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.

Endless runner

The fact that humanoid robots went from lagging behind human record-holders last year to surpassing human world records in the 100-meter sprint and standing high jump events this year suggests significant progress in robotic whole-body control for accomplishing specific tasks, Dipam Patel, a PhD candidate in computer science at Purdue University and a research assistant at the US Army DevCom Army Research Lab, told Ars.

“All of that does display whole body control, because you need to move all the joints, hands, legs, arm, body, everything to accomplish that task,” said Patel, who is also a graduate student member of IEEE. “So there has definitely been a huge push in engineering from where they were last time to this time.”

However, the robots on display in the World Humanoid Robot Games are still very far from general-purpose autonomous robots capable of handling practically any task. Instead, these robots were engineered to accomplish just one task, as shown by the fact that the running robots sprinted in a straight line and could not even slow down by continuing around the track after the finish line.

“If you cross the finish line, that's the goal—it doesn't matter if you stop and it doesn't matter if you fall into different pieces,” Patel told Ars. “Some companies had different types of robots for different games or different tasks, because they were engineered for that task to be the best in that.”

The robotic races and other flashy events provide for an entertaining spectacle that can lead to easy news headlines and viral video clips. They also give robotics companies an opportunity to attract more publicity and investor money by potentially standing out from the competition, Patel said.

One type of humanoid robot developed by the Beijing-based company X-Humanoid gained viral online fame for winning the small-group 400-meter race with an unusual “shy person hiding behind their hands” posture. The robot’s developers told the Global Times that the robot learned through reinforcement learning trials in simulation to shift from a human-style runner’s arm swing to holding its arms up near its face and swinging them back and forth through hip rotations.

Measures of robotic progress at the games could prove even more meaningful if, for example, they challenged robots to run the same race 10 times, Patel suggested. That would require the robots to demonstrate they have the software and hardware to perform reliably over multiple trials—and maybe even learn to slow down safely without endangering themselves or any bystanders.

Boring is more useful

The less flashy events that debuted during the World Humanoid Robot Games this year may ultimately prove more useful benchmarks for robotic progress. Such scenario competitions included household chores, like washing laundry, folding clothes, and cleaning up living rooms, according to the Chinese state media publication the Global Times.

Robots were also challenged by an unscheduled interruption when they had to bring a delivery package inside. That required them to switch tasks from the household chores to deal with receiving the delivery.

The Beijing Continental Grand Hotel provided robots with a different set of timed challenges, including moving wheeled luggage to assigned hotel rooms, cleaning up beds and restocking supplies. The Global Times also reported that a separate library shelving event challenged robots to collect book returns and put them in the correct place as a test of visual recognition and reasoning.

One of the livelier practical scenarios involved an outdoor firefighting and rescue event. Robots had 30 minutes to identify hazardous substances, locate and shut off three open valves of different types, spot a fire, and then find a fire extinguisher to put it out. Only three out of 12 competing robot teams completed the entire challenge, according to the Global Times.

Robots even participated in six events challenging hand dexterity, including picking up beans and driving screws. They also competed to precisely hammer nails into a corkboard without driving them in at an angle.

But Patel observed that many of the robotic competitors were still being teleoperated by human operators who directly controlled the robots’ actions. The World Humanoid Robot Games allowed for human teleoperation of robots in certain events, but penalized the final score if robots were being remotely controlled rather than performing autonomously.

Limits of robot autonomy

The fact that many events still permitted humans to directly control robotic motions shows that autonomous robot systems still have a long way to go, Patel said. Whereas humans can quickly learn many tasks on the fly, robots require much more training through repeated trial-and-error attempts either in simulation or in real-world scenarios.

“You need to have all possible edge cases for a robot to learn from interaction, which is not really feasible,” Patel told Ars. “You can simulate something like 100,000 scenarios for hammering a nail, but that’s just one task from millions of tasks in the world.”

The AI models powering many robots can also learn from huge amounts of visual data involving human demonstrations. But gathering such task demonstration data for robots has proven time- and resource-intensive, despite various companies’ efforts to pay ordinary people to strap cameras on their heads.

