Tech
Scientists find curvy answer to harnessing ‘swarm intelligence’
Birds flock in order to forage and move more efficiently. Fish school to avoid predators. And bees swarm to reproduce. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have sought to mimic these natural behaviors as a way to potentially improve search-and-rescue operations or to identify areas of wildfire spread over vast areas—largely through coordinated drone or robotic movements. However, developing a means to control and utilize this type of AI—or “swarm intelligence”—has proved challenging.
In a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, an international team of scientists describes a framework designed to advance swarm intelligence—by controlling flocking and swarming in ways that are akin to what occurs in nature.
“One of the great challenges of designing robotic swarms is finding a decentralized control mechanism,” explains Matan Yah Ben Zion, an assistant professor at the Donders Center for Cognition at the Netherlands’ Radboud University and one of the authors of the paper.
“Fish, bees, and birds do this very well—they form magnificent structures and function without a singular leader or a directive. By contrast, synthetic swarms are nowhere near as agile—and controlling them for large-scale purposes is not yet possible.”
The research team, which included NYU scientists Mathias Casiulis and Stefano Martiniani, addressed these challenges by developing geometric design rules for the clustering of self-propelled particles. These rules are modeled using natural computation—similar to the “positive” or “negative” charges in protons and electrons that are foundational to the formation of matter.
Under these rules, active particles moving in response to external forces have an intrinsic property that causes them to curve—a quantity the researchers call “curvity.”

“This curvature drives the collective behavior of the swarm, which points to a means to potentially control whether the swarm flocks, flows, or clusters,” explains NYU’s Martiniani, an assistant professor of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Their conclusion was supported by a series of experiments in which the scientists showed that the curvature-based criterion controls robot-pair attraction and naturally extends to thousands of robots. Each robot was treated as having a positive or negative curvity, and similar to electric charge, this curvity controls the robots’ mutual interactions.
“This charge-like quantity, which we call ‘curvity,” can take positive or negative values and can be directly encoded into the mechanical structure of the robot,” explains Ben Zion.
“As with particle charges, the value of the curvity determines how robots become attracted to one another in order to cluster or deflect from one another in order to flock.”
Ben Zion, who, as an NYU student, previously developed microscopic swimmers, added, “Finding a design rule of geometric nature, such as curvature, makes it applicable to industrial or delivery robots or to cellular-sized microscopic robots that have the potential to improve drug delivery and other medical treatments.”
“The best part is that these rules are based on elementary mechanics, making their implementation in a physical robot straightforward,” adds Casiulis, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s Center for Soft Matter Research and NYU’s Simons Center for Computational Physical Chemistry.
“More broadly, this work transforms the challenge of controlling swarms into an exercise in materials science, offering a simple design rule to inform future swarm engineering.”
More information:
Mathias Casiulis et al, A geometric condition for robot-swarm cohesion and cluster–flock transition, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2502211122
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Scientists find curvy answer to harnessing ‘swarm intelligence’ (2025, September 9)
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Tech
This Speaker I Tried From Soundboks Can Handle a Real Party
In addition to the rubber balls, there’s a nice physical interface on the side for adjusting volume and pairing multiple Mix speakers together if you have multiple on hand (I was only sent the single mono speaker). Setup involves installing the Soundboks app, pairing to the speaker via Bluetooth on your phone, and picking whatever you want to play. It’s all quick and painless, especially for my first-time pairing with a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Otherwise, it’s all very pro audio. Everything reminds me very much of the Peavey PA system I have in my music rehearsal space. The top of the speaker features a built-in carrying handle and a place for a strap (an accessory you have to buy aftermarket, or you can fasten it with any strap you have that fits through the hole). There are also top-hat mounts for the speakers to slide onto traditional PA pole stands, if you wanted to use them in that way at a party or event.
The grill is replaceable, as is the massive internal battery, which means that these things are pretty much indestructible as long as the amp and speakers themselves still work—the battery is the weak point of most portable speakers in 2026.
I bounced it around my yard, dropped it off my patio, and generally beat the crap out of it during my two-week testing period, and the thing just needed a little wipe down and a charge when it ran out of juice. The claimed 40 hours of battery at reasonable volume is accurate, but you’ll get about eight hours at max volume (which is very good for the category). If you need to bring some walk-out music to your kid’s all-day Little League tournament, this a great way to go.
Big Sound
Photograph: Parker Hall
Soundboks calls this speaker midsize, but at 21.4 pounds and the size of a medium-size cooler, I’d still call it a large speaker. That said, the size doesn’t make it any less portable than competitors from JBL and others; you still need a car or cargo ebike to take one of these with you, so what’s a couple inches here or there? The fact that this is a rectangle actually makes it easier to strap down than many others, especially with the holes for the strap and the built-in handle to tie down through.
