August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
A humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at Beijing's robot games
The second World Humanoid Robot Games closed after 5 days in Beijing. One humanoid ran the 100 metres in 9.39 seconds, under Usain Bolt's 2009 world record, and another cleared 2.88 metres in a standing high jump. Last year's winning sprint was 21.50 seconds and the best standing high jump 0.95 metres. In a separate factory test, Sanctuary AI reported a 99.5 per cent success rate and a 2.54 second cycle time over 313 insertion attempts; the figures are the company's own measurements.
AIR-STEMI functional angiography cut extra stenting and cardiovascular events
AIR-STEMI used an angiography-derived flow measurement rather than the visual degree of narrowing alone to assess remaining lesions in heart attack people with multivessel disease. The functional approach substantially reduced intervention in non-culprit vessels, while the combined endpoint of death, myocardial infarction, stroke or ischaemia-driven revascularisation also fell. The results sharpen the case for selecting which narrowing actually needs a stent.
Appeals court keeps Kalshi's sports contracts out of Nevada
A 9th Circuit panel refused to let Kalshi reopen sports and election contracts in Nevada, ruling federal commodities law likely does not preempt state gambling rules. In the same week the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered White House staffer Gabriel Perez to pay 172,539.02 dollars over KalshiEX trades tied to speeches he saw early. Pressure on prediction markets is coming from both court and regulator.
Blinded veterans in Mississippi received Meta glasses that describe the room aloud
Visually impaired veterans received Ray-Ban Meta glasses on 29 August at VFW Post 6731 in D'Iberville, Mississippi, through a partnership between Meta and the Blinded Veterans Association. The glasses read documents aloud, identify objects and describe surroundings, and training teaches veterans to run the device by voice. The association puts blinded veterans in the country at 130,000. Thomas Goldberg said losing his sight had been a major loss of independence and that the glasses brought him back to feeling whole again.
Claude Code and Codex estimated about 90 minutes whatever the task
Coding agents asked how long a task would take answered near 90 minutes. Across 200 ProgramBench tasks and 18 benchmarks, Claude Code overestimated by 3 times and Codex by 6 to 10 times, and both scored their own work 20 percentage points above the real result. Accuracy increased when they read elapsed time from a tool. Amazon released Kiro Crew under the Apache 2.0 licence to keep coding agents working across sessions; Amazon says more than 39,000 of its developers used the internal version in six months.
Claude Code's temporary ceiling falls on September 14 as weekly limits rise 25 percent permanently
Anthropic will permanently raise Claude Code's standard weekly limits by 25 percent on September 14 for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans. Because the temporary 50 percent boost ends on September 13, the new level will sit 17 percent below today's ceiling. The percentages use different baselines; the announcement covers weekly limits only and reports no price change.
Clopidogrel alone cut bleeding but raised ischaemic events in A-CLOSE
A-CLOSE compared clopidogrel alone with continued dual therapy in people who had completed 12 months of dual antiplatelet treatment after a drug-eluting stent. The combined endpoint was nearly identical over the next 24 months, but its components moved in opposite directions: clopidogrel was linked to fewer bleeding events and more ischaemic events. Investigators said long-term treatment should be tailored to each person's bleeding and ischaemic risks.
CMR GUIDE missed its main target and found a signal under age 70
The CMR GUIDE work tested whether an implantable device lowers sudden-death risk in people with magnetic-resonance scar and a left ventricular ejection fraction of 36 per cent to 50 per cent. The main measure showed no difference across the whole group, while a reduction stood out in those younger than 70. Commentators said scar imaging alone does not settle the device decision and that device trials must move overall death rather than arrhythmic death alone.
Colombia captures a Tren de Aragua commander as Washington backs Taiwan's forum role
Colombian security forces captured Luis Saúl Pérez Nieto, whom Colombian authorities describe as a senior coordinator in Tren de Aragua's weapons and drug-trafficking networks, in an operation presented as part of closer US-Colombian cooperation. In the Pacific, the US State Department backed Taiwan's continued role in the Pacific Islands Forum before its Palau leaders' meeting, describing Taiwan as a longstanding development partner.
Digital post invitation more than doubled starts of proven heart failure drugs
In Denmark, EMAIL-HF used registries to find people with heart failure who were not on an SGLT2 inhibitor and invited them through the government digital post system to a specialist telephone consultation. Within six months 18.6 per cent had started dapagliflozin or empagliflozin against 8.2 per cent under usual care, and the gap held at 24 months. Investigators said adoption of proven therapies in routine practice remains limited.