“We would have to push the algorithmic development a lot to actually see a robot being able to generalize and do eight-hour work shifts in any random environment,” Patel explained.

Even the more autonomous robots competing in the World Humanoid Robot Competition still rely heavily on cloud computing to help run intensive AI models, rather than running the AI computing directly on their own onboard hardware, according to the South China Morning Post. It described robots being equipped with 5G modules to transmit data to an “embodied-intelligence system” and then receiving instructions on what to do next.

The real test for humanoid robots’ capabilities will necessarily take place in the real world beyond the demonstrations at the World Humanoid Robot Games. Investors have poured more than $6 billion into humanoid robot companies in 2025 alone, with Chinese companies being especially aggressive in testing and deploying such robots.

Meanwhile, US companies like Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics are also ramping up their own commercialization and deployment plans in factories and warehouses. The US government has even banned the import of foreign-made robots, including China’s most popular humanoid robots.

But not all robotics researchers are convinced that humanoid robots are necessary, especially when the most useful robots currently doing productive work usually come in other shapes and sizes. For his own part, Patel is focused on developing software algorithms that allow many different types of robots to seamlessly switch between tasks.

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Florida's attorney general got a fiery rebuke and some ecclesiastical schooling from the state's Catholic bishops after he boldly threatened to block funding to Catholic schools unless the church bends to the state's ant-vaccine policies—policies allegedly intended to uphold religious freedom.

On July 31, Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a questionable letter to the bishops regarding exemptions to school vaccination requirements. Florida law requires public and private schools to allow vaccination exemptions based on religious grounds. But Catholic schools in the state do not accept religious exemptions; Florida's Catholic dioceses support vaccination and recognize no theological argument against it. The schools only accept exemptions based on medical conditions that are verified by a healthcare provider.

Uthmeier, himself a Catholic, wrote to the bishops in an open letter that, based on his own understanding of Catholicism, he saw "no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions." He reviewed select theological positions regarding the use of "abortion-derived vaccines," and suggested to the bishops that it was "morally reprehensible" that they not grant religious exemptions.

Beyond sharing his personal interpretations with the bishops, Uthmeier threatened to withhold state scholarships and vouchers from Catholic school if they don't change their position.

"Far from hallow"

The bishops responded with their own letter, which they made public last week. With a firm crack, they smack down Uthmeier's legal and theological arguments, while also noting that they're being unnecessarily nice in explaining to him why he's wrong. "[T]he Catholic bishops in Florida do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching and their reasons for the current vaccine policies," the write.

But "out of respect," they go on to demolish Uthmeier's points, citing the hierarchical nature of the Catholic church, the Religion clauses of the First Amendment, state laws, and previous court rulings. In all, "It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology."

They write:

The constitutional defect in your office’s inquiry is, therefore, not merely the conclusion it posits, but the inquiry itself. Whether Catholic doctrine requires, permits, or disfavors a particular exemption is a religious question entrusted to Catholic authorities, not state officials. The government may not decide that Church teaching is insufficiently religious, insufficiently consistent with Catholic doctrine, or insufficiently compelling to justify an ecclesiastical policy. Nor may it require Church leaders to defend their interpretation of Catholic doctrine before civil authorities as a condition of operating religious schools.

To the threat of withholding educational scholarships and other funding, the bishops call it "far from hallow and legally incorrect."

"The state cannot disqualify Catholic schools from the scholarship program merely because a state official’s views differ from the bishops' views."

Vaccine and the common good

As to their position on vaccines, the bishops explain their policy by first addressing a common religion-tinged criticism of vaccines: that the production of some of them involves using cell cultures that were originally developed from fetuses aborted in the 1960s. With the cell lines still in use, no new fetal cells or abortions are involved, and vaccines are purified so that no fetal tissue is in immunizations.

Some, like Uthmeier, claim that use of such vaccines goes against the church's belief in the sanctity of life. But, in fact, the church has repeatedly made clear that this is not the case. The Florida bishops reference a 2017 document from the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Italian Bishops’ Conference that getting vaccinated "does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion" and can be done "with a clear conscience." The Florida bishops further clarify that it is "morally permissible" for parents to have their children vaccinated for the same reason.

