Runners completing a half marathon in Beijing later this year will do so with some unusual, metal competition at their sides. According to a press release from China's Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, more than 12,000 human runners will square off against dozens of bipedal, humanoid robots from more than 20 companies in a 13-mile course. The top three finishers, be they human or humanoid, will receive prizes. But the robots will have their work cut out for them. As of now, no bipedal robot has successfully completed that long of a race, let alone against a seasoned human runner.

Apple's self-driving car is facing serious impediments a new extensive chronology of the project by The Information has revealed. The report alleges that the car is falling victim to software issues and project management turmoil. The most noteworthy such event came when a jogger crossed the car's path earlier this year. The vehicle "only slightly adjusted its path" and Apple concluded that it would have hit the jogger if the human driver had not jumped on the brakes. These are all significant problems for a vehicle that Apple wants to sell without a steering wheel or a brake pedal, something that would require special exemptions from NHTSA.

Apple's development of a self-driving car has proven arduous and massively challenging for the company. The Information today published an extensive chronology of the project so far. It covers some familiar ground for anyone who's been following Project Titan over the years, like a revolving door of leadership, high turnover across the team, and shifting goalposts around what Apple is even trying to accomplish with the large effort. But the report goes beyond recounting the project's history and stumbles. The Information also reveals some interesting new details.

The road ahead looks bumpy for the Apple Car. A new report reveals that the effort, dubbed Project Titan and dating to 2014, has been plagued by a'revolving door of leaders,' time wasted on sleek demos and a lack of commitment to mass production from CEO Tim Cook. According to a report from The Information that's based on conversations with 20 company employees, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi is'particularly skeptical' of the project and has voiced his concerns to other senior executives at Apple. Cook - who'rarely visits' the project's offices in Santa Clara, California - has also been'unwilling to commit to mass projection of a vehicle,' the report says, which has frustrated other leaders at the firm. Apple Car has been plagued by management turnover, ever-shifting goals and a lack of full commitment from the company's top leaders, areport in The Information states.

Researchers have developed an electronic rubber material that will help create soft, stretchy robots and electronics. The material, given the nickname'thubber,' can conduct heat and is also elastic in a similar way to biological tissue - and was even used by researchers to create a robotic fish with a'thubber' tail. The material can stretch to over six time its length and be used in heated garments for injury therapy as well as soft robotics and even flexible electronics such as an iPad that can fit into your wallet. A: The researchers created a soft-robotic fish that can swim using a tail made of'thubber.' The fish was composed of a silicon body and caudal fin connected by the thubber.

Autonomous vehicles are already making profound choices about whose lives matter, according to experts, so we might want to pay attention. "Every time the car makes a complex manoeuvre, it is implicitly making trade-off in terms of risks to different parties," Iyad Rahwan, an MIT cognitive scientist, wrote in an email. The most well-known issues in AV ethics are trolly problems -- moral questions dating back to the era of trollies that ask whose lives should be sacrificed in an unavoidable crash. For instance, if a person falls onto the road in front of a fast-moving AV, and the car can either swerve into a traffic barrier, potentially killing the passenger, or go straight, potentially killing the pedestrian, what should it do? Rahwan and colleagues have studied what humans consider the moral action in no-win scenarios (you can judge your own cases at their crowd-sourced project, Moral Machine).