World humanoid robot games show runners breaking records, bursting into flames

World humanoid robot games show runners breaking records, bursting into flames

fivenewscrypto    août 27, 2026   

Viral videos of the World Humanoid Robot Games show sprinting robots beating the human 100-meter record held by Usain Bolt—but also feature running robots crashing into barriers and falling down because they cannot readily stop running. A few fallen robots even break at the waist in a shower of sparks or catch on fire.

That demonstration of both robotic prowess and limitations came from the second edition of the World Humanoid Robot Games hosted in Beijing from August 22–26. Like the inaugural event held in 2025, this year’s event challenged humanoid robots to run fast, perform kung fu or dance moves, fight one another in kickboxing, and play soccer or table tennis.

This year’s games also tested robots in more humdrum practical scenarios like washing and hanging laundry, where they appeared to lag behind typical human working speeds. That suggests the event organizers, including Chinese state media and the Beijing city government, are keen to showcase the commercial potential of humanoid robots at a time when China’s robotics industry is rapidly developing and testing such robots.

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Preserving glow-in-the-dark art and fashion for future generations

Preserving glow-in-the-dark art and fashion for future generations

fivenewscrypto    août 27, 2026   

Fashionistas of a certain age no doubt remember the late designer Stephen Sprouse, who gave Blondie's Debbie Harry her distinctive Bowery punk style. Sprouse's first collections in the mid-1980s made a major splash, melding graffiti prints, a playful '60s aesthetic, and bright Day-Glo colors that won admirers such as Andy Warhol.

Several examples of Sprouse's work are preserved in the textiles collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, where conservationists are trying to learn more about the phosphorescent and fluorescent pigments the designer used in his creations in order to keep the colors from dulling over time. They described recent advances in that research at a meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) held this week in Chicago.

Scientists began describing minerals that glowed in the dark as phosphors in the Middle Ages. Typically, such materials take on a charge when exposed to light, storing the absorbed energy and releasing it gradually as re-emitted light. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactive decay in 1896 because of his work with phosphorescent uranium salts: He left the salts in a closed drawer with photographic plates, which fogged up even without a light source. DayGlo paints and similar materials exploit the related phenomenon of fluorescence. DayGlo pigments fluoresce in daylight by essentially converting UV light into visible light to produce brighter, more vibrant colors.

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Google's anti-nausea Motion Assist dots finally rolling out on Android

Google's anti-nausea Motion Assist dots finally rolling out on Android

fivenewscrypto    août 26, 2026   

Some people are cursed with motion sickness, which can make it impossible to read or use a phone in a moving vehicle without suffering waves of nausea. There's a surprisingly simple trick that can make smartphones usable in such situations. Apple deployed it on the iPhone a couple of years ago, and now Google's own version is finally coming (slowly) to Android.

Motion sickness is caused by a disagreement between what your inner ear senses and what your eyes see. If you're looking at a book or a screen while in a car, the sensory mismatch can lead to a pretty unpleasant time. As part of iOS 18 in 2024, Apple released a feature called Motion Cues that places a network of moving dots on the screen to alleviate motion sickness, and it seems to work surprisingly well. Google's version is similar, but it's called Motion Assist.

Google began testing Motion Assist back in 2024, but it never expanded beyond an internal test until now. Android Authority reports Motion Assist is appearing on Pixel phones running Android 17, but there's no app or update you can install to get the feature—it's being delivered by Play Services as part of a staged rollout.

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Two unvaccinated people die from measles in Pennsylvania, officials confirm

Two unvaccinated people die from measles in Pennsylvania, officials confirm

fivenewscrypto    août 26, 2026   

Two unvaccinated people have died from measles in Pennsylvania, state health officials confirmed Tuesday.

They are the first measles deaths reported in Pennsylvania in 35 years and the first deaths reported in the US in 2026. Last year, the US saw three measles deaths: two in otherwise-healthy but unvaccinated school-age children in Texas and one in an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. Prior to those deaths, the US had not seen a measles death since 2015, when a woman with underlying conditions became severely ill.

Citing privacy, health officials in Pennsylvania are not providing information on the people who died beyond that they were unvaccinated and were residents of Lancaster County. Officials noted that the deaths are among 393 confirmed cases reported this year across 28 counties in the state.

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SpaceX intends to invest up to $100 billion in massive Louisiana spaceport

SpaceX intends to invest up to $100 billion in massive Louisiana spaceport

fivenewscrypto    août 26, 2026   

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Tuesday that SpaceX will commit $100 billion to develop Starship factories and launch pads in the state's coastal areas. In doing so, the company seeks to replicate the Starbase facility it has built over the last decade in southern Texas on a larger scale.

The announcement capped months of speculation about SpaceX's interest in a sprawling parcel of land along the Gulf coast of Louisiana, which offers room to build multiple launch towers and offers access to the methane propellant that fuels the Starship rocket.

Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the "Starbase Louisiana" facility would become a self-sustaining spaceport with propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport on site.

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Lab supply companies have been selling antibodies using manipulated images

Lab supply companies have been selling antibodies using manipulated images

fivenewscrypto    août 26, 2026   

Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery.

In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation—the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.

Antibodies are useful in the lab because the immune system generates them to recognize specific proteins. While those proteins typically appear on the surface of pathogens, the immune system doesn't know where a given protein it encounters comes from. So, if you inject an animal with your protein of interest, it will typically generate antibodies to recognize that.

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Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors.

Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors.

fivenewscrypto    août 26, 2026   

Ads and tracking have turned TVs into privacy nightmares. Both are so widespread among smart TVs that I’ve written a guide for avoiding them. One recommendation in that guide is to use a computer monitor. But in recent years, monitors have become more capable of pushing ads and tracking users.

Without more straightforward approaches from vendors, such as easily comprehensible privacy policies and avoiding inappropriate ads, monitors are dangerously encroaching into smart-TV-like territory.

LG monitors’ McAfee ads

LG lost some trust after a recent report that some of its monitors installed McAfee pop-up ads onto connected computers. Since at least 2024, some of these displays installed an app, LG Monitor App Installer, onto connected computers under the cover of driver updates installed through Windows Update.

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