The vast majority of robots have never made it out of their laboratories, but there were plenty of signs in 2023 that robots are beginning to have their moment in the sun. These photos showcase some of the most eye-catching machines from the past year, and also tell the story of a class of technology that is becoming increasingly visible in everyday life.

Spot��takes to the catwalk

Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot, first seen in 2016, may seem old hat, but its real-world applications have grown since it became commercially available in 2019. The New York Police Department has bought two Spot robots, to be deployed in situations that present a high danger to humans, while e-commerce giant Otto Group has employed the robots in its warehouses for equipment inspections. This year, Spot could also be seen removing a model’s jacket as part of a Paris Fashion Week show.

Actors and writers (and robots) unite in strike against artificial intelligence

This robot dog, called Gato, didn’t have a say in whether it joined a demonstration outside Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, as part of the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strike. But future robots might, if artificial intelligence gets sufficiently advanced. Advanced AI was one of the motivating factors for the Hollywood strike, with actors and writers worried they would be replaced with AI-generated scripts and virtual performers. The unions reached an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in November.

Automation comes for restaurant and cafe workers

If you take a stroll down Manhattan Avenue in New York, you will walk by Botbar Coffee, the city’s first robotic coffee shop, and find Adam, an egg-shaped robo-barista, ready to take your order. Adam can also make other drinks, like bubble tea, as he demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, in January. Automated food and drink service isn’t an inevitability, though — this year, the San Francisco-based automated pizza truck company after nearly $500 million in investment.

The gap between human and humanoid robot narrows

The “uncanny valley” – when small differences between humans and human-like robots or simulations evoke unsettling feelings ­– very much still exists, but robot designers are getting better at some of the trickier details, like skin, facial expressions and eyeballs. Here, a group of humanoid robot heads from Chinese company EX Robots show off their emotional range at the 2023 World Robot Conference in Beijing.

Will we see humanoid robots in the real world?

This humanoid robot, called Amy, is a visual artwork from Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven. Amy works in a speakeasy-style pharmacy, offering up drugs and analgesics to help cope with reality. While pharmacists don’t have too much to worry about in the immediate future, humanoid robots aiming to help people cope with potentially depressing realities are becoming increasingly common, such as companions for lonely elderly people.

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This spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) pup is a natural in front of the camera, while its mother and sibling keep a watchful eye in the background. This playful shot was taken by in Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya.

As the sun rises off the coast of the Cayman Islands, a southern stingray (Dasyatis americana) prowls the sandy seabed in this striking split-level snap by photographer

Mustard also captured this vibrantly fluorescent oddity, known as the sap-sucking slug (Costasiella kuroshimae), creeping across green algae just off the coast of northern Indonesia. Two beady eyes sit close together on its face, while spotty green leaf-like appendages called cerata sprout from its body. These sea slugs have the special ability of preserving the chloroplasts in the algae they feed on, which means they can perform photosynthesis.

Deep in the Finnish woods, snapped this action shot of a Eurasian brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos) shaking itself dry after a quick dip in a pond. These mammals can weigh up to 480 kilograms and are commonly found across eastern Europe and Russia.

In the grasslands of the Rhodope mountains in Bulgaria, took this colourful picture of a spotted fritillary (Melitaea didyma) larva. It will eventually transform into a butterfly, whose wings – hints of which can already be seen along its back – will be bright orange with brown spots.

A majestic white-winged snowfinch (Montifringilla nivalis) braves a snowstorm in the Swiss Alps in this photograph by . They are relatively large, sturdy birds, measuring up to 19 centimetres tall. Their distinctive orange-yellow bills are seasonal, becoming black in the summer.

This bemused fruit bat is having its nose and throat swabbed as part of efforts in the Republic of the Congo to better understand how zoonotic diseases, such as Ebola, could jump to people. Around 100 fruit bats have had their blood and saliva samples taken by researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Congolese Foundation for Medical Research.

From extraordinary heat to stunning space imagery, New Scientist has brought you extensive coverage of the biggest developments, discoveries and events in science, technology, health and environment in 2023. Here is our recap of some of the best stories this year.

Environment

The number of heat records broken in 2023 is simply astounding. While we can’t say for sure until official figures are in next month, this year was almost certainly the hottest ever recorded. In a sign of how extraordinary temperatures have been, New Scientist was already reporting this possibility in mid-June, well before the northern hemisphere summer had got into gear.

A few weeks later saw a particularly surreal string of events. The average global air temperature recorded 2 metres above Earth’s surface – essentially, a way of taking the temperature of the entire planet – hit its highest ever figure on 3 July, but this record was immediately broken on 4 July, which was then matched on 5 July and broken again the next day. By the end of August, we had seen the hottest three-month period on record, and it was followed by the hottest September ever. In November, researchers declared the hottest 12 months on record.

Against this backdrop, negotiations at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, were a fraught affair. Whether the world would finally take action against fossil fuels was a key point of disagreement, and at one point looked set to scupper the summit. In the end, the world agreed to begin “transitioning away” from fossil fuels – which was the first time they have been mentioned in a COP text – but many questions remain about what that means in practice.

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The demand for Wegovy, the weight-loss formulation of semaglutide, this year has been like almost no other drug in history. As well as being incredibly effective for weight loss, early trials this year have shown that it may cut the risk of heart attack or stroke and could also help treat addiction. Despite some moralising about a “quick fix” for obesity, along with shortages and difficulty in accessing the drug, it is clear a health revolution has begun.

The past year has also been the first since 2019 that covid-19 wasn’t at the forefront of everyone’s minds. With the World ��ҹ����1000���� Organization announcing on 5 May that the viral illness was no longer a public health emergency, in some sense the coronavirus pandemic has come to an end – at least for some. Millions of people are still experiencing the lingering symptoms of long covid, a condition that remains poorly understood.

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Artificial intelligence

By a rough count,��New Scientist has published almost 150 stories about artificial intelligence this year. Tech firms were falling over each other to compete, from OpenAI claiming “human level performance” for its GPT-4 large language model to Google saying its Gemini model is even better. There were concerns about the rise of AI-driven misinformation, from an image of the Pope in a puffer jacket to the risk of a feedback loop of bias, along with attempts at detecting AI-generated text.

AI was also the subject of high-level discussions across politics and business. It became a huge sticking point in the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, while world leaders, researchers and businesspeople convened at Bletchley Park in the UK in November to sign a declaration on the risks of the new technology. Truly, this was the year AI went mainstream.

Space

The biggest space mission of the year was also one of the least expensive, with India’s low-budget Chandrayaan-3 moon landing costing just £60 million. India’s success made it just the fourth nation to safely touch down on the moon, after the US, the Soviet Union and China. It also came just days after a Russian probe crash-landed on the lunar surface in an attempt to recapture that Soviet-era glory.

Further out in space, the James Webb Space Telescope continued to shine, providing fantastic images and advancing our understanding of the universe, from the fastest growing galaxy to the most distant black hole ever seen.