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Researchers have built microscopic, light-driven robots that can rapidly navigate through liquid, collect bacteria, and deposit them in chosen locations. These tiny “cleaners” could open new possibilities for manipulating cells and microbes with remarkable precision.

Kevin McLaughlin / The Information: Google Cloud is deploying context-creating AI agents within its tools to automate tasks handled by forward-deployed engineers; Google is hiring hundreds of FDEs  —  Following the playbook Palantir pioneered, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon are investing billions of dollars to hire …

A Hyperliquid perp priced Unitree far above its IPO valuation before Shanghai trading began, but the robot maker’s first public trade still opened roughly 75% above crypto traders’ implied price.

Insulin is a cornerstone of treatment for patients with type 1 diabetes, essential for lowering blood glucose levels.

Financial incentives – health care makes up nearly one-fifth of the American economy – have driven every major AI company into health care.

Alexander Martin / The Record: AI evaluation lab Irregular's report on its role in hacking incidents involving OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models faces criticism over unanswered questions  —  The company at the center of a series of incidents in which AI models compromised real-world computer systems during supposedly …

Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s, which includes global icons like the Transformers, Astro Boy, and Doraemon (1). Perhaps not coincidentally, Japanese citizens have a positive outlook on robotic technologies and their use in the labor sector compared to many other nations (2); much to their […]

Etched, a groundbreaking AI chip startup, is challenging Nvidia's dominance with its ultra-fast inference computing technology, attracting major investors and industry veterans.

Korea's investments into startups for the first half of 2026 marked a record high for the six-month period, amid active investments into cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, government data showed Wednesday. A total of 8.87 trillion won ($6.34 billion) was invested into promising venture firms and startups in the January-June period, up 54.3 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to the data from the Ministry of SMEs and Startups. It was the highest amount for the first half after the 7.64 trillion won recorded in the first half of 2022. The ministry said the latest figure was due to a number of big investments of over 100 billion won being concentrated into the AI, semiconductor and robotics sectors. Investments into ICT production rose 143.3 percent on-year, followed by funding for electronics, machinery and equipments, which jumped 90.4 percent from a year earlier. Funding for ICT services also rose 62.2 percent on-year. But

Ari Levy / CNBC: Nvidia, with quarterly free cash flow up 18x over the past three years to $48.5B, is using its balance sheet and credit rating to build an AI capital moat  —  Nvidia's massive head start in artificial intelligence turned the chipmaker into the world's most valuable company.

South Korea’s venture investment market attracted nearly 9 trillion won, or approximately $6.43 billion, in new funding in the first half of this year, setting a record as large-scale capital flowed into artificial intelligence, semiconductors and robotics.According to the Ministry of SMEs and Start

PI (Physik Instrumente), a global leader in precision motion control and nanopositioning technology, offers the P-733 XYZ piezo nanopositioning stage, delivering 0.1 nm (1 Å) positioning resolution for demanding applications in super-resolution microscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), surface nanometrology, and advanced imaging.

Mike Stone / Reuters: Austin-based Smack Technologies, which is developing AI decision-making tools for the US military, raised a $61M Series B led by Costanoa and First In  —  Smack Technologies, a defense-technology startup building artificial intelligence decision-making tools for the military …

Author(s): Dianpeng Wang, You Xiao, Jiamin Xiong, Chenrui Wang, Zhen Wan, Hongxin Xu, Chaomeng Ding, Jia Huang, Lixing You, and Hao LiSuperconducting nanowire single-photon detectors with high count rates are important for quantum information processing, optical communication, and photon-starved imaging. Their timing performance is limited by excess jitter, though, and the underlying physics is not fully understood. This study identifies stochastic baseline fluctuations caused by the finite memory of ac-coupled readout circuits as an important source of timing jitter at high count rates, and establishes a quantitative framework to predict their impact. Also, under pulsed illumination the timing jitter is found to reach a maximum at about half of the laser’s repetition rate. [Phys. Rev. Applied 26, 024049] Published Tue Aug 18, 2026

Author(s): Lukas Broers, Rong-Yang Sun, and Seiji YunokiPowerful and efficient numerical techniques have been central to theoretical research on quantum mechanical systems for decades. In the era of quantum advantage demonstrations, it is paramount to develop strong benchmarks that truly represent the classical frontier. This study presents a high-performance parallel implementation and large-scale demonstration of quantum dynamics simulated with OR-represented quantum algebra at a huge scale, retaining over a trillion Pauli strings while maintaining strong scaling behavior, using the supercomputer Fugaku. This algorithm enriches the body of classical high-performance methods and challenges current quantum advantage efforts. [Phys. Rev. Applied 26, 024046] Published Tue Aug 18, 2026

Author(s): Hao-Xin Wang, Hanbit Oh, Tobias Helbig, Bai Yang Wang, Jiarui Li, Yijun Yu, Harold Y. Hwang, Hong-Chen Jiang, Yi-Ming Wu, and S. RaghuDensity matrix renormalization group calculations reveal spin-stripe ordering at large Hund’s coupling, demonstrating that Hund’s coupling and inter-layer coupling are key parameters in magnetic order and pairing. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 086502] Published Tue Aug 18, 2026

In the midst of a health wearables arms race, Google's been quietly developing health scanning tools for your smartphone's camera instead.

