The robotics startup Figure AI has been livestreaming humanoid robots placing thousands of packages onto a conveyor belt for nearly a week—a spectacle that included a robot competing against a human intern at one point.

The promotional robot demo has become a viral sensation among tech enthusiasts, spurring YouTube commenters to name the robots and the company rapidly rolling out related robot merchandise in response. Users on X have described the livestream in glowing terms such as “the greatest product demo since Steve Jobs’ ‘one more thing.’” But despite such sentiments, it’s worth bearing in mind that even the most impressive robot demos represent narrow windows for understanding real-world robot capabilities.

Figure’s event began on May 13 as a planned eight-hour robot demonstration featuring the company’s latest Figure 03 robots. The chosen robotic task involved inspecting the barcodes on various small packages—including cardboard boxes and soft padded envelopes or bags—and then placing the packages on a conveyor belt with the barcodes facing downward. The demo would feature the robots performing the task autonomously without any human intervention, according to Figure CEO Brett Adcock.

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BARCELONA, Spain—Volvo unveiled its new all-electric EX60 in January with a slew of distinctions. The EX60 is the first model on the company's all-EV SPA3 platform, a scalable base upon which Volvo plans to build a range of other vehicles.

With up to 400 miles (643 km) of range and faster charging than any other Volvo vehicle, this EV carries a lot of hopes and dreams. Volvo says it completely changed how it builds cars for the EX60, refining every stage of production. Part of the building process is called megacasting, a technique that converts molten aluminum into one lightweight piece. The model also boasts 800 V charging and cell-to-body integration, a structural load-bearing battery design that integrates battery cells directly into the vehicle’s floor and walls.

While the market may seem wishy-washy on EVs right now, at least in the United States, most automakers with EVs already in the works are plowing forward. Volvo launched the compact EX30 at the end of 2023 and discontinued it this year due to shifting conditions and tariffs, but the three-row EX90 continues the lineup alongside the new EX60. Priced at $59,795 for the entry-level P6 Plus, the 2027 EX60 ranges up to $68,745 for the P10 AWD Ultra, which is more powerful and has a longer range. Volvo says the P12, which will have even more power and range, is on the horizon.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced plans to buy nationwide access to a network of license plate readers, saying it will award contracts to one or more vendors that can offer "near real time" information from cameras across the US. The proposed contract is for the FBI Directorate of Intelligence.

"To evaluate and manage threats to personal safety, property, and law enforcement, the FBI requires professional service firms that can provide License Plate Readers (LPRs) for tracking subjects on roads and highways over the US and its territories," the FBI said in a Request for Proposals (RFP) published on May 14. The FBI said the winning bidder or bidders "must provide law enforcement and/or commercial license plate reader data provided through the Contractor’s existing platform." The system must cover 75 percent of locations, the FBI said.

The system must offer the ability to search for license plate information "and other descriptive data such as vehicle description information, time/date criteria, and geo-location criteria," the FBI said. "Additionally, the system must provide search result notifications. The Contractor system must have the ability to access and/or query cameras across the United States and its territories. The Contractor system must be capable of providing this data in near real time."

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Prime Video has released one last trailer for its upcoming live action series, Spider-Noir , starring Nicolas Cage, and once again it's been released in two formats: one in black and white (below) and another in color (above), which the showrunners are calling “True Hue.” Seriously, the more footage we see of this series, the more eager we are to find out if the series lives up to its marketing. And the final trailer—which really plays up the deadpan humor and is set to Amy Winehouse's " Back to Black "—is very promising.

As previously reported , Marvel Comics created its “noir” line in 2009, reinterpreting familiar Marvel characters in an alternate universe, usually set during the Great Depression in the US. A version of the Spider-Noir character, voiced by Cage, briefly appeared in the animated masterpieces Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023). (He is set to reprise that role in the upcoming Beyond the Spider-Verse .)

Cage is playing Ben Reilly, a hard-boiled PI with a secret superhero identity, The Spider. Per the official premise: “ Spider-Noir tells the story of Ben Reilly, a seasoned, down on his luck private investigator in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life, following a deeply personal tragedy, as the city’s one and only superhero.”

