Capsules
August 2026 — 05 capsules
- Physical AIRoboticsAI
Gemini Robotics 2 takes Google's VLA to whole-body control
One model now walks, crouches and manipulates in a single task, drives Apptronik Apollo 2 humanoids, and adds collaboration between different robot types.
01 - PolicyAIEthics
The EU AI Act's transparency duties become applicable
From 2 August 2026, providers must disclose AI interaction and mark synthetic media, and deployers must tell people when emotion recognition or biometric categorisation is in use.
02 - BiotechEthicsPolicy
HuidaGene discloses a CRISPR trial death twelve months late
HuidaGene Therapeutics waited a year to disclose that a boy in the high-dose cohort of its Duchenne gene-editing trial died in August 2025.
02 - BiotechPolicy
Intellia ties its worst liver signals to a single HLA allele
A genomic analysis of more than 600 samples found the highest liver enzyme elevations in Intellia in vivo CRISPR trials clustered in carriers of one HLA allele.
02 - Physical AIRoboticsAI
Xiaomi open-sources XR-1, a 100,000-hour manipulation model
Xiaomi released weights and code for its vision-language-action model under Apache 2.0, pre-trained on more than 100,000 hours of handheld-rig trajectories.
02