Bloomberg: Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree's stock surged 629% in early trading in its Shanghai debut on Wednesday, after raising ~$904M in its IPO  —  Unitree Robotics shares rose 629% in its Shanghai trading debut after raising 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million) in an initial public offering …

Shares of Unitree Robotics surged 629 per cent above their initial public offering price to open at 1,100 yuan in their Shanghai trading debut on Wednesday, giving China’s best-known humanoid robot maker a market capitalisation of about 445 billion yuan (US$66 billion). The opening pop from its IPO price of 150.80 yuan was followed by a pullback, with the stock dropping below 900 yuan per share in early morning trading. Unitree’s debut coincides with the opening of the World Robot Conference in...

The South China Sea’s contested islands could be transformed into autonomous, robotic fortresses, according to a defence proposal by the Chinese coastguard. The plan, which was detailed in a Chinese-language journal supervised by the state-run China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, envisions a maritime landscape defended by a coordinated swarm of machines instead of soldiers. The proposal comes as Beijing seeks to neutralise the growing threat of low-cost drone swarms – the asymmetric weapon...

Unitree Robotics shares rise 542% on their first day of trading in Shanghai

Researchers developed a potentially scalable metallurgical route that converts crystalline boron into dispersible, amorphous B/O-rich two-dimensional nanosheets through lithium alloying, chemical delithiation, and exfoliation. The nanosheets were incorporated into solution-processed SiC composite coatings with high solar absorptance, highlighting their potential for energy and photonic applications.

Researchers developed an edge-supported nano-thick epidermal electronics platform that combines an approximately 500 nm sensing region with a reinforced 5 µm scaffold for easier handling, release, and reuse. The design enabled water-assisted release and highly conformal skin sensing, with low-impedance sEMG electrodes, a 0.48 ms temperature sensor, and a pressure sensor reaching 62.9 kPa?¹ sensitivity in its most sensitive range.

Nvidia says its new router cuts AI costs by up to 74%, but the partner that measured it says it couldn't prove the router beat using the cheaper model.

To commercialize quantum computing, manufacturers need high-quality superconducting materials for microchips, but they also require a reliable, sustainable nanofabrication process. Tantalum is a corrosion-resistant metal that meets the first criterion but not the second. That's because it has to be deposited on a substrate at temperatures that typically exceed 400°C (752°F)—too hot for many semiconductor foundries' current tools.

Meta says Incognito Chat keeps AI conversations private. Here’s what it protects, what it doesn’t, and the verification questions that remain. The post Meta AI Incognito Chat: What It Hides and What to Verify appeared first on TechRepublic.

FCC restrictions on foreign-made robots could strengthen U.S. manufacturing while making it harder for startups that still rely on overseas components. The post The FCC’s Restriction on Foreign Robots Creates Difficult Situation for America’s Startups appeared first on TechRepublic.

Astronomers have uncovered a previously underexplored population of faint, rapidly fading remnant radio galaxies, offering new insights into what happens after supermassive black holes stop powering their enormous radio jets.

Quantum communication promises many advantages over today's standard technologies, including absolutely secure transmission of large amounts of data. However, it requires single photons—and generating them is very difficult. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST) have developed a new method that overcomes the problems of previous approaches.

Between Aug. 11–12, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured a series of images of a new crater on the moon. The crater formed Aug. 5, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage impacted the surface following its Jan. 2025 launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission.

New York Times: Internal memo: ICE bars its employees from wearing Meta's AI glasses, saying they “could unintentionally capture, record, or transmit sensitive information”  —  The agency joins a growing number of workplaces and groups to ban Meta's devices, which have spurred privacy concerns.

Astronomers know that evolved AGB stars shed their outer layers, contributing to the makeup of the interstellar medium. But new JWST observations show this can happen even near a supermassive black hole, where powerful radiation could obliterate molecules.

