Jack Guo, an engineer who leads the development of Tiangong Ultra, stands among Tiangong Ultra and Tiangong Omni humanoid robots at the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, also known as X-Humanoid, in Beijing on Sept. 4. | REUTERS A week after his robot outran humanity's fastest man, Jack Guo is already chasing a harder goal. TianGong Ultra stunned spectators at the World Humanoid Robot Games when it covered 100 meters in 8.64 seconds, almost a full second faster than Usain Bolt's world record. Behind the feat were days of round-the-clock testing and repairing battered robots between races. "When it started smoothly and got past 50 meters, that was when I finally relaxed," said Guo, who leads development of Ultra and Omni, a smaller model used in 400m races, at the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre, known as X-Humanoid. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Beijing held what's being called the world's first half-marathon for robots, allowing bipedal bots to compete alongside human runners, and as one might expect, ridiculousness ensued. The robots, which had human operators running with them, for the most part struggled to make it through the course at all, let alone complete the full 13 miles within the four-hour cutoff time. "One fell at the starting line," Bloomberg reports. "Another's head fell off and rolled on the ground. And one collapsed and broke into pieces."

On Saturday, about 12,000 human athletes ran in a half marathon race in Beijing, but most of the attention was on a group of other, unconventional participants: 21 humanoid robots. The event's organizers, which included several branches of Beijing's municipal government, claim it's the first time humans and bipedal robots have run in the same race, though they jogged on separate tracks. Six of the robots successfully finished the course, but they were unable to keep up with the speed of the humans. The fastest robot, Tiangong Ultra, developed by Chinese robotics company UBTech in collaboration with the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, finished the race in two hours and 40 minutes after assistants changed its batteries three times and it fell down once. The slowest time allowed for human runners in the race was 3 hours and 10 minutes, and Tiangong Ultra was the only robot that barely qualified for a human participation award.