Plus, mini drones of the future ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
August 21, 2026—Lettuce might be back on the menu, bees inspire drone navigation, and physicists are hard at work on nuclear clocks. Happy Friday, folks, Andrea will be back on Monday!
—Emma Gometz,
Newsletter Editor
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Brandon Bell/Getty Images
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Bees memorize landmarks near home to find their way back. Darwin Fan/Getty Images
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Navigation, Bee-Style
Some engineers really want to make tiny drones. (Why? I don’t want to think about it.) But the problem with making them smaller is that traditional navigation systems weigh them down. So researchers have taken some cues from bees to invent a new system called Bee-Nav.
How it works: Bees keep track of the direction and speed of their movement, which roboticists call path integration. Because path integration is prone to accumulating measurement errors over time, the insects also rely on memorized landmarks to correct their course as they head back home. Bee-Nav mimics this process using a computer chip the size of a credit card and a minuscule omnidirectional camera. The camera takes pictures of the drone’s surroundings and establishes a “safe zone” it can always navigate back into using the images. Then, it uses path integration to venture farther out and retraces its steps upon return. As long as the hand-sized drone ends up back in the safe zone, it can navigate back to its dock.
What the experts say: “What I find especially exciting is how little computation is needed,” says Sarah Bergbreiter, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved in the study. Bee-Nav uses thousands of times less data than a traditional navigation system. “For the small-scale robots that my group and others work on, this is the kind of approach that makes serious outdoor deployments plausible,” Bergbreiter says.
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Ultra-Accurate Nuclear Clocks
Atomic clocks observe the frequency at which atoms change energy states. But their timing is easily thrown off by stray magnetic and electric field interference. In hopes of more precise timekeeping and less noise, scientists are working on “nuclear clocks” that observe the change in energy state of a single neutron within a thorium 229 atom after it’s hit with an ultraviolet laser. Physicists at the Vienna University of Technology figured out how to protectively nestle these atoms in a nuclear clock—by putting them inside a crystal. In a new study, they figured out exactly where inside the crystal lattice is the best spot to place the atoms.
How they did it: You can’t just put a thorium 229 atom anywhere in a crystal and expect its neutrons to be unaffected by electric and magnetic field interference. The researchers grew crystals with thorium 229 atoms inside them and found that if they targeted thorium 229 in a bad internal position, the crystal would have an uneven electric field and harm the clock’s timing. So they shot a laser at thorium atoms in the four available positions within the crystal and saw one position where the atom only responds to a single wavelength of light—making it perfect for a clock.
What the experts say: Right now, it’s a race to make clocks that can beat the current standard’s precision. “I’m not going to give you a time scale on when we will beat the best atomic clocks,” says Thorsten Schumm, a physicist at the Vienna University of Technology, “but we will be better [than our current prototypes] by at least three orders of magnitude by the end of the year.”
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Have you been keeping up with this week's science news? Even if you have, today's science quiz might stump you. Try it for yourself!
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Every Friday in summer we're recommending a great, freshly published science (or science-ish) book. Tell us what you're reading, fill in your bingo card and happy reading!
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The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence
by Kimon de Greef. Penguin Random House, Aug 04, 2026.
 The venomous Sonoran Desert Toad produces a psychedelic substance in its glands called 5-MeO-DMT, also known as “the God molecule” because smoking it induces powerful transcendental experiences. The psychedelics community has embraced “smoking toad” as a sacred practice, approved of by the Seri people Indigenous to northeast Mexico. But there has been simmering criticism of some of its most prominent practioners, leading author Kimon de Greef to dig deeper into assumptions about the origin of toad smoking, the burgeoning industry behind it and the ecological impact of the practice. This sharp, occasionally shocking story gives readers first-hand access to some of the biggest controversies (and personalities) in the toad world.
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This month, I really enjoyed reading The Ego Trip for Scientific American's Summer Reading Challenge. As science-lovers, I think we all crave new discoveries, especially when they can tell us something about ourselves or possibly even heal us. But there can always be too much of a good thing—risky journeys to discover the truth (psychedelic or otherwise) don’t mean much if they aren’t taken with care. The reading challenge is almost over, and I'm so glad I participated! Enter to win exclusive prizes before it’s done.
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—Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor
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