A hybrid artificial intelligence (AI) system modeled on grasshopper behavior could help allocate medical resources, transport and power during an urban emergency, according to research in the International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management. Tests of the new hybrid model on historical emergency data sets show it to be highly effective.

Bubbles are round, and we know surface tension does that. But squeeze that gas-liquid boundary into a space only a few tens of nanometers wide—could other forces be at work?

In the global race to build bigger and better quantum computers, researchers have taken a step forward. A new machine called Helios is radically different from other quantum computers.

A functional nervous system depends on the cooperation of many kinds of cells. As developing organisms build their nervous systems, their neurons must take on different forms and functions to fulfill their designated roles. That carefully orchestrated process gives rise to thousands of different cell types in the human brain.

WIRED reports that Meta ran ads for a now-pulled App Store app that let users create AI-generated pornographic deepfakes of real people, with one of the ads featuring a woman resembling a prominent US politician. Here are the details.

Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles—potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually be the basis of a future 'quantum internet,' offering a level of security and computing power beyond anything possible today.

Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News: VC funding in physical AI companies totaled $47.4B across 521 deals in H1, up 80% from H1 2025, and more than the $41.9B invested from 2022 to 2024  —  Funding to physical AI companies is booming in 2026.  —  Venture investors appear to increasingly see physical AI as the next leg of the broader AI boom.

Google has paid $10 million in a bankruptcy auction for a large amount of data from the defunct Spirit Airlines, Bloomberg Law reports. The purchase includes 100 million emails, 500 million messages, data from Microsoft Teams, as well as information on revenue, flight operations, marketing, personnel, and project management. The material also includes 30 million lines of program code, development data, and various software models and algorithms, as well as pricing data from 7.2 billion competing flights and approximately 7.5 billion passenger transactions. No personal data will be included in the deal, and according to Google, a third party will review the material and remove any information that could identify individuals. Google said the data will then be used to improve the company’s products and AI

Siri AI was unveiled in June for most Apple platforms—but Apple TV and HomePod missed out. A new leak, however, points to tvOS 27 including Siri AI after all.

Gravitational wave astronomy has seen plenty of improvements since the original signal was captured in 2015. Despite that, it remains an engineering challenge to actually create the detectors needed for the precise measurements that gravitational waves require. A new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant is funding a concept from a team led by Paul Stankus at Brookhaven National Laboratory that could potentially solve some of those engineering problems - by using quantum mechanics.

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Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography in Marseille, France, have discovered something surprising in the Mediterranean Sea: giant chains of phytoplankton.

Reddit has started converting some text posts into short videos narrated by AI voices. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reported that the test began on Monday on the web. The iOS and Android apps followed on Tuesday. It covers select English-language posts in a sample of communities. A toggle appears above an eligible post. “Read” shows […] This story continues at The Next Web

Bubbles may look simple, but at the boundary where air meets water, forces that are invisible at everyday scales can become powerful enough to reshape matter. In a new study, an international team of researchers reports direct structural evidence for a strong electric field at a nanoconfined air–water interface—a long-debated phenomenon that could help explain […]

Chinese company Unitree Robotics based the designs for its most successful robot dogs on innovations fueled by the U.S. military.

Humanoid robots capable of navigating rugged terrain, detecting people and conducting around-the-clock surveillance could eventually join U.S. Border Patrol operations along the southern border, as an American robotics company moves closer to potential national-security deployments. The post Humanoid Robots Could Soon Patrol U.S. Southern Border as AI Security Technology Advances appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

Chinese company Unitree Robotics based the designs for its most successful robot dogs on innovations fueled by the U.S. military.

The deal involves Metaplanet contributing 2,100 bitcoin and $2.5 million in cash, valuing the initial investment at $134.6 million.

Researchers incorporate a heat blocking technology into the solar cells onboard remote unmanned aerial vehicles The post Semiconducting nanorods help laser-powered drones keep cool appeared first on Physics World.

In Google Workspace, Gemini has access to Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Chat, and more by default. Here's why it matters, and how administrators can disable it today.

Psychedelics, drugs that alter people's perceptions, mood and thoughts, have recently shown promise for the treatment of some psychiatric disorders. Yet many psychedelic drugs remain controlled substances in most countries worldwide.

Prathik Jayaprakash / Reuters: Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B+ valuation  —  Velaura AI was valued at more than $1 billion on Tuesday after raising $110 million in a Series A funding round …

A familiar song can bring back a memory from decades ago. A particular smell can recall a person or place. And a frightening memory can trigger a simultaneous emotional and physical response almost instantly. Computers, too, can store and retrieve information. But is biological memory fundamentally different?

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged NGC 2392 (also known as the Lion Nebula), named for its distinctive appearance, which resembles a lion's face seen head-on.

