Cyberpunk remote work, IRL.

Operators in the Philippines—paid about $250/month—are remotely piloting shelf-stocking robots in Japanese stores.
Today it’s teleoperation; tomorrow it’s training data. The real question: how fast until the robots learn enough to cut humans out of the loop?

#robots #teleoperation #retailtech #AI #futureofwork #science

🚀 Starcloud wants a 4-km, 5-GW GPU data center… in space

NVIDIA-backed startup Starcloud is about to put a data-center-class GPU in orbit: their Starcloud-1 satellite launches in November with an NVIDIA H100 onboard — roughly 100× more GPU compute than any prior space system. The 60-kg, fridge-sized sat is a first step toward orbital GPU clouds.

Why it matters: today, satellites downlink raw data to Earth for processing. With an H100 upstairs, AI runs where data is born — cutting response times from hours to minutes. That’s big for sensors like SAR, which can spit out ~10 GB/s; instead of shipping it all home, the model can filter, segment, and alert in orbit.

Power & cooling: sunlight is (nearly) constant in orbit and space is an “infinite heat sink” via radiators, so no water-hungry chillers. Starcloud’s roadmap sketches a ~5 GW orbital data center fed by solar + radiator panels about 4 km × 4 km. Future birds aim to integrate Blackwell GPUs for up to 10× more performance versus Hopper.

Biz timeline: Crusoe (the “energy-first” cloud) plans to deploy capacity on Starcloud’s platform from 2026–27. Starcloud projects ~10× lower energy cost than Earth data centers long-term. A white paper even models a 40 MW cluster with a ~$8.2M launch cost — if Starship-class launch prices fall to ~$30/kg (a big if).

CEO Philip Johnston’s bet: within 10 years, most new data centers get built in space. Gamers, rejoice — astronauts might finally run DOOM at ultra.

#Starcloud #H100 #Blackwell #OrbitalCompute #SpaceDatacenter #SAR #EdgeAI
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@science

AI-powered parking never looked like this in my head.

A 35-kg Unitree G1 running BAAI’s THOR whole-body control just dragged a 1.4-ton car — ~40× its own weight. It’s a stunt, but it shows how fast balance, traction, and whole-body control are improving. Next stop: factory logistics, recovery, and precision vehicle positioning.

#Unitree #BAAI #THOR #Robotics #AI #Humanoids
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@science

🤖 “Hand-motion farms” are real — and they’re training robot hands.

In parts of India, workers strap a small camera to their forehead and spend hours doing simple, tactile tasks: folding towels, packing boxes, sorting everyday objects.
The POV videos go to U.S. labs, where neural networks study exactly how human fingers grip, pull, twist, and place—so robots can learn to copy the same motions.

Why this matters:
• Dexterity is the bottleneck. Vision models are great, but robots still struggle with cloth, cables, zipper pulls, and irregular objects. Human POV data captures the micro-moves that simulators miss.
• Imitation learning at scale. Hour after hour of clean, labeled hand maneuvers becomes training fuel for policies that generalize to new objects and tasks.
• Societal twist. It’s efficient—and a little dystopian: people meticulously teach the fine motor skills that may one day automate their own work.

Humans teaching their replacements, one folded towel at a time.

#AI #robots #imitationlearning #India #futureofwork

Whether we expect a major nuclear war or not, here is a curious set of U.S. actions in deploying strategic weapons:


First, the White House has consistently withdrawn from long-standing arms reduction and limitation treaties. In 2002—from the ABM Treaty; in 2019—from the INF Treaty; in 2020—from the Open Skies Treaty. A potential U.S. refusal to maintain the moratorium on nuclear testing could thus be a logical next step in Washington’s dismantling of the global strategic stability system.
Second, the U.S. is accelerating the modernization of its strategic offensive weapons. Work is underway on the new Sentinel ICBM with a new nuclear warhead and a range of 13,000 km. Development continues on the Columbia-class strategic nuclear submarine to replace the Ohio-class. The new B-21 Raider heavy bomber is in progress. A nuclear-armed cruise missile is under development, and so on. Plans include reactivating 56 launchers on 14 Ohio-class submarines—note: full reactivation—with complete loading of Trident II ballistic missiles. Preparatory measures are in place to reconvert 30 B-52H strategic bombers back into nuclear weapon carriers.
Third, the Americans have begun implementing the “Golden Dome” program, which envisions both missile defense interception and pre-launch strikes against Russian and Chinese missiles.
Fourth, by the end of this year, the U.S. Army plans to adopt the new Dark Eagle intermediate-range missile system with hypersonic missiles capable of a 5,500 km range. Future deployment is foreseen in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Flight time from Germany—where this complex is planned for placement—to targets in central Russia would be about six to seven minutes.
Fifth, Washington regularly conducts exercises of its strategic offensive forces. The latest, Global Thunder 2025—which practiced, I emphasize, preemptive nuclear missile strikes on Russian territory—took place in October of this year.
Overall, this is a unified complex of measures, including potential U.S. plans for nuclear tests, which significantly heighten the military threat level to Russia.

“Feels like the uncanny valley just got crossed.”

Prompt: “Photorealistic interview with an 8-year-old child speaking sadly. The child knows they are AI-generated, feels sorrow about it, and answers the interviewer’s question — ‘What is it like to be an AI?’ — wisely yet child-like. Dark-blue background.”

