Robotics

Beyond the Wheelchair: How Machines Are Learning to Restore Motion

Without an implant or surgery, researchers are teaching an EEG cap to translate imagined movement into control of a robotic hand. It is an early step towards restoring motion after paralysis.

Robots Small Enough to Swim Your Bloodstream

Forget humanoids. The most radical robots of 2026 are specks that travel through your body under magnetic control, some of them partly alive, carrying a drug straight to its target.

This Robot Learns Your Job by Watching You Do It

A Paris startup founded by a Tesla veteran says its lightweight humanoid, Northstar, can pick up new jobs by watching a person do them once, the long-sought shortcut that would let one robot learn many tasks without a coder, though for now it is only a prototype.

The Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

Six deep dives, one a day, Monday to Saturday. Here is your first taste of each.

One Free Download Now Drives 20 Different Robots

Ant Group open-sourced LingBot-VLA 2.0, a free model its makers say drives 20 different robot bodies on a single gaming graphics card. A day later NVIDIA and Hugging Face answered. The race to become the Android of robots is on, and nobody is charging.

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

Mind-reading AI, a chip that writes DNA, one free download that drives 20 robots, and the signal holding up civilisation. Six deep dives, one a day, Monday to Saturday.

No Hands on the Scalpel: The Robot That Did the Whole Surgery Itself

A robot removed a gallbladder start to finish with no surgeon at the controls. Inside autonomous surgery: how it learned, and why it isn't in hospitals yet.

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six Deep Dives, One a Day

Six spoilers- for next week's deep dives, one a day, Monday to Saturday.

AI Can Now Spot Cancer Years Before You'd Feel It

Plus: China's eerily lifelike humanoid, why bosses say data (not models) is the moat against LLMs, Russia's $60B bid to become SpaceX, home batteries turned power plants, and the Pentagon's encryption countdown.

Can AI Actually Do Science? A Brutal New Test Keeps Score

Plus: robots learning to feel, a contested claim to have built life from scratch, China's fusion-magnet milestone, a tiny engine aimed at Mars, and quantum error-fixing as a free download.

The Future of Video Editing? Tell Google's AI What to Change — and It Does It

Plus: a humanoid robot pulls a multi-day shift, a monthly shot that silences a gene, a battery made of CO2, NASA's private cargo run to the Moon, and a quantum computer that fits in a server rack.

A Robot Tow-Truck Launches Today to Save a Falling NASA Telescope

Plus: NVIDIA hands AI agents a real science lab, robots learn from video games, a world-first cell therapy cracks a solid tumour, a walk-away-safe reactor finds a grid partner, and an AI designs quantum codes humans couldn't.

The Machines Sucking CO2 From the Sky Just Got Real — and Cheaper

Plus: Washington gates the most powerful AI, a humanoid takes a real shift at BMW, an AI-designed antibody clears its first human safety test, the next Starship lights up, and quantum hits a real milestone.

The Signal — America's quantum moonshot, and the quiet race to lock your data first

A US executive order pours the government into quantum computing — and braces for the day it breaks today's encryption. Plus five more signals from the frontier.

The Signal — The $20,000 home robot has arrived, with a human quietly on call

A walking humanoid you can buy for your living room is shipping this year — but the laundry-folding demo hides a remote helper. Plus six more signals from the frontier.

The Signal — A battery of iron and air could be clean energy's missing piece

Cheap storage that lasts days, not hours, is the part that finally lets a grid run on sun and wind — plus five more signals from the frontier.

The Signal — AI is now hunting bugs in the code the whole internet runs on

For two years the fear was AI helping hackers. Now it's patching the open-source code almost everything online depends on — plus six more signals from the frontier.

The Signal — A robot is flying across the Pacific to rescue a NASA telescope

Launch is becoming routine. The new frontier in space is keeping, moving and rescuing what's already up there — plus six more signals.