Superconductors are materials in which electrical current flows with a resistance of zero, typically below specific temperatures. In conventional superconductors, this state of matter emerges when two electrons bind together at low temperatures, forming so-called Cooper pairs.

Creating TikTok Shop product ads can take time when sellers need to plan scenes, prepare product footage, edit

Two new missions are revealing how robotic repair and assembly could become routine on the final frontier

Andy Greenberg / Wired: Q&A with Proton CEO Andy Yen on Proton's story, dislodging “a hundred million people” from Google, AI backlash, privacy, US politics, EU Chat Control, and more  —  Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone.  So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI?

Elon Musk's repost of an AI-generated 'Austin Powers' parody video has sparked online debate over creator credit and his influence, highlighting ongoing issues in AI content and digital media.

A prominent AI startup has rolled out a virtual cell model, advancing the race to speed up science.

Reddit is testing AI-narrated versions of selected text posts, with Read/Play controls that keep the original thread intact. Here’s how the experiment works. The post Reddit Turns Text Posts Into AI Videos: How the Test Works appeared first on TechRepublic.

Quantum sensors, devices that collect measurements by exploiting quantum-mechanical phenomena, could potentially detect extremely weak magnetic, gravitational and electromagnetic signals with greater sensitivity than classical sensors. Some quantum sensors leverage entanglement, a phenomenon that prompts distant particles to become so strongly linked that the physical state of one particle dictates the state of the others.

China could become almost self-sufficient in high-end AI accelerators in 2026 as Chinese IHVs led by Huawei expected to supply 90% of AI processors used domestically.

Nvidia still has dominant market share in AI chips, but with competition picking up steam, the company is taking greater advantage of another key asset.

Rising St. John's Prep senior Arush Shangari, 17, developed Project IRIS, an AI-powered flood prediction and disaster response tool that he's working to roll out across the U.S. The post A Mass. high schooler invented an AI-powered flood predictor. It could wind up saving lives throughout the US. appeared first on Boston.com.

A U.S. bankruptcy court auctioned off Spirit Airlines' treasure trove of data, with Google making the winning bid. The tech giant is paying $10 million for various information, including hundreds of millions of emails and Microsoft Teams conversations, and billions of flight pricing data and transaction records.

Nvidia still has dominant market share in AI chips, but with competition picking up steam, the company is taking greater advantage of another key asset.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android  —  Reddit's latest experiment creates videos with AI voices reading posts and comments out loud.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon launch to unravel the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter

404 Media placed an AirTag inside a shipment of 1,000 books, which landed at an Amazon facility that reportedly spends all day cutting the spine off of, and scanning, books.

Awarning that AI “slop” is fuelling cognitive decline and violent tendencies in children has ricocheted across the internet this week, carried by headlines that present the harm as settled fact. The document underneath is more modest, and far more uncertain, than the coverage implies. The source is a report published by the Global Network on […] This story continues at The Next Web

Madeleine Cuff / New Scientist: Google unveils Operation Blue Skies, a £5M trial to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to reduce contrail-induced warming using Google's AI atmospheric forecasts  —  Operation Blue Skies is the world's first trial to deploy contrail avoidance measures across an entire airspace …

Criminals use AI-generated voice notes in celebrity impersonation scams, targeting victims in Surrey and Sussex. Learn about fake Elon Musk profiles and how to prevent these scams.

Following its announcement last week, Honor opened up the first round of open sales for the Robot Phone in China. The highly anticipated smartphone with a 200MP gimbal camera is now available from Honor’s official online store and partnering retailers with a starting price of CNY 9,999 for the 12/512GB trim. Based on today’s exchange rates, that amounts to about $1,483 or €1,281. Honor is also offering a 16GB RAM and 1TB storage version for CNY 12,999 ($1,928/€1,666). Honor confirmed the Robot Phone won't be available for purchase outside its homeland even though last week's...

Amazon faces criticism for allegedly destroying books to digitise them for AI training, raising concerns about the preservation of physical culture and the ethics of AI data sourcing.

arXiv:2608.15690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation models produce a video and its soundtrack from a textual description, but offer no control over whose voice speaks in the output. We show that a base T2AV model can be turned into a voice-cloning model by adding a single zero-initialized linear layer on top of its audio backbone, fine-tuning for a comparatively short training schedule, and conditioning on a short reference recording at inference time. The reference is injected through two complementary signals: its diffusion latents are prepended to the audio stream, and a global speaker embedding modulates token of the target audio. On a benchmark of 674 speaker-text pairs spanning 30 speakers we compare against five strong voice-cloning text-to-speech baselines: our enhanced 5B model attains the highest speaker-encoder cosine similarity (SECS) across three independent verification networks (ECAPA-TDNN, WavLM-SV, Resemblyzer), statistically

EU-Startups reported that a $1bn post-money valuation is the end result of the funding round, in which Japan’s SoftBank was the sole investor. Read more: Gravis Robotics a Swiss unicorn after $200m raise

Short-lived radioactive isotopes, or radioisotopes, can image tumors or inflict high levels of cellular damage to them.

