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The day robots went silly!

A ⁠robot ran the 100m in 9.32 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games on Saturday, beating Usain Bolt’s record. The machine reached a peak velocity of 14.5 meters per second during a test run before running face-first into a wall. The robot, named Lightning and developed by Chinese smartphone manufacturer Honor, outran Bolt’s 9.58-second record set 17 years ago at the World Athletics Championship. The red and black humanoid also won the Beijing half marathon in April in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, surpassing the men’s world record set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo earlier this year. Researchers later increased...

A robot has outperformed humans by running faster than Usain Bolt's 100m sprint world record at the World Humanoid Robot Games in China. The humanoid robot, developed by the Beijing Innovation Centre of Humanoid Robotics, ran the distance in 9.39 seconds at the event. Eight-time Olympic gold medallist Bolt set the world record for humans in 2009, running 100m in 9.58 seconds. The robot beat two others including one made by Chinese smartphone maker Honor - which the manufacturer says ran the distance in 9.32 seconds in a test run. Other events at the robot games, which started on Saturday,...

BEIJING — Chinese humanoid robots broke records set by humans, including beating Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint world record, on the opening day of the Olympics-like World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday. More than 2,000 humanoid robots were participating in the event, the organizer said. The five-day games, now in its second year, are a spectacle demonstrating China’s rapid progress in advanced robotics as the technology race with the U.S. heats up, with 51 events and more than 1,000 competitions taking place including running, table tennis and soccer. The games, which are taking place in the National Speed Skating...

Unitree Robotics shares rose 542% in early trading Wednesday as the Chinese humanoid robot maker made its stock market debut in Shanghai. The Hangzhou-based robot maker, whose backflipping and dancing machines have drawn global attention, raised about 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) in its IPO, according to its prospectus. Shares rose to 968.1 yuan apiece, after hitting as high as 1,100 yuan earlier. The IPO also drew backing from Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which invested about 140.8 million yuan, according to a company filing. Unitree’s existing investors also include Chinese tech giant Tencent. Unitree’s product lineup spans bipedal humanoid robots...

Elon Musk is betting that the next phase of his sprawling technology empire will require a building on a scale that has never existed before. SpaceX and Tesla are building Terafab, a 100-million-square-foot semiconductor manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas, more than five times the size of the world's largest building. "Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far. And it will be stunningly beautiful," Musk wrote on X. "We're now embarking on the most epic chip-building effort—combining logic, memory, and advanced packaging all under one roof," said Musk in a press release. The...

China is leading as a global innovator in humanoid robotics, according to a new LexisNexis patent analysis. The report analyzed more than 26,000 patent families to identify the countries and companies that are leading innovation in humanoid robotics. China claimed the top five spots. In total, Chinese companies occupy six of the 10 spots for the most innovative humanoid robotics startups in the world, according to the report. Shanghai-based Fourier and AgiBot ranked first and second, followed by Shenzhen-based LimX Dynamics and Pudu Robotics, and Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics. Shenzhen’s Leju Robotics also made the top 10, ranking ninth.

They’re bot for teacher. A rural upstate New York school district will be one of the first in the nation to bring a humanoid robot into the classroom. The Salamanca City Central School District, located on Seneca Nation territory, will be introducing $57,000 AI-powered “Sally” in high school classes in September as a teaching assistant, it announced last week. “Sally” will have brown hair, latex skin and will be able to move its arms and hands — but won’t be able to cruise around the classroom since her legs don’t move. “It’s exciting but also a bit nerve wracking,” superintendent...

Trillionaire Elon Musk aims to have rockets blast off from Earth before the end of 2026, sending the first materials to the moon and Mars to start building colonies. The world’s first trillionaire is then planning to send robots to prepare the infrastructure needed for humans to survive. Musk said recently he has shifted Space X’s focus as it is closer and “much faster to complete a moon city,” with a timeline of getting it established in the next 10 years. However, he is optimistic he can also start sending material to the red planet within seven years too. This...

General Motors has gutted its electric-vehicle ambitions and killed more than 1,000 jobs at its flagship Detroit assembly plant — replacing those workers with 50 robots and sparking outrage from labor unions. The replacement “collaborative robots,” or “cobots,” have been installed on the assembly line at GM’s Factory Zero plant in Michigan amid a sharply reduced demand for its EV models and the ensuing push to cut costs, reports said. The machines are now working alongside the remaining humans there who attach the body panels to vehicles as they move down the track, according to AutoBlog. The automaker insists the...