Tech
Affordability Doesn’t Suck With Eufy’s Newest Robot Vac
Where the X10 Pro Omni had rotating mop pads, the rolling mop pad on the Omni C28 continuously self-cleans to prevent spreading dirt or grime to other parts of the house. Both apply downward pressure, but neither can spot dirtier places on their own as pricier, AI-powered robot vacuums will. Still, I was happy to see that it was able to scrub away some of the large dirt smudges in my entryway, though it didn’t get all of them. It also didn’t manage to scrub away all of the cherry juice I intentionally spilled in my routine mess setup for robot vacuum testing, even after sending the vacuum to do a second mopping job on one of the spots.
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Still, the Omni C28 was able to raise its roller mop high enough when it switched from mopping my floors to vacuuming my living room rug that there was no hint of dampness anywhere. The older X10 did get my colleague Adrienne So’s carpet wet, but it didn’t get mine wet, though my carpet is a fairly low pile. It did a fine job vacuuming the carpet, though I could tell the difference in suction between this and more powerful vacuums I’ve tested.
The base station is nice and compact, and includes drying fans to dry off the roller mop. That does mean there’s a gentle fan noise in the background for a couple of hours after you use this robot vacuum, which was more annoying than I expected, but you could easily place this vacuum’s base station in a less central spot in your home so you don’t hear it. You could also set up a schedule for the vacuum to run in the morning and finish its drying job before you get home.
Multi-Floor Madness
Photograph: Nena Farrell
My favorite feature on the Omni C28 is that, even at this price point, it can still learn multiple maps. While it can’t climb up stairs, you can move it around your home and switch the maps in the app to the floor you’ve relocated to. This isn’t new for Eufy, as the older affordable model can do that too, but it’s nice to see the feature maintained when I’ve tried more expensive robot vacuums that don’t include it. It’s pretty simple to use; you’ll go to the maps, select “make a new map,” and then activate the robot to map. Once the map is made, you’ll switch to that map from the little map icon on the right side, which will label them with numbers in the order you created them.
Tech
‘She’s Never Going to Age’: Porn Stars Are Embracing AI Clones to Stay Forever Young
Lisa Ann technically quit the porn business in 2019, but for $30 a month you can now dream up any X-rated scenario of her on your computer.
Ann, 53, was an adult performer for three decades starting in the mid 1990s and retired because she had reached her savings goal.
But last year she had a change of heart. Ann, who considers herself an AI fanatic, signed a contract with OhChat, a London-based AI companion company, to license her likeness on its platform, essentially creating an AI version of her in every way that can be used to make sex scenes for paying customers: same voice, same physique, and same pillowy brown hair.
As issues around deepfakes intensify and questions about the future of the adult industry become more dire with the passing of age-verification laws, several AI companion platforms want to create a new standard for consent-driven AI porn. More than sexting a faceless chatbot, digital twins—also called duplicates, doubles, clones, or replicas—draw on the exact likeness, including speech and mannerisms, of your favorite performers and creators.
Ann, now a self-help author and sports radio host, represents a growing faction in adult entertainment who not only believe AI is going to reshape the sex industry but who want a say in how that change materializes. She sees the decision to partner with OhChat as a way to tap into a fountain of youth—and stay at her peak forever.
“This keeps my name alive,” she says of her digital twin. “She’s never going to age.”
For Cherie Deville, a 47-year-old performer known for shooting MILF content, digital twins are just a smart business strategy to earn passive income while the opportunity is hot. “We can either let the makers of AI take the lion’s share of the money in the sex-work space, or creators and businesses can get on board and start creating their own revenue sources through AI.”
OhChat creators, who must submit 30 images and undergo voice training with a bot, sign an agreement stating the level of sexual content allowed for their digital twin. Ann is considered a “Level 4”—the highest on the platform—which means paying members can create scenarios and chats of her that include full nudity and sex. Per the company’s guidelines, clones can be deleted at any time.
“For guys that like to say good morning or good night, they now have that access. The fact that I’m not shooting scenes anymore also allows new scenes to be created,” Ann says.
Once described by CEO Nic Young as the “love child between OnlyFans and OpenAI,” OhChat launched in 2024 and has since scaled to over 400,000 users. According to data shared with WIRED, OhChat has 250 creators, 90 percent of which are female, and has contracts with celebrities Carmen Elektra and Joe Exotic. The platform runs on a tiered subscription model—$5 a month for on-demand texts or up to $30 for unlimited adult content—and the company, like OnlyFans, takes a 20 percent cut.
Other competitors in the space include My.Club, Joi AI and SinfulX AI, the platform that adult film actress Georgia Koneva partnered with this month, saying, in a press statement, that her avatar gave her a “new way to share my voice and personality with the people who follow me.” According to SinfulX AI, it also develops “original” synthetic characters using licensed source imagery from adult performers whose content it has the rights to use. In the same statement, the company said that those AI-generated “characters” are “designed not to replicate any single individual while still maintaining the realism for which its content is known.”
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