Control freak

A pilot charged with endangering his passengers during a flight claimed in his defense at his trial that he was not fully responsible for his actions.

Joseph Emerson, 44, tried to activate a fire suppression system which automatically shuts down the plane engine while Horizon Air Flight 2059 was en route from Everett, Washington to San Francisco, California on 22 October 2023.

Emerson blamed the psychedelic mushrooms, which are hallucinogenic, that he ingested two days before the flight to relieve his depression for making him feel sleepy and trapped in the cockpit. This prompted him to reach for the emergency fire suppression system, thinking that it would wake him up.

The other alert pilots stopped him, preventing a disaster, and held him in wrist restraints outside the cockpit.

Meanwhile, a wheeled cart rolled back and forth at the Organic Robotics Lab (ORL) at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York during a biohybrid experiment.

Another robot shaped like a star slowly crawled on the lab floor by bending its five legs as researchers test their latest innovation.

ORL head Robert Shepherd wrote an article about the experiment that was published on 28 August in the journal Science Robotics. In the article, he explained that the two robots were powered via electrodes that source electricity from Pleurotus eryngii or king oyster mushrooms.

The lab-grown mushrooms’ roots wrapping the electrodes produce small amounts of electric signals to generate electricity that move the biohybrid robots.

The scientists are developing robots that combine biological, living materials such as plant and animal cells or insects with synthetic components to make partly living and partly engineered entities, according to the CNN report on the experiment.

They aim to one day create robot jellyfish that will explore oceans, sperm-powered bots that will deliver fertility treatments, and cyborg cockroaches that will search for earthquake survivors under the rubble, according to CNN.