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Two new videos from Chinese companies make it clear: it’ll soon be no use trying to run from robots. Rapid upgrades in speed and agility mean robot dogs can now sprint at near-Olympic pace, and humanoids are running smoothly over tough terrain.Let’s start with the humanoid – Unitree’s G1 Bionic. We’ve written quite a bit about this diminutive android in the last year or two, largely because it’s incredibly cheap, the base model starting at a remarkable US$16,000. The G1 stands 132 cm (4 ft 4 inches) tall, weighs 35 kg (77 lb), perceives the world through LiDAR, depth cameras…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the nation’s health agencies, formally asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the authorization of all Covid vaccines during a deadly phase of the pandemic when thousands of Americans were still dying every week.Mr. Kennedy filed a petition with the F.D.A. in May 2021 demanding that officials rescind authorization for the shots and refrain from approving any Covid vaccine in the future.Just six months earlier, Mr. Trump had declared the Covid vaccines a miracle. At the time Mr. Kennedy filed the petition, half of American adults were receiving…

A climactic mystery about a year that gave summer a deadly pass may have been solved. Using new ice core techniques, scientists have concluded that the dark, chilly year of 1831 was due to the massive eruption of a volcano north of Japan.The year 1831 was a very nasty one in terms of weather. Across the globe, temperatures dropped by an average of 1 °C (1.8 °F). The British Isles were inundated with rain to the point where it was one of the wettest years on record for that century as the countryside flooded. Snow storms buffeted the Northeastern United…

Three years ago, when Bob and Sandy Curtis moved into an upscale continuing care retirement community in Port Washington, N.Y., he thought they had found the best possible elder care solution.In exchange for a steep entrance fee — about $840,000, funded by the sale of the Long Island house they had owned for nearly 50 years — they would have care for the rest of their lives at the Harborside. They selected a contract from several options that set stable monthly fees at about $6,000 for both of them and would refund half the entrance fee to their estate after…

Merrell has one of the deepest lineups of hiking shoes and boots on the market, so when it says it’s developed something that disrupts the market and reinvents sole construction, it’s worth having a look. The method to the madness behind the alien-looking SpeedArc Surge Boa is a nitrogen-injected coiled midsole that adds high-performance rebound and energy return and a dual-Boa system for tight, dialed-in zonal fit. Merrell’s team didn’t have to look far off the trail to find ideas for the new SpeedArc – they simply turned their gaze to the dirt road that leads to the trail, using…

Though Mr. Kennedy’s embrace of recovery farms may be novel, the concept stretches back almost a century. In 1935, the government opened the United States Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Ky., to research and treat addiction. Over the years, residents included Chet Baker and William S. Burroughs (who portrayed the institution in his novel, “Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict”). The program had high relapse rates and was tainted by drug experiments on human subjects. By 1975, as local treatment centers began to proliferate around the country, the program closed.In America, therapeutic communities for addiction treatment became popular in the…

A clever new set of glasses may offer new hope to people with macular degeneration. By copying the structure of a fly’s eyes, the specs are claimed to “fill in” the missing section of the wearer’s view of the world.Macular degeneration is one of the leading causes of blindness, affecting the center area of the retina. That area is known as the macula.In one of the two main forms of macular degeneration, light-sensitive cells in the macula get damaged as cellular debris accumulates around them. In the other form, abnormal blood vessels growing behind the retina damage the macula by…

More Americans are surviving cancer, but the disease is striking young and middle-aged adults and women more frequently, the American Cancer Society reported on Thursday.And despite overall improvements in survival, Black and Native Americans are dying of some cancers at rates two to three times higher than those among white Americans.These trends represent a marked change for an illness that has long been considered a disease of aging, and which used to affect far more men than women.The shifts reflect declines in smoking-related cancers and prostate cancer among older men and a disconcerting rise in cancer in people born since…

Your action movie is coming together nicely, but it needs something thrilling, like an explosive car chase – and you’re nearly out of budget. We’ve all been there, right? Right?Well, thankfully, award-winning filmmaking tech company Pixomondo has a fix(omondo). Its new PXO Akira system, showcased at CES, lets you plonk practically any vehicle – a car, motorcycle, or even a small plane – onto a platform that can spin 360 degrees on command, along with your camera rig to capture it in any sort of motion you need to simulate for exciting shots.This contraption pairs with a wall of linked…

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that thanks to the negotiations, Medicare’s prices for semaglutide products “will fall substantially beginning in 2027.”That would also open the door to lower prices for competing obesity drugs like Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. Pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate drug prices, would have more leverage to demand lower prices closer to what the government pays for semaglutide. If the government were to expand coverage of obesity drugs, the amount Medicare would spend on each patient taking one of them would fall by about a third in 2027, the C.B.O. projected.That would slow the growth of the…