The first self-checkout system was installed in 1986 in a Kroger grocery store just outside of Atlanta. It took several decades, but the technology has finally proliferated across the U.S. Given the automated direction grocery stores are heading, it seems that robotic bagging can’t be too far behind.

MIT’s CSAIL department this week is showcasing RoboGrocery. It combines computer vision with a soft robotic gripper to bag a wide range of different items. To test the system, researchers placed 10 objects unknown to the robot on a grocery conveyer belt.

The products ranged from delicate items like grapes, bread, kale, muffins and crackers to far more solid ones like soup cans, meal boxes and ice cream containers. The vision system kicks in first, detecting the objects before determining their size and orientation on the belt.

As the grasper touches the grapes, pressure sensors in the fingers determine that they are, in fact, delicate and therefore should not go at the bottom of the bag — something many of us no doubt learned the hard way. Next, it notes that the soup can is a more rigid structure and sticks it in the bottom of the bag.

Revealing what was once unseen.

Bored to Floored

The remarkable James Webb Space Telescope has been used to image the furthest reaches of the cosmos. But in a change of pace, astronomers have leveraged its immense powers on a target far closer to home: the mighty planet Jupiter — and in so doing, they’ve found mysterious features and structures on the gas giant that have never been seen before, let alone in the astounding fidelity of the James Webb.

As detailed in a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the scientists observed a region of atmosphere hovering above Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot, an enormous storm big enough to swallow the Earth, and the largest in the solar system.

Despite its awesome proportions, though, this part of the atmosphere has gone overlooked by astronomers, who had previously written it off as uninteresting. Now, they’re happy to admit that they were dead wrong.

“We thought this region, perhaps naively, would be really boring,” study lead author Henrik Melin of the University of Leicester said in a statement about the work. “It is in fact just as interesting as the northern lights, if not more so,” he added. “Jupiter never ceases to surprise.”