsky, Sachin and collaborators

Robots have become much better at seeing objects than at feeling them. TacO proposes a benchmark for comparing tactile sensors in object-manipulation tasks, making the question less about whether a sensor produces interesting data and more about whether it helps a robot grip, infer contact and complete practical actions. Treat it as infrastructure for embodied AI: not a new robot hand, but a common yardstick for a field where hardware, datasets and tasks are still hard to compare.

arXiv:2605.21976 →

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