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There are more opportunities to access space than ever, thanks to a bevy of commercial rockets, some with reusable boosters, led by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9. So why is NASA launching fewer telescopes and planetary science missions than it did a quarter-century ago?

The answer is complex. It is not necessarily the money. The space agency's science budget this year is $7.25 billion, roughly the same as it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. This is despite attempts by the Trump administration to drastically reduce NASA science funding.

In the early months of his tenure, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's focus has been on human spaceflight and the Moon. This isn't terribly surprising given NASA's wildly successful Artemis II mission carrying four astronauts around the Moon last month. Since taking office in December, Isaacman has announced an overhaul of the Artemis program, canceling a space station to be built in orbit around the Moon in favor of construction of a base on the lunar surface.

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As of July 1, at 12:01 am UTC—or June 30 at 8:01 pm ET—people seeking access to Plex's media server features through a one-time purchase will have to pay $750. That’s three times the current price of $250.

The new price will not affect current Lifetime Plex Pass holders.

A Lifetime Plex Pass allows you to stream from your own Plex Media Server to a device connected to your own network, to stream from the server remotely, and to allow others to stream remotely from your server.

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On Tuesday, Nature released two papers describing AI systems intended to help scientists develop and test hypotheses. One, Google's Co-Scientist, is designed as what they term "scientist in the loop," meaning researchers are regularly applying their judgements to direct the system. The second, from a nonprofit called FutureHouse, goes a step beyond and has trained a system that can evaluate biological data coming from some specific classes of experiments.

While Google says its system will also work for physics, both groups exclusively present biological data, and largely straightforward hypotheses—this drug will work for that. So, this is not an attempt to replace either scientists or the scientific process. Instead, it's meant to help with the things that current AIs are best at: chewing through massive amounts of information that humans would struggle to come to grips with.

What's this good for?

There are some distinctions between the two systems, but both of them are what is termed agentic; they operate in the background by calling out to separate tools. (Microsoft has taken a similar approach with its science assistant as well; OpenAI seems to be an exception in that it simply tuned an LLM for biology .) And, while there are differences between them that we'll highlight, they are both focused on the same general issue: the utter profusion of scientific information.

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In a few short years, we've gone from easily identifying AI content that featured superfluous fingers to images and videos that look shockingly realistic . How can we know what's real in the age of AI? Google's answer is SynthID, which it first demonstrated three years ago. The company says SynthID has since been used to label 100 billion images and videos, plus 60,000 years' worth of audio. Those numbers are only going up now that SynthID is expanding beyond Google.

SynthID is not Google's only AI labeling strategy. It's also committed to the C2PA standard, which tags content with metadata describing how it was created. Google began using C2PA more prominently with its Pixel 10 smartphones. Photos taken with the Pixel 10 include metadata describing how they were processed. If a highly zoomed image includes generative elements, it gets an AI tag, too.

Google now says this same feature is coming to videos recorded on Pixel 8, 9, and 10 phones in an update in the coming weeks. It's also adding C2PA scanning to Gemini, allowing the chatbot to explain a file's providence based on the content labeling. This same capability will come to Chrome and Search in a few months.

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Security researcher Brian Krebs brings us the news that America's Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency (CISA) has had a large store of plaintext passwords, SSH private keys, tokens, and "other sensitive CISA assets" exposed in a public GitHub repo since at least November 2025.

The now-offline public repo—named, somewhat aspirationally, "Private-CISA"—was brought to Krebs' attention by GitGuardian's Guillaume Valadon , who was alerted to the repo's presence by GitGuardian's public code scans. Krebs says that Valadon approached him after receiving no responses from the Private-CISA repo's owner.

In an email to Krebs, Valadon claimed that the repo's commit logs show that GitHub's default protections against committing secrets—protections designed to protect unwitting or unskilled developers against exactly this kind of stupidness—had been disabled by the repo's administrator.

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