Forget rockets and rotors — the next big leap in robotics might come from… bubbles. A team of scientists from the United States and China has managed to turn cavitation — the violent collapse of bubbles in a liquid — into propulsion for micro-robots capable of penetrating skin without any needles.
These microscopic “jumpers” use cavitation energy to leap up to one and a half meters high, all without external power sources. The system, described in Science, transforms an otherwise chaotic physical process into a miniature propulsion mechanism that enables extremely precise movement.
The most exciting potential application is in medicine — where these robots could enable needle-free drug delivery, penetrating tissue and releasing therapy directly at the targeted site within the body. Beyond healthcare, the technology could enhance industrial processes and even micro-scale space exploration.
Although still in the early stages, this project represents a fascinating example of how a destructive natural phenomenon can be turned into a useful tool. If successful in practice, this concept could pave the way for new, painless treatment methods and enable exploration of spaces beyond human reach.
In brief: Tech World Highlights:
- Analytics firm Databricks announced that its valuation is expected to grow by 61%, surpassing $100 billion in a new funding round, emphasizing investor interest in AI startups.
- ByteDance Seed introduced M3-Agent, a multimodal agent with long-term memory that processes visual and audio inputs in real time to continuously update its understanding of the world.
- Karandeep Anand, CEO of Character AI, stated that the average user spends 80 minutes a day chatting with chatbots, suggesting that most people will have “AI friends” in the future.
- xAI’s Grok website revealed system prompts for AI personas — ranging from “homework helpers” to “crazy conspiracy theorists” — with some containing explicit instructions.
- Nvidia released Nemotron Nano 2, small reasoning models with 9B–12B parameters, achieving strong results compared to similar-sized models while running up to six times faster.
AI Trending Tools:
- AgentHub – A realistic sandbox for simulating and evaluating AI agents.
- Lindy 3.0 – An AI employee with agent creation, autopilot, and team collaboration features.
- Grok Imagine – xAI’s video-generation AI, available to X Premium and SuperGrok users.
