Local robotics team finds success in its first year
The 'Bathtub Chickens' team earned the rookie all-star award a few weeks ago at a 'first robotics' competition in Tallahassee, finishing 13th out of 42 teams. They also won the imagery award, placing 16th out of 42 teams at another competition in Tulsa earlier this week.
'It's been an incredible experience. It's been quite a lot of work, long days, but it's very rewarding to see the robot work in the end and scoring points on the field. It's provided me with some incredible information that I can use later on when I'm pursuing my career,' Mechanical & Drive Team Nathan Rich said.
The 13 students on the team built their robot, Mr. Bubble, in six weeks.
Medical Academy students gain hands-on experience at Ascension Sacred Heart Bay
'We need all the different members of the team to work together so we can get this made. Without mechanical, we won't have a robot structure made. Without coders, we won't be able to have the robot working. And with all these pieces, they all come together how they should so that we can have our robot assembled on the field running properly,' Robotics Scouting Lead Cody Casady said.
One of the key pieces in competition is the team's branding.
'Each robotics team is supposed to have their own culture and just in general, their own team spirit. And you can get different kinds of awards for that. Each team has their own theme. Some are more silly, some are more serious. It really just depends on the team,' Marketing Lead & Drive Team Lillian Owens said.
The team's mentors work with the students outside of school, helping them gain real-world experience they can use after high school.
'It is very important for them as the future of our nation to be involved in things like science and technology and math. They learn very valuable lessons to be able to have those skills already. And they could hit the ground running right when they get to college or straight into the workforce,' English teacher and Robotics Lead Mentor January Sellers said.
They say that to find success in their rookie year is rare.
'Becoming a mentor and seeing kids that I work with day in and day out actually put together one of those giant working machines was probably the most fulfilling and cultivating experience I've ever had,' Biology teacher and Robotics Mentor Kylie Giovinco said.
The robotics team is now fundraising to participate in future competitions.
If you'd like to sponsor them or learn more about St. Andrews Bay Stem Academy, click here.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Wire
9 minutes ago
- Business Wire
Behavox Sets New Benchmark in Risk Detection and Compliance with Multilingual Asian Voice Intelligence
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Behavox, the AI company that transforms data into insights that safeguard and enhance businesses, today announced the expansion of Asian language capabilities in its Quantum Voice product, designed to strengthen compliance monitoring and risk detection across key Asia-Pacific markets. 'Our customers operate in high-stakes, multilingual environments where missing a single signal can have serious consequences,' said Fahreen Kurji, Chief Customer Intelligence Officer at Behavox. With this enhancement, Quantum Voice now supports full transcription, risk detection, and language-switching for Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, and Indonesian - setting a new industry benchmark for multilingual compliance. As financial institutions and multinational corporations scale in Asia-Pacific, the ability to monitor native-language voice communications has become critical. Legacy tools, which fail to interpret non-English conversations with precision, leave organizations vulnerable to fines, reputational damage, and operational risk. Regulatory expectations in the region have intensified, and many firms are discovering costly oversight gaps due to legacy tools that fail to understand non-English communications accurately. Behavox Quantum Voice addresses these challenges directly, using domain-specific language models and AI-powered speech recognition, enabling enterprises to: Achieve unmatched accuracy with a 20% word error rate—outperforming major technology providers. Detect risks in real time with contextual AI models designed for regulated industries. Capture seamless language-switching that mirrors real-world conversations on trading floors and in customer interactions. 'Our customers operate in high-stakes, multilingual environments where missing a single signal can have serious consequences,' said Fahreen Kurji, Chief Customer Intelligence Officer at Behavox. 'With Quantum Voice, we've eliminated language barriers in compliance - setting a new industry standard for risk detection in global communications. With Quantum Voice, organizations benefit from: Faster and more accurate risk detection Higher-quality alerts with reduced false positives Stronger audit readiness and regulator confidence Unified oversight across languages, regions, and business units This release builds on Behavox's mission to help the world's most complex organizations identify and prevent risk, regardless of communication format, channel, or language. These capabilities are now generally available for all Quantum Voice customers. For more information or to request a demo, please visit To explore how multilingual AI surveillance is reshaping compliance, register for Behavox's upcoming webinar: ' Achieving Compliance Without Language Barriers '. Hear more in a short video clip from Behavox Chief Revenue Officer Nabeel Ebrahim. About Behavox Behavox is an AI company that transforms structured and unstructured corporate data into insights that safeguard and enhance businesses. Our proprietary technology and industry-specific LLM enables users to ask and answer questions without becoming domain experts, technologists, or data scientists. Our global client base includes banks, hedge funds, commodities firms, private equity firms, crypto firms and other non-financial companies. Equipping them with quality, cost-efficient insights, our solutions empower them to: Detect and address compliance risks Streamline and secure data archiving Predict and prevent regulatory breaches Turn big data into revenue Founded in 2014, Behavox is headquartered in London, with offices worldwide, including in New York City, Montreal, Seattle, Singapore, and Tokyo.
