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As demand accelerates for autonomous undersea systems that can move quickly from concept to deployment, Canadian marine technology firm Cellula Robotics and Metron, Inc . are formalizing a long-term partnership aimed at delivering next-generation capability to the United States defense market. Announced on May 19 in Houston, the 10-year agreement brings together Cellula’s commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) long-endurance autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) platforms with Metron’s adaptive mission autonomy and decades of operational experience in undersea warfare and maritime domain missions. The agreement builds on several years of collaboration between the two companies, including support work tied to the Defense Innovation Unit’s CAMP project. Together, the firms are positioning the partnership as a pathway to faster fielding, scalable deployment, and long-term operational support for US defense customers seeking reliable autonomous underwater capability. At the core of th...

By Kevin McCarthy  It’s the penultimate round but really, it may as well be the final round of Super Rugby Pacific for the Hurricanes, if they execute this weekend. There are as always the odd booby traps to make things tasty, however. The Crusaders host the Chiefs at their new home. Should they win, then...

A sacred Buddhist hall on the top of Mount Misen in Japan was destroyed by fire—but an “eternal flame” said to have been burning for more than a millennium was rescued and moved to another site, where it continues to glow. As reported in the New York Times , Reikado Hall, in the south of Japan, “was reduced to a charred skeleton after a fire tore through the building, engulfing its wooden prayer rooms.” No one was injured, fortunately, and the flame that had been burning for some 1,200 years was salvaged and transferred to a less traumatized location. In a statement, the Daisho-in temple, which oversaw the damaged hall, said, “We have received many messages of sympathy. Thank you for your concern.” Reikado Hall had been rebuilt after a previous fire in 2005, after an accident following cleanup from a typhoon. The cause of the latest fire in under investigation. The Times noted that Japanese temples and shrines, often constructed with materia...

Harald Metzkes, the so-called “Cézannist of Prenzlauer Berg” who made classically indebted and symbolically rich paintings following Germany’s surrender in World War II, died last Thursday in Brandenburg at the age of 97. His death was confirmed to the German Press Agency by his son, the sculptor Robert Metzkes. “Metzkes became particularly well-known in East Germany because he had no interest in socialist realism,” wrote Monopol , which asserted that he created his own “world theater” in work that wriggled free of East German strictures. The magazine quoted Robert Metzkes saying, of his father, “He wasn’t concerned with implementing cultural policy demands.” Metzkes was born in 1929 in Saxony, Germany, and in 1949 started studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 he moved to East Berlin, where he established a distinctive painterly style that “combined poetic imagery, references to classical modernism, and deeply symbolic...

When Powerhouse Parramatta, the enormous new cultural center opening in the city of Parramatta west of Sydney, Australia, opens later this year, a new commission by the British-Indian sculptor Bharti Kher will welcome visitors as the entrance. Art Asia Pacific reported the news. The sculpture, titled Tree of Life , will be monumental in scale and will be made up of four stacked bronze and clay heads. Tree of Life is part of Kher’s ongoing “Intermediaries” series , which she began making in 2016. Many of these large-scale sculptures re-create or transform fragments of found ritual objects into hybrid creatures. The Powerhouse Parramatta commission is not Kher’s first foray into public art: from fall 2022 through summer 2023, Ancestor , an 18-foot-tall bronze mother figure also referencing an “Intermediary” piece, was installed in Central Park, and from 2018-20, The Intermediary Family , based on a collection of small clay objects from South India, was install...

James ‘Big Jim’ Kinvig was a leading player for Onslow throughout the 1950s and early 1960s and he played a number of times for the Wellington representative team. Kinvig was well known as a big goal-kicking forward, whose most usual position was lock but he also played at prop and No. 8 throughout his career....