Result: natural eye contact, micro-movements, believable pacing; emotion reads instantly.
Takeaway: the uncanny-valley threshold in Gen-Video has shifted.

Stack to try: Sora 2, Kling, Nano Banana, Krea, Artlist, Resolve.

#AI #GenerativeVideo #UncannyValley #PromptEngineering

Earth, Jupiter, and Venus as seen from Mars

💊 A once-daily pill that slashes “bad” cholesterol by ~58%

High LDL (“bad”) cholesterol is a slow-motion killer: it silently damages arteries and drives heart attacks and strokes. For people with familial hypercholesterolemia (roughly 1 in 250 adults), LDL is dangerously high from birth.

A new clinical trial just tested an experimental pill called enlicitide decanoate, an oral PCSK9 inhibitor:
• 293 adults with inherited high cholesterol
• all already on statins, but still with elevated LDL
• randomized to enlicitide once a day vs placebo for 24 weeks

📉 Result:
Those on the pill saw LDL drop by 58.2% on average, while the placebo group actually had a slight increase in LDL. The effect stayed strong over a full year, and side effects were similar to placebo.

PCSK9 inhibitors already exist as injections; this one is a tablet that basically lets the liver vacuum more LDL out of the blood. If longer-term studies confirm it reduces heart attacks and strokes, millions of high-risk patients could swap some injections for a daily pill.

Question:
If you had very high LDL, would you take a daily PCSK9 pill on top of statins?

#medicine #cholesterol #cardiology #pharma

🧠 Your Mind Can Switch On Your Immune System — Literally

A recent immunology session reminded me of a striking study: participants in VR were shown faces of supposedly “infected” people — and their innate immune biomarkers actually increased.
In other words, both real pathogens and completely virtual ones triggered the same physiological immune response. No microbes needed.

Another paper impressed me even more: tumor growth in mice was suppressed simply through social interaction.
We all know loneliness is harmful, but the effect here was dramatic:
just one hour of daily social contact significantly reduced tumor growth and anxiety-like behavior.

This fits into a growing body of work on how the brain regulates the body — including immunity. If you want a solid overview, Cell has a great review by Ayelet “A.C.” Rolls, with a deep dive into immunoceiving (how the brain senses and modulates immune activity).

The bigger picture?
We’re moving toward a future where maintaining health won’t rely only on pharmaceuticals, but also on managing mental states.
Drugs are easier — you take a pill and don’t have to change yourself.
Mind-body interventions are harder — but potentially just as powerful.

I still hope medicine will more actively tap into the brain–body connection.

🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02008-y

China just rolled out its own T-800. And no, this is not CGI.

🤖 Chinese company EngineAI (Zhòngqíng) has unveiled a full-size humanoid robot called T800 — the promo stresses: “All real footage – no CGI, no AI, no video acceleration.”

Key specs:
• Height: 173 cm
• 29 degrees of freedom (not counting the hands)
• Peak joint torque: up to 450 N·m

Capabilities:
• 360° surround vision system
• Active cooling for the leg joints (so it doesn’t overheat while walking/running)
• Battery life: ≈ 4–5 hours of operation on a single charge

Humanoids are rapidly moving from flashy concept videos to more practical platforms: with this level of torque, sensing and runtime, robots like T800 are getting closer to tasks in logistics, manufacturing, and hazardous environments — not just lab demos.

#robotics #AI #humanoid #China

🤖 When EngineAI’s T800 humanoid went viral, a lot of people were sure the video was just CGI.

So the CEO, Zhao Tongyang, literally stepped into the ring with his own robot — and let it kick him. 🦶

No VFX, no compositing, no AI post-processing — just a full-size humanoid, real-time control, and a CEO who’s very confident in his product. 📷

As humanoids get more powerful (high joint torque, fast reaction times, active cooling), trust and safety are becoming just as important as raw specs. EngineAI decided to demonstrate that trust the hard way.

#robotics #humanoid #AI #China

Imagine your liver biopsy being scored not by a panel of pathologists, but by an AI that regulators officially treat as a “lab tool” for drug trials. That just became real.

PathAI has announced that its AIM-MASH AI Assist system is the first AI-powered pathology tool ever qualified by the US FDA (and already by the European Medicines Agency) for use in clinical trials of MASH — a common, fatty liver disease that can progress to cirrhosis and cancer. Instead of three experts arguing over how bad the damage looks on a slide, the model helps a single pathologist assign consistent scores.

Why this matters: drug trials for liver disease live and die on tiny changes in biopsy scores. Human reads are slow, expensive and notoriously variable. An AI that gives the same answer every time for the same slide can make trials faster, cheaper and statistically cleaner — which may mean more liver drugs actually making it to market.

Important caveat: this AI is cleared only as a biomarker tool for trials, not for diagnosing individual patients. But if regulators are starting to trust models as part of the evidence pipeline, how long until similar systems sit inside routine hospital workflows?

Would you be comfortable knowing an AI scored your tissue sample in a drug trial? Should this kind of model stay in research, or gradually move into everyday diagnostics?

Full story from PathAI’s press release: https://www.pathai.com/news/pathais-aim-mash-ai-assist-becomes-first-ai-powered-pathology-tool-to-receive-fda-qualification-for-mash-clinical-trials

#AI #medicine #pathology #liverdisease #clinicaltrials #FDA #biotech