This striking humanoid robot is the R1 from Robbyant, a company owned by Chinese tech giant Ant Group. The allure of humanoid robots is their versatility – you can imagine them doing any job that a human can, simply because they have the same appendages.

But unlike wheeled robots, they have to deal with balancing on two legs, which is no mean feat. The R1 strikes a balance, with a stable wheeled base and a humanoid form from the waist up.

The R1 certainly made an impressive entrance at the IFA 2025 tech show in Berlin, where it demonstrated its skills in the kitchen, cooking up shrimp – albeit at a very relaxed pace. Its makers say it could be put to work as a carer, nurse or tour guide.

This bipedal robot, named Tiangong, is more ambitious than the R1 – but as this image shows, that hasn’t necessarily paid off. The machine, was competing in a 100-metre race at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August when it tripped and fell.

Other events at the games included football and dance, and the Tiangong was by no means the only robot to suffer an injury: another dropped out of the 1500-metre event because .

The Qatari government was forced to in 2005 after pressure from campaigners, so fans turned to robots instead.

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Initially, the devices were rudimentary contraptions and remote gate openers. They have grown more sophisticated over time, although they still amount to little more than remote-controlled whips to force camels to run faster.

Here, we see a race during an event organised by the Qatar Camel Racing Organising Committee in Al-Shahaniya, about 40 kilometres west of Doha, in January.

Some competed in the Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in April, seemingly the first organised event to allow runners whether they are made of flesh, metal or plastic.

Only six of the robots finished the distance, but the winner, a Tiangong Ultra, came in at a very respectable 2 hours 40 minutes – albeit with three full sets of batteries, which is a privilege not afforded to human participants.

Another event at the World Humanoid Robot Games saw one of the first ever kickboxing bout between robots. The Unitree G1 robots that took part are rather slow, so their blows were more like a gentle push than a knockout punch. They also had a tendency to fall over when attacking or defending themselves, but they at least showed great agility and tenacity by getting back on their feet.

This tadpole is in fact a cyborg, with an electronic implant embedded inside it as an embryo to monitor the development of its neural activity as it grows into a frog.

at Harvard University and his colleagues used a soft material called perfluropolymer to build a soft, stretchable mesh around ultra-thin conductors, which they then placed onto the neural plate – the precursor to the brain – of African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) embryos. As the neural plate folded and expanded, the ribbon-like mesh was subsumed into the growing brain, allowing the researchers to measure brain signals.

If there’s ever a creature you would not want to bump heads with, it is Zavacephale rinpoche. This dome-headed dinosaur found in Mongolia lived 108 million years ago, making it the oldest of its kind ever discovered. When palaeontologists first saw the fossil skull protruding from the ground, they described it as looking like a “cabochon jewel”. While other species in the group could reach 4 metres in length and up to 400 kilograms, this specimen was a mere teenager and would have been about a metre long, weighing about 6 kilograms.

When scientists were trying to describe a 165-million-year-old dinosaur fossil found in Morocco, named Spicomellus afer, they were lost for words. The dinosaur, a kind of ankylosaur, may be one of the most heavily armoured creatures that ever lived. According to at the Natural History Museum in London, the creature was so bizarre that there weren’t enough hyperboles to describe it. In the end, the team settled on the word “baroque” to attempt to capture its unique look.

Duonychus tsogtbaatari, a 90-million-year-old fossil found in the Gobi desert, may be the closest thing the dinosaurs had to Edward Scissorhands. It was a bipedal, herbivorous animal that had only two fingers on each hand, which it may have used to grasp branches and pull them towards its mouth. But they were no ordinary fingers, as they were armed with two giant claws up to 30 centimetres long that belie its vegetarian diet.

While fans of Jurassic Park may shiver at the sight of that movie’s velociraptors, those predators were probably nothing compared with the Velociraptor-like Shri rapax, found in the Gobi desert. It had hands and claws so fierce that its name was inspired by the word rapacious. At 2 metres in length, the dinosaur may have been one of the most dangerous creatures hunting in the sprawling sand dunes and intermittent lakes when it lived between 75 and 71 million years ago.

Is it a bird? Is it a dinosaur? A 150-million-year-old fossil from China, named Baminornis zhenghensis, had researchers baffled about where in the evolutionary tree it belonged. Ultimately, they concluded that the quail-sized creature may be the earliest known bird – although birds are also a kind of dinosaur, of course. The kicker leading to the decision was that it had a much shorter tail than Archaeopteryx, another fossil long considered to be an early relative of modern birds. The discovery shows that the short tails characteristic of modern birds evolved much earlier than previously thought.

No amount of dental floss would have helped a ferocious 66-million-year-old dinosaur discovered in Patagonia with a crocodile leg stuck in its jaw. Joaquinraptor casali, a new species of megaraptor, was armed with a thumb claw the size of a human forearm and it may have been one of the fiercest predators of the Cretaceous. While Tyrannosaurus rex was probably bigger, the new dinosaur had much stronger and more muscular arms. This specimen of J. casali would have been at least 19 years old when it died, about 7 metres long and weighed at least a tonne.

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Dinosaur hunting in the Gobi desert, Mongolia

Embark on an exhilarating and one-of-a-kind expedition to uncover dinosaur remains in the vast wilderness of the Gobi desert, one of the world’s most famous palaeontological hotspots.

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