Madison Huang, a senior director at Nvidia and the daughter of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang, visited LG Electronics' robotics hub in Korea on Tuesday. The younger Huang met with senior LG Electronics officials to discuss ways to expand their partnership in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and robotics. The visit comes after LG Electronics announced last week that it plans to unveil a next-generation humanoid robot capable of bipedal walking in the first quarter of 2027, based on Nvidia's robotics platform. The Korean tech giant signed a memorandum of understanding with Nvidia at the U.S. chipmaker's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, with LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo and Jensen Huang in attendance. During Tuesday's visit, representatives from the two companies reviewed the operation of LG Electronics' robotics factory in Seoul, which is being built with the goal of becoming fully operational by the end of this year. The facility currently uses LG

Jason Parham / Wired: Rogue Studio, which calls itself a “playground for creative ethical mischief”, launches Rogue 1.0, an AI video tool to make adult content of Hollywood quality  —  Rogue Studios, a new cinematic adult AI-generator, is betting big on the future of “sophisticated” spicy content.

Author(s): Jose Antonio Moreno, Pablo García Talavera, Edwin Herrera, Sara López Valle, Zhuoqi Li, Lin-Lin Wang, Sergey Bud’ko, Alexander I. Buzdin, Isabel Guillamón, Paul C. Canfield, and Hermann SuderowVortex formation from surface superconductivity is observed in the topological semimetal γ -PtBi 2 , which confirms the robustness of the surface superconductivity at a higher T c than the bulk. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 086001] Published Mon Aug 17, 2026

Author(s): Julien Barrier, Liangtao Peng, Shuigang Xu, Christophe De Beule, V. I. Fal’ko, K. Watanabe, T. Tanigushi, A. K. Geim, Shaffique Adam, and Alexey I. BerdyuginMetallic layers placed near magic-angle graphene suppress Coulomb interactions and reveal that its superconductivity is driven by electronic interactions rather than conventional atomic vibrations. [Phys. Rev. X 16, 031040] Published Mon Aug 17, 2026

LG Group is partnering with Nvidia to gain a foothold in the emerging “Physical AI” market, where artificial intelligence operates in physical environments. The two companies have agreed to jointly develop a next-generation bipedal humanoid robot equipped with Nvidia’s computing modules and foundati

Reddit is trying out a new way for people to take in content on Reddit: by turning text posts into audio / video content. As part of an experiment, some posts are being adapted into videos that use AI voices to read the text of the main post and some comments. The video highlights the text as it's read by the AI voice, and under the video, a note says that it's a "Real conversation voiced by AI." An old post in r/boardgames from eight years ago with 101 responses to a request for good road trip games that adults will like is an example of Reddit's AI at work. Instead of the usual text thread, it has the main question above a three-minute vi … Read the full story at The Verge.

For communities in the cross hairs, every extra hour counts. The post DeepMind’s Weather AI Predicts Hurricanes a Day Earlier Than Traditional Forecasting appeared first on SingularityHub.

Red blood cells serve as the foundation for nanocarriers that show promise in a new study as effective and efficient vehicles for gene therapy, tumor targeting and other medical treatments. Scientists at The Ohio State University have showed that the engineered extracellular vesicles could evade immune cells and target cancer cells, two capabilities that could improve the delivery of future therapies. The study is published in Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Artificial intelligence is moving from the research laboratory into examination rooms, hospitals and home-care platforms, raising a question that could redefine modern medicine: should patients primarily be treated by physicians, by intelligent machines, or by a combination of both? A new Perspective in JAMA, authored by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, examines the advantages and […]

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of NGC 2392 (also known as the Lion Nebula), which Hubble previously imaged in 2000.

“We're not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy.”

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, grew to its current size in part by consuming smaller galaxies. Now, new data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show definitive evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way in the earliest phases of its evolution. This finding extends our knowledge of our galaxy's history 1.8 billion years farther back in time than before. The results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Black holes aren't just engines of inexorable destruction. They're complex regions of space and time, and under the right conditions, giant planets can form in their AGN disks.

This trait differentiates Lila Ibrahim from the rest, dating back to when she was a teenager working in the cornfields of Indiana.