An international team of scientists developed augmented reality glasses with technology to receive images beamed from a projector, to resolve some of the existing limitations of such glasses, such as their weight and bulk. The team’s research is being presented at the IEEE VR conference in Saint-Malo, France, in March 2025.
Augmented reality (AR) technology, which overlays digital information and virtual objects on an image of the real world viewed through a device’s viewfinder or electronic display, has gained traction in recent years with popular gaming apps like Pokémon Go, and real-world applications in areas including education, manufacturing, retail and health care. But the adoption of wearable AR devices has lagged over time due to their heft associated with batteries and electronic components.
AR glasses, in particular, have the potential to transform a user’s physical environment by integrating virtual elements. Despite many advances in hardware technology over the years, AR glasses remain heavy and awkward and still lack adequate computational power, battery life and brightness for optimal user experience.
We thought we knew the human body — but a new organ has been officially discovered.
In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers have officially classified the mesentery—a structure in the digestive system—as a distinct human organ.
Previously thought to be a fragmented and insignificant part of the abdominal cavity, new research reveals that the mesentery is actually a continuous structure that plays a crucial role in holding the intestines in place.
This reclassification, led by J Calvin Coffey from the University Hospital Limerick in Ireland, has been recognized in medical textbooks like Gray’s Anatomy and is now being taught to medical students. While its precise function remains unclear, studying this newly recognized organ could lead to breakthroughs in understanding and treating abdominal and digestive diseases.
The mesentery’s discovery marks the beginning of a new medical field—mesenteric science—which aims to uncover its role in human health. Researchers believe that a deeper understanding of its functions will help identify diseases linked to abnormal mesenteric activity. This revelation reminds us that, despite advances in science, there is still much to learn about our own bodies. With further research, the mesentery could hold key insights into improving gastrointestinal health and developing innovative treatments for abdominal disorders.
Reasoning about the physical world enables people to successfully interact with and manipulate their environment. In this Review, Hartshorne and Jing bridge findings from education, developmental psychology and cognitive science and discuss how best to reconcile these approaches going forward.
I have always considered myself generally attuned to the nuances of sound and technology, but nothing in my training or experience as an audio engineer had prepared me for the experience that would challenge my understanding of mind-machine interaction, if not reality itself. During my five years of industry experience (in documentary postproduction) working with digital audio workstations, mixing consoles, and media servers, I occasionally noticed fleeting moments of uncanny synchrony between my thoughts and the technology around me — an inexplicable, almost telepathic rapport with the equipment.
One event stood apart from all others: a sudden, unshakable certainty that the entire production company’s server infrastructure was on the verge of catastrophic failure. There were no perceptible signs of this — no sluggishness in the UI or signal output, no glitches registering perceptually or in the manipulations of the hardware — it was just a gut feeling. Trusting this intuition, I meticulously backed up every project I was working on at the time. A couple days later, the crash hit — crippling the workflow of every suite in the company except mine. To a skeptic, this might be dismissed as coincidence or subconscious pattern recognition. But to me, it was phenomenologically undeniable: something beyond conventional cognition had occurred, something that demanded deeper inquiry.
The history of science is punctuated by phenomena that defy our prevailing paradigms. The phenomenon described here — a premonition of an impending media server collapse, acted upon with near-perfect timing — suggests an intimate, perhaps even psychic, relationship between the human mind and the technological milieu. While a materialist skeptic may argue that this experience is the product of unconscious pattern recognition or mere coincidence, such objections introduce unnecessary complexities, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor.