We take a lot of photos. We upload them. But a study from UC Santa Cruz shows that photographs don’t actually present the truth of the moment: they actually distort it. The effect is called “cognitive offloading.” The linked article explains. “It turns out that photographing gives the photographer significantly less need to encode (i.e. we tend to put more mental stock, if you will, into the photograph that we just took rather than actually encoding the memory ourselves).” Sounds like vacationers need to spend more time gazing and less time photographing.

Have you ever wanted a robot gardener? Maybe this new robot can help. It’s not a gardener per se, it’s a robot/plant hybrid that has a plant on its head and chases sunlight to keep the plant fed.

The resulting plant-robot hybrid looks like a leafy crab or a robot Bulbasaur. It moves toward the sunshine when needed, and it retreats to shade when it’s had enough. It’ll “play” with a human if you tap its carapace, and it can even make its needs known by performing a little stompy dance when it’s out of water.