A humanoid robot named Lightning completed the Beijing E-Town Half-Marathon today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human world record by nearly seven minutes. The robot, built by Shenzhen Honor Smart Technology Development Co., navigated the 21-kilometre course autonomously, without remote control, using multi-sensor fusion and real-time decision-making algorithms. A second Lightning unit, this one remotely controlled, crossed the finish line even faster at 48 minutes and 19 seconds. The human half-marathon world record is 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon on 8 March.

The robots and the roughly 12,000 human runners followed the same route but competed in separate lanes. The human race was won by Zhao Haijie of China in 1 hour, 7 minutes, and 47 seconds. The robot race was won by a machine that stands 169 centimetres tall, has an effective leg length of 95 centimetres designed to mimic elite human runners, generates 400 newton-metres of peak torque, and uses a proprietary liquid cooling system with a heat exchange flow rate exceeding four litres per minute, technology borrowed from Honor’s smartphone division.

The scale of the event

This was the second edition of the Robot World Humanoid Robot Games Half-Marathon, co-hosted by the Beijing Municipal People’s Government and China Media Group. The first, held on the same date last year, was riddled with mishaps. Only six of 21 robotic runners completed the course. Several stumbled, careened out of control, or simply lay down at the starting line. The winner, a Tiangong Ultra robot, finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds.

The 2026 edition was a different event in almost every respect. One hundred and twelve teams from 26 brands entered, fielding more than 300 individual robots, including five international teams from Germany, France, and Brazil. Roughly 40% of the teams competed in the autonomous navigation category, in which robots must navigate the course without human input. Remote-controlled teams had their net times multiplied by a 1.2 coefficient, a 20% penalty designed to encourage autonomous capability. All three podium finishers in the autonomous category were Honor robots, and all three posted times faster than the human world record.

The improvement from 2025 to 2026, from six finishers out of 21 to more than 100 teams competing with autonomous navigation, represents the kind of year-over-year progress that makes the event significant beyond spectacle. Lightning still collided with a barricade near the finish line and fell, requiring staff to help it back up before it completed the race. Another robot fell at the start line. But the failures were exceptions rather than the norm, a reversal from last year.

Who built the winner

Honor, the smartphone manufacturer spun off from Huawei in 2020, is the first major phone company to enter the humanoid robotics market. It unveiled its humanoid robot programme at Mobile World Congress on 1 March and committed $10 billion over five years to AI development. The company says Lightning’s running speed of four metres per second is 14% faster than Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. The entire development-to-marathon-entry process took one year.

Du Xiaodi, an Honor engineer on the winning team, said the competition’s value lies in technology transfer: “Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas. For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios.” The race functions as a forcing function for locomotion, balance, navigation, and endurance, the same capabilities required for factory floors, construction sites, and eventually domestic environments.

China’s humanoid robot industry

The marathon is a showcase for an industry that China is building with the kind of coordinated state investment it previously applied to electric vehicles and solar panels. The 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026 to 2030, elevates robotics and “embodied intelligence” to one of the country’s top ten “new industry tracks.” The government has committed a one-trillion-yuan ($138 billion) state-backed fund to humanoid robots, industrial automation, and embodied AI. In February, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology unveiled the “Humanoid Robot and Embodied Intelligence Standard System,” drafted by more than 120 research institutions and manufacturers, with a roadmap to push Chinese standards into ISO and IEC international adoption by 2028.

MIIT describes humanoid robots as “the next groundbreaking innovation following computers, smartphones, and new-energy vehicles.” The industry is projected to surpass 20 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) in scale by the end of this year. Chinese companies already dominate production. AGIBOT shipped more than 5,000 units in 2025. Unitree Robotics shipped 5,500. UBTech shipped more than 1,000 and plans to reach 5,000 this year and 10,000 in 2027. Chinese firms accounted for nearly 90% of global humanoid robot shipments last year. By comparison, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics each shipped approximately 150 units.

The gap between running and usefulness

The question the marathon raises is whether speed on a road translates into capability in a factory or a home. Western humanoid robot companies, including Tesla with Optimus, Figure AI, and those supplying BMW, have emphasised dexterity and manipulation: picking up objects, assembling components, navigating cluttered indoor environments. Chinese companies have invested heavily in bipedal locomotion and speed, which produces more dramatic demonstrations but addresses a narrower slice of the problem.

The global humanoid robot market is projected to reach somewhere between $6.5 billion and $15 billion by 2030, depending on the research firm, with Goldman Sachs estimating $38 billion by 2035. The spread in projections reflects genuine uncertainty about how quickly robots that can run a half marathon will learn to do things that people will pay for. Industrial deployment is advancing: Figure 02 completed an 11-month pilot at a BMW plant, moving more than 90,000 components. But the gap between a controlled factory deployment and the kind of general-purpose humanoid robot that China showcased at its Spring Festival Gala remains wide.