The bishops say that some parents may still disagree, and for those parents, they "are free to choose a different educational path for their children. Catholic virtual schooling and home schooling are among them," the bishops write.

Their vaccine policy is "rooted in the desire to protect the common good and to encourage the proportional benefits of utilizing vaccines," the bishops write. "This position is rooted in our Catechism: 'Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good.'"

The bishops note the vaccines not only protect healthy children, but also vulnerable groups in their schools, including children who cannot be vaccinated due to medical conditions, expectant teachers, and elderly parents and grandparents.

State context

The bishops' stand against Uthmeier comes as Florida's Republican leaders continue to attack life-saving vaccines and vaccination requirements. Last year, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced that the state planned to end all vaccination requirements, including those for school children. He dramatically claimed that every vaccine requirement "drips with disdain and slavery."

On Monday, the state proposed a rule to remove requirements that children get vaccinated against chickenpox, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type B, and pneumococcal to enter school. The rule would also expand religious exemptions.

The bishops' letter highlights a fallacy often used by anti-vaccine advocates: that undermining vaccines and dismantling vaccination requirements upholds religious freedom, when in fact it can be an attack on that freedom. Just on Monday, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed weakening the wording of federal vaccine recommendations "in favor of individual autonomy and religious freedom." Yet, no major religion in the world forbids vaccinations, and most encourage and embrace them as a common good, like the Catholic bishops.

The bishops ended their letter noting that they periodically review their vaccine policy. But, they wrote, they stand firm in their rejection of religious exemptions and "will not succumb to affronts to religious freedom."

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For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far.

The August 2026 edition of "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most "AI-exposed" occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption.

Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent.

Not all jobs are AI jobs

To determine those numbers, the researchers used a large subsample of the anonymized, high-frequency payroll data regularly aggregated by HR management company ADP. The team then rated each occupation's "exposure" to AI disruption using both a potential labor market impact gauge established by previous researchers (we took a somewhat critical look at that previous research earlier this year) and the Anthropic Economic Index, which looks at how various occupations actually use the Claude model in their everyday work (Google released a similar report based on occupational Gemini usage last month).

When crunching the numbers economy-wide, the researchers found little to no difference in relative overall employment between the jobs judged most and least affected by AI on these metrics. When separating out workers ages 22 to 25, though, the researchers found that, since 2022, employment in the top 40 percent of "AI-impacted" jobs had fallen by about 11 percent. In the 60 percent of jobs with the least AI impact, by contrast, total employment for those young workers grew by 10 percent over the same period.

Digging deeper into the data, the researchers found that this phenomenon is mainly manifesting itself through lower hiring rates for entry-level workers in AI-impacted fields, rather than increased firings or employees quitting. They also found that the labor market effects among this age group were mostly seen in lower overall employment, rather than reduced pay rates.

But not all jobs that show potential for AI "disruption" are created equal, the researchers found. In its Economic Index, Anthropic differentiates between queries related to tasks that are "automative" (i.e., fully replacing work previously done by a human) or "augmentative" (i.e., helping human workers be more effective at tasks they are still needed for). By this measure, jobs like "accountants and auditors" and "receptionists and information clerks" were among those judged most susceptible to AI automation, while jobs like "chief executive" and "registered nurse" were among those using AI augmentation most often.

Unsurprisingly, jobs where AI automation is prevalent are the ones showing the worst relative employment levels for entry-level workers these days. "The findings are consistent with automation-oriented uses of AI substituting for labor while complementary uses are associated with flat or rising employment," the researchers write.

Stay in school, kids

The researchers also theorized that entry-level workers could be especially affected by AI's impact on jobs that require heavily "codified" knowledge—the kind of "formal, standardized, documented knowledge that can be taught through education, textbooks, or written procedures." That would contrast with jobs where AI mainly complements an experienced worker's more "tacit" knowledge, which is overwhelmingly "acquired through practice, mentorship, and repeated exposure to real situations," the researchers write.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers used the required level of formal education in O*NET's extensive occupational database as a proxy for how reliant that job is on codified knowledge. Breaking out the employment data, the researchers found that "occupations with higher codified knowledge have slower entry-level employment growth, while occupations with higher tacit knowledge have faster employment growth for mid-career and senior workers."

