Category: BLOG

(Wired) – Explosive acceleration, limited dexterity, eyes in the back of its head. What could possibly go wrong?

Perhaps no humanoid maker has a bigger lead than a Hangzhou-based company called Unitree. While Elon Musk’s Optimus staggers through its demos, Unitree’s robots are doing sprints, kung-fu kicks, and acrobatic backflips. (The conference’s dancing door greeter was a Unitree.) Unitree’s legged robots are also incredibly cheap, costing tens of thousands of dollars or less, a tenth of what a typical humanoid in the US costs. Unitree is China’s most prominent robotics startup, a national champion for its tech industry, and is reportedly targeting a $7 billion IPO listing in Shanghai. And if Unitree fails? A staggering 200-plus other Chinese companies are also developing humanoids, which recently prompted the Chinese government to warn of overcapacity and unnecessary replication. The US has about 16 prominent firms building humanoids. (Read More)

(Axios) – This chart shows what it looks like to hit a 30-year high in measles cases — and why the U.S. is on track to lose its measles “elimination status.”

Why it matters: We’ve all heard that cases are on the rise, but the reality is that they’re skyrocketing. (Read More)

(New York Times) – More than 300 Times Opinion readers responded to a January invitation to share their experience of rising health care costs. They included a cancer patient who shifted care mid-recovery to a new insurance plan that doesn’t cover all her doctors. A mother who began skipping birthday parties to avoid the cost of a gift. A small-business owner who closed his doors. Many readers shared accounts of relying on retirement funds to pay for insurance. More than one Republican voter said they now regretted voting for that party. I am sharing a selection of these stories below, which have been edited for length and clarity. (Read More)

(ProPublica) – Each year, hundreds of thousands of women enter pregnancy with chronic conditions that put them at an elevated risk of long-term complications and, in some cases, death.For those who live in states that have banned abortion, their options are now severely limited.  

Our reporting has found that abortion bans generally don’t include exceptions that cover these kinds of health concerns — or if they do, doctors aren’t using them. 

Instead, the exceptions are for the “life of the mother.” In practice, this often means doctors won’t act without strong evidence that their patients are very likely to die. Where there have been efforts to create broader health exceptions to cover a range of medical risks women can face in pregnancy, anti-abortion activists have fought against them. They argue that such exceptions are too permissive and could allow nearly anyone to get an abortion. (Read More)

(ProPublica) – A ProPublica investigation found that Averhealth’s lab practices have not only been faulted by its own accreditor but also targeted in lawsuits, and prompted Michigan’s child welfare agency to order its employees not to use Averhealth’s tests as evidence in court and to withdraw any petitions based solely on the lab’s results.

Six former employees told ProPublica that the company’s central lab facility in St. Louis was mismanaged. The former employees, who include two chemists and two lab managers, complained variously of understaffing, broken and poorly maintained instruments, and pressure from management to speed up the delivery of test results, even when some feared they were compromising accuracy. (Read More)