Lightning’s 50-minute half-marathon is a genuine engineering achievement. A robot that navigates 21 kilometres autonomously, maintains balance at 25 kilometres per hour, manages thermal loads through liquid cooling, and recovers from a collision with a barricade has demonstrated capabilities that did not exist in any humanoid platform a year ago. The question is not whether the technology is impressive. It is whether the country investing $138 billion in it will find applications that justify the spending before the rest of the world catches up on a different approach to the same problem.

Photo credit: Autoblog
Seres developed an in-car toilet design that allows the system to fit inside an electric vehicle without taking up additional room. Engineers put the entire assembly on a movable rail connecting to the seat frame. When it is not needed, the toilet simply disappears beneath the floor. All it takes is a simple nudge or a whispered order, and it appears like a drawer.

Voice commands activate the system with a simple phrase that initiates the toilet function. Once you get access to it, the rest of the interior remains largely unchanged. A built-in fan draws in air and expels foul air through an exhaust pipe. Pee and other waste enter a tank, which must be manually emptied when you get at your destination. They include a small heating element inside that helps to dry everything up, making cleanup easier.

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The beauty of it is that when it’s not in use, nothing sticks out, allowing you to use the space for seating or storage. The patent filing cites extended journeys, camping vacations, and any time spent living in your car as the primary reasons for this functionality. Traffic delays that used to force you to make painful decisions are no longer as inconvenient. Seres already manufactures automobiles with features meant to make your daily commute easier. They compete in a market where each new model strives to be unique. This invention fits nicely into that approach by figuring out how to transform something you use every day into another part of the car.

There are still several technicalities to be sorted out before anyone can install this system in a real car. There is concern that scents may remain if the fan or seals fail to function properly when the unit is frequently utilized. Emptying the tank is also a bother, whether at the gas station or at home. If you’re sharing a car with a group of people, you might be afraid to take turns in such a small place, and there’s also the question of how well it will withstand all of the road’s bumps.

Seres hasn’t said whether they intend to manufacture any automobiles with this system in them. Patents don’t always come to fruition, therefore there’s a high risk this idea will go unnoticed. Nonetheless, it’s a creative solution to a problem that almost every driver has encountered at some point. If it ever gets it out of the design phase, road vacations may not be such a burden.
[Source]

Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi footprint across Texas by introducing availability in both Dallas and Houston. As announced in a post on X, the EV maker is rolling out its Robotaxis to small sections of the Texas cities, as detailed by two maps of its new service areas.

The first Robotaxi rides started in Austin, Texas where Tesla is headquartered, but the service’s launch was paired with a “Tesla Safety Monitor,” or a supervising human in the passenger seat. Earlier this year, Tesla began to transition away from including safety monitors, leaving its Robotaxis to operate unsupervised and fully autonomous. In the latest announcement on X, Tesla also showed off a 360-degree panning shot with no safety monitor, but the company hasn’t stated if its Dallas and Houston service will have in-car human supervision. It’s worth nothing that Tesla previously admitted that some of its Robotaxis are sometimes driven remotely by human operators.

With the Robotaxi expansion into Dallas and Houston, Tesla is encroaching on Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service that entered the same markets in February of this year. Looking ahead, Tesla is also targeting the Bay Area market in California for its Robotaxi expansion. While the company has received approvals to operate a ride-hailing service in California, it still doesn’t have authorization for autonomous taxis in the state yet.

Vacuuming is a chore, even if you use one of the best vacuums in Australia. If you want to make it as effortless as possible, investing in one of the best robot vacuums is the way to go.

The best robovacs available today are autonomous cleaners requiring minimal human intervention. They’re perfect for regular vacuuming and mopping, plus they can be scheduled for when you and the family will be away to minimise disrupting household activities.

At AXPONA 2026, the EarGear section was filled with the usual heavyweight brands, but a smaller name managed to stand out. Audma may be a new company on paper, founded in 2024, but its story reaches back to 1978 when Cesare Mattoli began chasing a stubborn idea: getting headphones to sound more like speakers in a room.

For decades, that goal remained out of reach. Mattoli built and rebuilt designs that never quite delivered, held back more by the limits of available technology than a lack of vision. That changed in 2022 with the arrival of ELISA, the Electronic Loudspeaker Imaging Simulating Amplifier, which finally brought his concept into focus. The company later rebranded as Audma in 2024, keeping ELISA as the core technology behind its products. Since then, Audma has introduced two amplifiers, the Maestro HPA1 desktop model and the Brioso PHPA1 portable, both demonstrated at AXPONA as a different way to tackle soundstage without changing your headphones, just the signal path.

