Is Shipyard Welding the Right First Job for Humanoid Robots?
Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies which seems to be entirely focused on making that happen.…
Persona’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economic…
IEEE Spectrum first spoke with Persona two years ago, shortly after it…
Radford led NASA JSC’s Valkyrie program back in the day and was also t…
This DIY Bipedal Robot Used Pneumatic “Air-Muscles” Instead of Motors
In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage.…
He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he couldn…
To help with his project, he organized a weekly get-together of a doze…
Every Wednesday night, his wife, Sally, would make a big pot of spaghe…
Defining Autonomy for Wellness Robots in Senior Care
An examination of how socially assistive wellness robots could support the seven dimensions of senior wellness, and how a framework can measure their autonomy.…
What Attendees will LearnWhy the senior care crisis exceeds incrementa…
Demographic pressure, workforce shortages, and a daily wellness-progra…
On 19 April 2026, the Honor Lightning humanoid robot ran a half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human world record by 7 minutes and the best robot time from 2025 by almost 2 hours.…
How did Honor do it?
Is there some magical technology or technique that unlocked this perfo…
How did the company beat the significantly better-known Unitree (which…
Cloning could be used to save species—or make human “organ sacks”
This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female.They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome.…
It allowed them to create female clones of male mice.
That’s right: female animals that are genetically identical to males, …
Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamana…
Roundtables: Inside the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” Idea Shaping US Policy
Listen to the session or watch below The “censorship-industrial complex” is an idea that a network of government, tech, and research groups is collaborating to suppress conservative online speech.…
This was fodder for the right-wing information sphere for years—then i…
Watch a conversation exploring how it started, where it’s going, and w…
Speakers: Amy Nordrum, Executive Editor, Operations, and Eileen Guo, S…