CNBC
41 minutes ago
- CNBC
The 10 U.S. colleges where students study the hardest—No. 1 isn't Harvard or MIT
Pursuing a STEM degree — which stands for science, technology, engineering or mathematics— has historically paid off well for college students. But earning that credential may require a lot of study time. Many of the 10 colleges where students spend the most time studying have STEM-focused curriculums, according to The Princeton Review's most recent rankings. The publication surveyed students at nearly 400 U.S. colleges and asked how many hours they spend studying outside of class. Students at California Institute of Technology reported the most study time, followed by Harvey Mudd college. All Caltech students — including English and history majors — complete a STEM-focused core curriculum, according to the school's website. And notably, the curriculum is "extraordinarily" hard, the college says. Harvey Mudd exclusively offers Bachelor of Science degrees in a variety of STEM fields to its are the 10 most studious colleges, per Princeton Review's rankings, along with tuition costs for the 2025-26 school year, according to each school's website. Median earnings reflect the median incomes of students who started at each school and received federal aid 10 years ago, according to Department of Education data. No. 1-ranked Caltech prides itself on its world-renowned science and technology research. Students there "work together to solve the problems of tomorrow, while enjoying great weather," a survey respondent wrote for The Princeton Review. Caltech alumni include astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded the first team of astronauts to circle the moon, and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, as well as 17 Nobel Laureates, the school reports. The school was also named the seventh-best university in the world in 2025 by Times Higher Education, which ranks global institutions on their faculty reputations and research contributions. Though some of the most-studious colleges have rigorous non-STEM programs, STEM majors at any given school tend to spend more time studying than their peers in other majors. First-year undergraduate students in STEM majors spend an average of 17.1 hours a week preparing for class, compared with 15.6 hours a week on average among humanities, communications and social science majors, according to the 2024 National Survey of Student Engagement. The survey — which polled nearly 476,000 students at 771 institutions — found first-year students across disciplines spend an average of 15.8 hours a week on work outside of class.
National Geographic
3 hours ago
- National Geographic
The deepest-diving whales could inspire new treatments for stroke and cancer
Goose-beaked whales hold the record for the deepest dive of any mammal. Researchers want to learn their secrets to develop new drugs for human diseases. Goose-beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris) hold the record for deepest dive of any marine mammal, and researchers hope that examining how these animals manage their oxygen thousands of feet underwater could one day yield medications that help humans. Photograph By Vincent Legrand/AGAMI Photo Agency/Alamy Whale sightings are never guaranteed, and goose-beaked whales are particularly hard to spot because they spend 90 percent of their time submerged. So when Jillian Wisse and her team position their boat in the right spot and the whales surface, it's a feat. During their field expeditions off the North Carolina coast, sometimes they can even cruise close enough to take tissue samples and appreciate the rake-like scratches that the animals acquire from mating behaviors, social play, and dominance displays. 'They look like the English bulldogs of the whale world. I love seeing them,' says Wisse, a behavioral physiologist at Duke University. Formerly known as Cuvier's beaked whales, goose-beaked whales dive deeper than any other known mammal and are found in most of the world's oceans. The elusive animals regularly dive down to around 3,300 feet and hunt for 20 to 40 minutes straight. Their deepest dive on record is 9,816 feet, and the longest known dive lasted 222 minutes. For comparison, blue whales only reach around 1,640 feet with dive durations around 10 to 20 minutes, and the best human divers tap out at records of 831 feet and 25 minutes. To achieve such impressive dives, goose-beaked whales' bodies have adapted to survive levels of hypoxia or oxygen deprivation that could easily kill a human. Wisse's expeditions are part of a Duke project that aims to understand these deep ocean adaptations in cetaceans, the group that includes whales and bottlenose dolphins. Hypoxia plays a role in health conditions from stroke to cancer, and the researchers' ultimate goal is to apply the findings from the marine mammals to develop treatments that could one day help humans, too. (These divers have evolved an ability to use oxygen more efficiently.) The Duke project is one of many research efforts worldwide that uses whales as models for understanding human diseases. Most of what we know about how deep diving animals handle low oxygen comes from beached whales and seals, which spend more time at the surface and are smaller and easier to study. But the Duke team focuses on getting samples from living whales and dolphins, especially extreme divers like goose-beaked whales, to figure out what's happening in their cells that allows them to survive low oxygen environments. First, the researchers need to get their hands on whale tissues. 'It's hard to get data from whales—they are very hard to get close to,' notes Nicola Quick, a marine scientist and one of the project's leaders. Skin is the most accessible tissue in live whales, though they are not fully representative of what happens inside their bodies, says Wisse who also leads the Duke University's project. From live whales, scientists use a dart to punch out a piece of skin from the thick blubber or fat layer. 