In 1974, New York Times humorist Russell Baker identified a “pig in the python” working its way through the economy: the bulge of 76 million Baby Boomers squeezing through America’s economic system, distorting everything they passed through. When Boomers flooded the labor market in the 1970s, they created a competitive squeeze that never fully released — leaving the generations behind them without the wage rebound economists had predicted. When they bought homes, prices soared. When they took the top jobs in business, culture, and civic life, they held them — and held them, and held them. For half a century,...

The Ardal ground robot had a specific mission: cross open ground, reach the Novoselivka village bridge in Donetsk, and lay an anti-tank mine before Russian forces could use it. It was a basic operation for Ukraine’s elite K-2 Brigade, based four miles away. But when they saw three Russian soldiers on their screen, they did not hesitate to change the objective, detonating the mine and taking the enemy – and the robot – with it. The loss of hardware was not a difficult call. Ukraine is on course to make 25,000 unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in the first half of...

US Robotics player Figure has rapidly scaled production of its Figure 03 humanoid robots, marking a shift from prototype to mass manufacturing. At its manufacturing facility, BotQ, in California, the company boosted output from one robot per day to one per hour—a 24-fold increase achieved in under four months. The ramp-up, supported by custom software and over 150 networked workstations, has enabled the delivery of more than 350 units. According to Figure, with improved supplier quality and rigorous inspection processes, production yields are rising steadily. The expansion is also accelerating data generation, a key factor in advancing the robots’ autonomous...

Lost luggage and battered bags could soon be a thing of the past, as Japan Airlines starts testing robotic baggage handlers. Starting in May, human workers at Tokyo's busy Haneda airport will have a helping hand from an army of humanoid robots as part of a two–year trial. The Chinese–made bots will be trained to tackle ground handling tasks like loading cargo containers of luggage on and off flights. Japan Airlines (JAL) hopes that the new robotic workers will help ease staffing issues as Japan juggles a surge in tourism and a slumping workforce. The airport will trial two robots:...

Deep-diving robots help crack the mystery of Antarctica’s vanishing sea ice Something strange has been swirling in the waters around Antarctica. From the 1970s until a decade ago, the floating sea ice that radiates from the continent had been expanding, even with climate change already in full swing. Then, in 2016, it suddenly and dramatically contracted — and has yet to recover — as rising global temperatures seemed to catch up with the Southern Ocean. Far from being just a local issue, the loss of sea ice has huge implications for Antarctica’s vast ice sheet, which would drive sea levels...

The European Union’s population is expected to plunge by 53 million by the end of the century after the bloc’s birth rate fell to a record low. In new projections released on Thursday, the number of people living across the continent will fall to 398.9 million by 2100, down from 451.8 million today. The population is expected to grow by an extra 1.5 million over the next three years, before then shrinking consistently over the next six decades. This decline is equivalent to the entire populations of Spain and Ireland disappearing. The forecasts also show that the age of the...

Here is a transcript of the intriguing and insightful Mo Gawdat video... Your life and mine will witness times where there will be 20, 30, 50 percent unemployment in certain sectors, maybe even more. Most of us are going to witness something we've never seen before. The interesting thing is that this is not unlike humanity's origin. Jobs are an invention that serve a capitalist system that has served humanity for a while and pained humanity for a while. And the question is, is the capitalist system going to survive artificial intelligence? Funny enough, the capitalists that are celebrating the...

.The Epoch Times@EpochTimes·5hMan Accidentally Hacks an Army of 7,000 Robot Vacuums, Able to Access Video Feeds Within People’s HomesA man over in Spain tried to hack into his own vacuum cleaner robot, but instead, he accidentally hacked into 7,000 different vacuum robots—giving him direct access to live video feeds within people’s homes. Basically, he discovered a backdoor within these Chinese-made robots that made them extremely insecure

What if a robot could move, smile, and react just like a real human? 🤯 Meet Moya, China’s first biomimetic AI humanoid robot that copies 90% of real human movement and facial expressions. Built by Droidup, this ultra-realistic robot is going viral for looking almost alive. From natural walking posture to subtle eye contact and warm skin temperature, Moya doesn’t feel like a machine anymore — it feels human.

China’s humanoid robots were once a punchline. Now they are a warning shot. Just one year after drawing global skepticism for awkward stumbles and mechanical breakdowns, Chinese-made humanoid robots are performing backflips, executing kung fu routines and delivering synchronized gymnastics on the world’s biggest television stage. The dramatic turnaround has reignited debate about China’s manufacturing edge, the future of work and the accelerating U.S.–China technology race. Here is what investors need to know. A Public Debut That Turned Heads China’s annual Spring Festival Gala is widely regarded as the most-watched television program in the world. This year, humanoid robots from...