While most headphone manufacturers try to squeeze more space out of their designs by tweaking cup geometry, airflow, and damping materials, Audma takes a different route. Its approach centers on delay line processing at the amplification stage, shaping how the signal reaches each ear rather than altering the headphone itself. The idea is straightforward: keep your existing headphones and source, insert one of Audma’s amplifiers into the chain, and let the processing do the heavy lifting in creating a more speaker like presentation.

How Audma ELISA Reworks Spatial Cues Inside Your Headphones

The ELISA circuitry uses delay line processing to create an image that more closely approximates what a listener hears with speakers or live music. One of the core issues it addresses is that headphones separate channels too well. In real world listening, the brain determines direction and distance based on the time delay between when a sound reaches each ear and the reduction in level at the farther ear.

With headphones, that mechanism is largely lost because each channel is delivered almost entirely to one ear. Some amplifiers and digital audio players attempt to compensate with crossfeed. Crossfeed mixes a portion of each channel into the other with reduced level and a slight delay so that both ears receive both signals, more like real listening conditions. Different implementations vary the amount of delay and level, which is why reactions to crossfeed tend to be mixed.

Audma builds on that same principle but with a more advanced approach. ELISA allows adjustment of both delay and perceived direction rather than just blending the channels. On both the desktop and portable amplifiers, listeners can control the apparent distance and angle of the sound, effectively expanding or narrowing the stage and shifting their position relative to it. In practice, that means you can move closer to the performance or further back by making a few adjustments, rather than changing headphones.

ELISA Enabled Products

The Maestro was Audma’s original release and is designed to function as both a headphone amplifier and a preamp. Connectivity is extensive, with XLR, RCA, coaxial, optical, and USB inputs, along with both RCA and XLR outputs. The chassis follows a fairly standard full size footprint at 16 x 4.5 x 16 inches (W x H x D) and is available in either brushed metal or black, with weight ranging from roughly 20 to 25 pounds depending on configuration.

On the digital side, the Maestro incorporates an AKM 4499REQ DAC capable of up to 768 kHz/32-bit PCM and DSD256, making it a serious standalone DAC as well. As a headphone amplifier, it offers an output impedance of 6 ohms and six selectable gain levels at 0, +6, +12, +18, +24, and +30 dB, allowing it to accommodate a wide range of headphones. Output power is rated at 4 watts into 32 ohms and 8 watts into 300 ohms, and it had no issue driving 600 ohm headphones during the demo, including a borrowed Beyerdynamic headphones.

Along with the standard controls and ELISA stage and angle adjustments, the Maestro also includes phase control, giving the listener another layer of tuning to better match personal preference and system synergy.

The portable Brioso PHPA1 offers both headphone amplifier and DAC functionality but drops the preamp role in favor of battery operation. Its size and shape are roughly comparable to a Samsung Galaxy S25+, measuring about 3 inches wide, three quarters of an inch thick, and just under 6 inches tall. Weight comes in at around half a pound, making it easy enough to carry on a daily basis.

Internally, it uses the AKM 4499EXEQ DAC paired with the 4191EQ modulator, supporting up to 768 kHz PCM and DSD256. For those who prefer an external DAC, both 3.5 mm and 4.4 mm analog inputs are included. The amplifier section provides four gain settings at 0, +8, +16, and +24 dB, with output power rated at 4 watts into 32 ohms and 5.4 watts into 150 ohms, which is more than enough for the vast majority of headphones.

Battery life is rated at up to 5 hours per charge, depending on listening levels, DAC usage, and headphone load.

Both Audma amplifiers are priced at approximately $5000 USD and are available directly from Audma or through select distribution partners.

The Bottom Line

Audma is chasing something most headphone brands only nibble at from the edges. By moving spatial processing into the amplification stage, ELISA offers a level of control over stage width, depth, and positioning that goes well beyond typical crossfeed. It’s clever, and in the right setup, it works.

The problem is the price of entry. At around $5000, you’re being asked to rethink your entire signal chain for an effect that some headphones, like the Grell OAE2, already attempt to deliver for well under $500. No, they don’t offer the same level of adjustability or precision, but the gap in cost is hard to ignore.

If ELISA delivers on its promise in a controlled environment, Audma might be onto something genuinely different. But at this level, different isn’t enough. It has to be indispensable.

For more information: audma.it

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We’ll start things off this week with a story that’s developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth — on Friday, NASA announced that the command had been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. As the power produced by the spacecraft’s aging radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to dwindle, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been systematically turning off various systems to extend the mission for as long as possible. It’s believed that deactivating LECP should buy them another year, during which engineers hope to implement a more ambitious power-saving routine. If this sounds a bit familiar, you’re probably thinking of Voyager 2. The plug was pulled on its LECP instrument back in March of 2025.