'Imagine you took a number two pencil, pulled the eraser out, poked yourself, and pulled it away. That's essentially what's happening,' Wisse explains. Skin cells are multiplied in the lab, exposed to very low oxygen levels like what whales experience during deep dives, and studied. With stranded or beached animals, sampling gets a little bit easier—tissues from skin as well as heart, lung, muscle, and even the brain are simply cut off and brought to the lab. The project is ongoing, but they already have some early results from skin samples of live and stranded goose-beaked whales from the Western North Atlantic. Even under low oxygen conditions, whale skin cells seem to consume oxygen at high levels, while skin cells of dolphins, cows, and humans reduced their oxygen consumption when oxygen was limited. Compared to humans, goose-beaked whales also carry differences in genes that regulate how mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, produce energy. What all this means is that whales have genetically-encoded adaptations that enable them to continue producing energy even when oxygen is extremely limited, while humans—and probably, other land-dwelling mammals lack these adaptations. These findings about the cellular adaptations in whales build on what researchers previously knew about the physiological adaptations whales have for oxygen consumption during deep dives, Wisse says. More blood and slower metabolism Studies of seals and dead whales have already revealed changes in how the animals' bodies function. Seals have about twice the blood volume of humans, carrying much more hemoglobin than we do, says Lars Folklow, an animal physiologist at the Arctic University of Norway. 'They would be caught in any blood doping test in the Olympics, for example,' chuckles Folklow, who researches hypoxia protection mechanisms in diving species. (How do diving seals know how long to hold their breath?) More blood volume means that the animals also have more hemoglobin, the protein that binds to oxygen in the blood and transports it to other organs. That means seals and other diving mammals have a very high capacity to store oxygen. They can surface with a blood oxygen content that is so low that we would lose consciousness if it was us, says Folklow. Estimates from beached sperm whales suggest that blood accounts for 20 percent of their body weight, compared to only seven to eight percent in humans. Whales also have high amounts of myoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in muscles, which helps them sustain at great depths for long durations. Previous research has also shown that whales can dramatically slow down their metabolism when they dive for extended periods of time. Their normal heart rate of 30 to 40 beats per minute at the surface plummets to less than 10 beats per minute during deep dives. The heart rate drop reduces the amount of blood flow and oxygen to non-critical areas like the digestive system, kidneys, and muscles. 'There is no need to run the kidneys at full speed or digest your latest meal while you are diving,' Folklow explains. Instead, the animals selectively perfuse more blood and oxygen to critical organs like the brain. These MRI images show damage (upper and center left in each image) in the brain of a 54-year-old woman after a stroke. Stroke is one of many human health conditions where oxygen deprivation plays a role. Photograph By ZEPHYR / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Zooming in on the brain Brains are exceptionally vulnerable to oxygen deficits in mammals, and Wisse's group is working on getting brain samples from stranded goose-beaked whales to understand how neurons in their brains function when oxygen gets depleted. Folklow's team has examined this question in seals and minke whales by looking at neuroglobin, a brain protein that like hemoglobin and myoglobin transports oxygen. Using brain tissues from dead animals, Folklow's group measured how active the genes that make neuroglobin protein are, and found that gene activity in whales was four to 15 times higher than in cattle, a non-diving mammal relative. The gene activity in seals wasn't quite as high, however, which surprised the research team. Folklow says this could be due to divergent evolution in whales and seals, a phenomenon where two related species independently develop different strategies to combat the same environmental challenge. Besides binding with oxygen, neuroglobin also prevents oxidative stress, which can damage cells. Either of these neuroglobin functions could be helping whales, says Folklow, and it's difficult to narrow down to one of them without running experiments with live brain tissues, the kind of sample that is near-impossible to access. (Whales could one day be heard in court—and in their own words.) What this means for human medicine Despite the experimental challenges, marine mammal researchers hope that their work on hypoxia could help humans overcome health conditions where oxygen is a factor, like stroke, prolonged anesthesia, COVID-19, and cancer. 'One thing we're interested to know is how marine mammals deal with inflammation when diving to such extreme depths,' says Jason Somarelli, a medical oncologist at Duke University and one of the leaders of the whale project. In humans, low-oxygen states are usually tied to inflammation, ultimately leading to tissue damage or death. But deep diving mammals have evolved sophisticated ways to carefully control and manage inflammatory responses, including carrying natural anti-inflammatory substances in their blood. Scientists are still working to fully understand how exactly these protective mechanisms work, but Somarelli suspects that marine mammals must have uncoupled their oxygen sensing response from inflammatory response. If this is true, figuring out how the animals achieve this feat could help identify molecules that a medicine can lock on to and uncouple these signals in humans, says Somarelli. For now, drugs inspired by whale biology are only hypothetical. But hypoxia researchers aren't the only ones interested. Other labs are studying bowhead whales' resilience to age-related diseases like cancer and exceptional longevity. Their super-efficient DNA repair systems could potentially be used to develop treatments for human diseases. Scientists are also studying dementia-like brain changes in toothed whales to better understand Alzheimer's disease. Meanwhile, Wisse continues to snag skin biopsies in hopes of further probing the cellular pathways that help whale cells deal with hypoxia. Finding goose-beaked whales is still like searching for a needle in a haystack for her. When a whale surfaces for a minute and a half, she accelerates her boat to get parallel to the animal and darts to remove a pencil eraser-sized piece of blubber layer that bounces off and floats. The whale then swims away. 'But my favorite moment is when they kind of turn and look back at me straight into my eye,' Wisse says. 'They know what's going on.'
