The robots are coming home. Not metaphorically, literally. Within two years, the same kind of embodied AI that keeps Tesla’s factories running could be wiping your kitchen counter. Priced somewhere between a used hatchback and a high-end laptop, the first generation of humanoid housemates is being assembled right now, preparing to take over the chores we’ve spent the last century inventing gadgets to avoid. The question isn’t whether it happens. It’s how quietly we’ll let it. Tesla’s Optimus programme leads the charge, aiming to build a fully functional humanoid for under $20,000, a machine designed not for laboratories but for

Autophagy is what happens when life tidies up after itself. Cells digest their own debris, breaking down used proteins and faulty organelles to create something new. It’s a biological paradox: destruction as the price of renewal. The word itself means self-eating, coined long before anyone could see what that actually looked like, the quiet machinery of death and recycling built into every living thing. The process was mapped most clearly by Yoshinori Ohsumi, who discovered that even something as simple as yeast carries the blueprint. His experiments in the 1990s identified a family of genes, Atg, that act like an

Japan, the country that brought us bullet trains, vending machines selling everything from ties to tentacles, and now apparently a plan to solve its labour crisis without inviting anyone to actually come over, has done it again. Its latest stroke of genius is a project by Telexistence, which uses robots in FamilyMart and 7-Eleven stores across Tokyo. The twist? The robots are operated remotely by workers in Manila through VR headsets. It’s called telemigration, a word that makes “outsourcing” sound almost quaint, and it’s being hailed as the future of labour. Essentially, Japan gets to keep its doors locked while

The web’s getting a reboot. The last one was Chrome. The next one is an AI with a clipboard. Legacy browsers were just glass. They showed you pages and got out of the way. The new ones want a chat. OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and The Browser Company’s Dia don’t just load sites, they understand them, summarise them, and act on them. You can ask them to plan your trip, find quotes, book a flight, or compare suppliers, and they’ll do it faster than you could type “best options.” This isn’t a cosmetic upgrade. It’s a land grab. Chrome, Safari,

There’s something almost confessional about an AI chat window. People whisper things to it they’d never tell a friend, a therapist, or even themselves out loud. Late at night, in that quiet private flicker of text, the AI becomes a modern priest, one that doesn’t judge, doesn’t gossip, and, crucially, doesn’t remember you. Or so we thought. As the world pours its inner life into Large Language Models, governments are quietly preparing to do what they always do when something becomes too powerful, too personal, and too revealing, turn it into a tool of observation. It’s not paranoia. The legal