At the same time, the researchers found that higher education might still serve as a buffer against the employment effects the Stanford researchers identified. As they write, occupations with a higher share of college graduates showed more "muted differences between more-exposed and less-exposed occupations" regarding AI. In jobs with few college graduates, on the other hand, "the least AI-exposed occupations [saw jobs] growing and the most exposed occupations [were] declining in employment."

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, lead researcher Erik Brynjolfsson warns that the current trends suggest a near future in which jobs for those employed in the pre-AI era largely persist, while many jobs for the incoming working-age cohort start disappearing. "The entry-level effects we’re measuring are real, persistent and widening," he said, "and I’m more worried than I was about a labor market that keeps its overall employment level while quietly closing the on-ramp for people starting their careers."

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SoundCloud will let you buy music directly from artists.

"The Register has a story about a Windows backdoor that waits silently in memory for a 'magic packet' before springing into action," writes Slashdot reader fred133. "No outgoing traffic, just waiting..." From the report: Like a sleeper cell awaiting activation, a never-before-seen Windows backdoor dubbed Sleepwalker waits silently in memory for one specifically crafted network packet to wake it up and deliver commands using the malware's 23-instruction language. The commands can do everything from running code directly in memory to moving data off the computer. Malware researcher Dominik Reichel discovered the passive backdoor, which also has its own command language, and detailed Sleepwalker in a technical analysis on Monday. "What makes it worth writing up is what that packet carries: not a readable command, but a short program written in a command language of the backdoor's own design," Reichel said. "Its 23 instructions cover scheduling, several ways to move data, staged file delivery and running code directly in memory. Recovering the encryption key is not enough to understand one of these programs. The internal command language must be reverse engineered as well." In addition to having its own command language, it's also notable that the remote host can be a VMware VMCI target instead of a normal network address. "Taken as a whole, the approach here is consistent with a targeted, well-resourced operation rather than an opportunistic one," Reichel wrote. The malware, hidden inside a 64-bit Windows DLL file, impersonates Microsoft's dpapi.dll, part of Windows' data protection API for protecting sensitive data. It exports the same seven functions as the real dpapi.dll, but attempts to forward calls to a file named dpapisvc.dll, which is not a real Windows component. The file also has a forged ESET Management Agent version resource, and loads via side-loading into ERAAgent.exe, the Windows executable for ESET Management Agent. After confirming that its host process is named ERAAgent.exe, Sleepwalker goes to sleep inside the computer's memory, which also helps it remain hidden from traditional anti-virus tools. Unlike most backdoors, which call back to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server and start receiving commands, Sleepwalker lies in wait, checking every packet that passes through the network looking for a specific pattern - this is called a magic packet. Once it sniffs out a packet that matches the exact pattern, the backdoor decrypts the data and treats it as a command. "Because the backdoor never sends anything out on its own and does not open any obvious listening port by default, tools that watch for connections to known-bad domains or unusual outbound traffic will not see anything unusual," Reichel wrote. "The absence of outbound connections to known-bad infrastructure does not rule out an infection, either. A machine can be fully compromised by this backdoor while producing nothing at all for a network monitor to flag."

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A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI: Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship... If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published after the release of ChatGPT, the trend is even more pronounced. In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released. This is in line with other studies that have shown that large shares of recently published pages on the internet were likely written or substantially edited by AI. AI-authored text is not evenly spread across the web. When ChatGPT was first released, the kinds of linguistic patterns that can signal AI authorship appeared at similar rates across the main top-level web domains (.com, .org, .edu and .gov). But in samples from 2026, around one-in-ten pages with a .com domain show signs of AI authorship — about double the share on .org domains (4.6%), and 10 times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%). They even identified specific ways online text has changed, "comparing the internet of today to a snapshot from 2023." Em dashes appear twice as often Oxford commas increased 63%. Words used more frequently by AI (like "delve," "interplay" or "testament") have more than doubled in usage. "Negative parallelism" comparisons ("it's not just X, it's Y") have nearly tripled.

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