The JPL engineers hope that their new plan may allow them to reactivate previously disabled systems on the twin space probes, but even if everything goes according to plan, there’s no fighting the inevitable. At some point, there simply won’t be enough juice in the RTGs to keep the lights on. Although it’s going to be a sad day when we have to bring you that news, surviving a half-century in space is one hell of a run.

Speaking of ending a run, just a week after Amazon announced that pre-2012 Kindles would no longer be supported, the company is letting users know that the Kindle software for PCs will be discontinued in June. In its current form, at least. As Good e-Reader reports, Amazon is developing a new client for users who want to access the Kindle ecosystem from their computers, but it will only run on Windows 11. Since older software could be used to strip DRM from purchased ebooks, it seems likely this is another attempt to lock the platform down.

We’re not fans of arbitrary limits being placed on ebooks and the devices that read them, but on the other hand, there are definitely systems out there that could stand to be tightened up a bit. For example, research out of Quarkslab has shown that the electronic control unit (ECU) from a wrecked vehicle can reveal a surprising amount of information.

After picking up a used ECU, they were able to dump its NAND flash chip and decode the log files it contained. It turns out the car had GPS logs going back to the day it rolled off the assembly line, and the researchers were able to reconstruct every trip it ever made.

By cross-referencing the last recorded coordinates with social media posts, they were even able to find pictures of the crash that took the vehicle out of commission. It’s bad enough that personal information can be scraped off of secondhand hard drives; now we’ve got to worry about what happens to our cars after they get hauled off to the junkyard.

If these are the sort of stories that keep you on two wheels rather than four, you may be interested in the latest innovation from Škoda Auto. In an effort to reduce collisions with pedestrians, they’ve developed a bike bell that penetrates active noise cancellation (ANC) systems. The logic goes like this: if someone is walking around with headphones that feature ANC, they might not hear the bell of an approaching bike. So they teamed up with researchers from the University of Salford to essentially find the weaknesses in existing ANC systems.

As you might have guessed, irregular noises are harder to block out than constant tones. Researchers uncovered a gap between 750 and 780 Hz where sounds could sneak through. The mechanical bell uses both principles to defeat ANC, and in testing, it was shown to provide headphone-wearing pedestrians  more time to react to an approaching bicycle.

Finally, we’ll bring this week’s post full circle by starting and ending on a space story: earlier this week, PBS released the hour-long documentary Artemis II: Return to the Moon on YouTube. Watching PBS programming on YouTube might seem a bit odd, but that’s the world we live in these days. At any rate, the video is a fascinating look into what went into the recently concluded Moon mission and has us even more excited for Artemis III and beyond.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is pretty tricky. It was a little unnerving to see “cannibalism” as one of the clues. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Cough, cough!

Green group hint: Reel it in.

Blue group hint: Spin a web.

Purple group hint: Not Sunday or Tuesday.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Mass of smoke.

Green group: Fishing gear.

Blue group: Associated with black widow spiders.

Purple group: ____ Monday.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is mass of smoke. The four answers are billow, cloud, plume and puff.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is fishing gear. The four answers are bait, hook, net and rod.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is associated with black widow spiders. The four answers are cannibalism, hourglass, venom and web.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ____ Monday. The four answers are blue, cyber, manic and meatless.

Anyone looking to upgrade to the next Mac Studio or MacBook Pro might have to wait a little longer, thanks to the ongoing global memory shortage. As reported by Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, “at least two of the company’s upcoming machines … could debut a little later than the company initially planned,” referencing the refreshes to Apple’s desktop and its laptop that’s expected to get a touchscreen.

Bloomberg reported that the upcoming Mac Studio, which follows up the current lineup in the M4 Max and M3 Ultra configurations, was first expected to release in the middle of the year. However, Apple is already dealing with shortages of its existing Mac Studio stock, likely due to the device being a popular choice for anyone running local AI models. With no stop to the shortage in sight, Gurman predicted that the refreshed Mac Studio’s release could be postponed to around October instead.

It’s not just Apple’s desktop offerings being affected. Gurman also reported that the release of the next MacBook Pro could be delayed. While Gurman said the release timeline of the touchscreen MacBook Pro could be between the end of 2026 to early 2027, he’s now predicting that it would arrive toward the later end of that timeline. Of course, Apple isn’t the only consumer tech company heavily affected by the RAM shortage. However, Apple can at least take advantage of its successful MacBook Neo release amidst the memory shortage crisis affecting all laptop makers.