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 WIRED


The Unitree GD01 Is a Giant Mecha Robot You Can Actually Buy

WIRED

If You Have $650,000 and Don't Buy This Giant Mecha Robot You're a Fool China's Unitree, famous for making low-cost dancing robots, will now sell you a giant, wall-smashing mecha. Unitree is a Chinese company known for making adorable, relatively affordable robots that dance and shuffle and such. Last night, it revealed its latest creation, which is something of a departure: a giant, walking, crawling, transforming, wall-smashing "mecha" called the GD01. An introductory video for the GD01--set to a thundering rock guitar soundtrack--shows the company's founder and CEO, Xingxing Wang, holding hands with the robot before climbing into its prodigious, open-air belly. A disclaimer added to Unitree's social media post reads: "Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a Friendly and Safe manner."

  Country: Asia > China (0.54)

MAHA Keeps Being Weird as Hell About Fertility

WIRED

RFK Jr. and Mehmet Oz's comments about teen sperm count and "underbabied" Americans at a recent women's health event underscore the White House's pronatalist agenda. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, and President Donald Trump discuss workplace IVF benefits on October 16, 2025, in Washington, DC. The home page for Moms.gov, the Trump administration's recently launched website for "new and expecting mothers," is a trad wife's dream. Featuring soft pastel graphics and a photo of a young, white, blond woman in a field clutching her pregnant belly, the website offers resources for women of reproductive age such as anti-abortion "pregnancy centers," as well as a CDC website listing potential workplace hazards for expecting mothers without noting accompanying legal protections for pregnant women. If you were conspiratorially minded, you might conclude from the website alone that the Trump administration is champing at the bit for young (white and blond) women to have as many (white and blond) babies as possible.


Iran Is Using Tiny 'Mosquito' Boats to Shut Down the Strait of Hormuz

WIRED

Iran Is Using Tiny'Mosquito' Boats to Shut Down the Strait of Hormuz Iran's traditional naval fleet has been almost completely destroyed by US-Israeli raids. But Iran's Revolutionary Guard has deployed a fleet of small vessels that is crippling every passageway. In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has developed an asymmetrical naval strategy that is crippling the passage of container ships. This "hemostat" uses guerrilla tactics, after Iran's "traditional" fleet was almost entirely destroyed by US and Israeli attacks. No longer able to rely on specialized military ships, Tehran is using an unconventional force made up of dozens of small military vessels armed with missiles, machine guns, and drones.


Googlebook Is Google's New AI-Powered Laptop Platform Built on Android

WIRED

Googlebook Is Google's New AI-Powered Laptop Platform Built on Android They won't replace Chromebooks, but Googlebooks have an Android-centered operating system, AI-first features like the Magic Pointer, and a promise of desktop-grade apps. Almost exactly 15 years since Google introduced Chromebooks and ChromeOS --which ushered a wave of cheap, functional, web-based laptops that would come to dominate the US education market--the company has announced a new laptop platform called Googlebook. It's built around artificial intelligence and Android, and while it isn't replacing Chromebooks, it could give the company a more meaningful foothold in the premium computer market. Google announced the platform on The Android Show on YouTube, where it also detailed new features coming in Android 17 and Gemini Intelligence (you can read more about that here). Google is purposefully not sharing the operating system's name yet (it was codenamed Aluminium OS internally); Googlebook is the platform, and Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all signed up to produce Googlebooks coming later this fall.


The Top New Features in Google's Android 17--and Gemini Intelligence--Coming This Summer

WIRED

You'll soon be able to generate your own widgets or ask Gemini to finish a booking in Chrome on Android. The Google I/O annual developer conference is around the corner--May 19--but in what is quickly becoming a tradition, Google announced new features for Android and Gemini a week early. The news came on Tuesday via the second-ever Android Show on YouTube . This livestreamed presentation helps Google spread out the cavalcade of updates from the often jam-packed I/O keynote. The Android Show focused on new features in Android 17, the next version of Android coming later this summer, as well as several updates to the Gemini assistant experience. It continues the theme set last year by Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem, of turning Android into an "intelligent operating system."


Trump Media Scales Back Plans for Its Own Prediction Market

WIRED

Truth Predict was supposed to be the Trump family's biggest leap yet into prediction markets. Now it's looking more like a tiptoe. The odds that the Trump family will launch a full-fledged prediction market product this year just plummeted. Last year, the Trump Media and Technology Group announced Truth Predict, a partnership with the cryptocurrency company Crypto.com. The initial announcement touted Truth Predict as a "new product" that would allow Truth Social users to make trades on sports, inflation, elections, and more through an "embedded" prediction market service.


All Your Hantavirus Questions, Answered by an Infectious Disease Expert

WIRED

Here's what you need to know, from why the cruise ship outbreak won't spark the next pandemic to how hantavirus spreads. Now that more than 100 passengers aboard a hantavirus -stricken luxury cruise ship have been evacuated, with 18 Americans in biocontainment units in Nebraska and Georgia, health officials around the world are working to monitor more than two dozen individuals who left the cruise and anyone with whom they might have come in close contact. So far, all of the 11 reported hantavirus cases are among passengers or crew on the ship, the World Health Organization's director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Madrid on Tuesday. That includes three deaths resulting from the virus. Typically, hantaviruses are spread when contaminated rodent droppings and urine are stirred up in the air and breathed in.


Hantavirus Conspiracy Theories Are Already Spreading Online

WIRED

From claims of an Israeli false flag to efforts to sell ivermectin, influencers and grifters are using lessons learned from Covid-19 to push their baseless conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists, wellness influencers, and grifters have already started promoting wild claims about the hantavirus outbreak that began aboard the MV, a cruise ship on the Atlantic. Some conspiracy theorists compared the outbreak to the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming it was another effort to control the global population, while others pushed a false narrative that the Covid-19 vaccine caused hantavirus. Many others promoted ivermectin as a treatment, using the incident as a way to sell emergency medical kits featuring the antiparasitic drug typically used as a horse dewormer. In more recent days, many of these same people spreading conspiracy theories have promoted the baseless and antisemitic claims that the entire incident is a false flag orchestrated by Israel.


Why Soccer Still Defies Statistical Analysis

WIRED

Sarah Rudd, who once ran analytics for Arsenal, made her name applying the tenets of probability theory to movements on the pitch. Even she admits not everything can be solved with data. The role of advanced analytics in sports is a contentious subject. To its defenders, data-driven pragmatism is a natural evolutionary step in the way we play and watch games. For detractors, the approach prioritizes results above all else and drains the soul from a pursuit that should be spontaneous and joyful.


Some Women Are Obsessively Testing Their Vaginas to Optimize Them

WIRED

Biohacker Bryan Johnson recently bragged about his girlfriend's "top 1%" vagina as the at-home vaginal microbiome test industry is thriving. Farrah was fed up with her vagina . For the past two years, the 29-year-old dancer from Ohio had been dealing with severe pelvic pain and vaginal odor. "It was like 8/10, horrible core pain," she says. When she visited doctors, she told them what she thought the culprit was: an allergic reaction to soy oil in a vat of water she'd swam in during a pirate-themed dinner theater performance. But they didn't believe her.