001 Sep
Weekly Ink Issue 001 cover
The Week in 30 Seconds
AI & Tech
About 7,000 humanoid robots were sold last year. We finally have a baseline for the hype.
World
China is becoming a source of new drugs, not just cheap manufacturing.
Science
A fresh 222-metre crater appeared on the Moon.
Markets
Gucci is selling a $1,000 sneaker made in China for the manufacturing know-how.
Medicine
37,000 AI agents worked together on a lung-cancer drug direction.
Under Radar
Indonesia's peat fires can keep burning underground for weeks.
AI & Technology

Robots making robots is no longer quite science fiction

A factory in China is designed to produce more than 10,000 humanoid and service robots a year. Some of the robots are already helping build the robots. But one number shows just how early all of this still is.
Weekly Ink illustration of robots assembling humanoid robots in a factory

China’s UBTECH has opened a factory designed to produce more than 10,000 humanoid and service robots a year — roughly one finished robot every ten minutes at full capacity.

And there is a strange milestone buried inside that number: some of the robots are already helping build the robots.

Inside the 14,000-square-metre factory in Liuzhou, UBTECH’s machines move components and handle parts of the production process alongside conventional automation and human workers.

That sounds like a glimpse of where robotics is going. Another number shows how far away that future still is.

About 7,000 humanoid robots were sold worldwide in all of 2025 for industrial and professional use.

In other words, this single factory is being built with the capacity to produce more humanoids in a year than the entire world bought last year.

Of course, capacity is not production. And production is not demand. UBTECH still has to build them reliably, bring the cost down and find enough customers with jobs that actually make sense for a humanoid machine.

Many of the humanoids sold last year went to research institutions and companies collecting data to improve their systems. For comparison, around 542,000 conventional industrial robots were installed in 2024.

So the interesting shift is not that humanoid robots have suddenly arrived. They haven't.

It's that the industry is beginning to face a harder test than making an impressive prototype.

Can it turn a few thousand machines into a real market?

We finally have a number to measure that against.

World

China is quietly becoming part of America's medicine cabinet

Biotechnology laboratory
Illustrative biotechnology laboratory · CC BY-SA 4.0.

Here's a China story that isn't about chips, EVs or TikTok.

American pharmaceutical companies are increasingly licensing drugs invented by Chinese biotech companies. Deals involving Chinese biotechs were worth about $115 billion in 2025, and nearly half of U.S. inbound licensing agreements last year involved Chinese firms.

Twenty years ago, China was largely a place Western pharma companies went to manufacture things cheaply. Now Western pharma increasingly goes there to buy innovation.

That shift has become big enough that Washington is now deciding how to regulate it. U.S. Treasury rules under development are expected to preserve most licensing deals for Chinese drugs while restricting some biotechnology linked to national-security concerns.

Why it matters is bigger than medicine. We're seeing versions of the same shift in EVs, batteries and robotics: China moving from factory to inventor.

And unlike Chinese cars, restricting access to a promising medicine becomes a much harder argument when that medicine might save someone's life.

Watch this: biotech may become another industry where the question changes from “How do we keep China out?” to “How dependent are we already?”

Science & Discovery

Somebody punched a 222-metre hole in the Moon

McGetchin crater photographed by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
McGetchin crater · NASA/LRO · public domain.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found a crater that didn't exist before 2024.

McGetchin crater is about 222 metres wide and 43 metres deep. The impact disturbed terrain more than 100 kilometres away. Events this large are estimated to occur only about once every 132 years.

Today, that is a fascinating thing for a spacecraft to photograph.

But we are planning Moon bases, landing pads, habitats and equipment designed to stay there for years. An impact capable of disturbing the ground 100 kilometres away suddenly stops being just an astronomy fact and becomes an engineering problem.

The Moon hasn't become more dangerous.

We're just finally planning to leave expensive things there long enough for the danger to matter.

Markets

Gucci just put “Made in China” on a $1,000 sneaker

Gucci's new Drip sneaker costs around $1,000 in the U.S. — and unlike almost all Gucci footwear, it is labelled Made in China.

The interesting part is why. Gucci says it chose the Chinese manufacturer because it had the technological know-how and capabilities needed for the design.

For decades, “Made in China” was shorthand for cheap manufacturing. Here, a century-old Italian luxury house is effectively saying: the expertise we needed was there.

Markets

Renting one oil tanker briefly cost more than $1 million. Per day.

The cost of hiring a very large crude carrier on the Persian Gulf-to-China route briefly crossed $1 million per day.

War risk and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have left too few ships willing or available to move the oil. The benchmark rate reached about $1.035 million a day.

Oil prices are visible. The ships quietly moving the oil usually aren't.

Medicine

One patient got a drug designed around his exact form of ALS

One man has an exceptionally rare inherited form of ALS caused by a mutation in CHCHD10. Researchers designed an RNA drug specifically around that mutation.

A year after treatment began, a marker of nerve damage had fallen into the normal range. Movement tests improved and breathing stayed stable.

It is one patient, not a cure. The striking part is how narrow personalized medicine can now become.

Human Past

Scientists burned fake Roman scrolls to help read the real ones

Researchers made papyrus scrolls, wrote on them with historically plausible inks, rolled them up and deliberately carbonised them to mimic the Herculaneum scrolls buried by Vesuvius.

Tiny amounts of lead in the ink produce a strong X-ray signal, which could help identify ancient scrolls that are easiest to read through CT scanning and virtual unrolling.

And yes, the experiment involved writing Star Wars onto papyrus before burning it.

Medicine

37,000 AI scientists went looking for a lung-cancer drug

Weekly Ink illustration of an analogue scanner examining a cancer cell
Weekly Ink illustration.

Researchers built a virtual biotech company containing as many as 37,000 AI agents.

Different agents were given different jobs: analysing clinical trials, searching for drug targets and coordinating the work like employees inside a pharmaceutical company.

Then the system was asked to investigate a protein called CD276, which is found heavily in some lung tumours.

The AI team proposed targeting it with an antibody carrying an anticancer drug. Human researchers judged the idea promising, although it has not yet been validated in experiments or clinical trials.

So this is not an AI cure for lung cancer.

The interesting part is the organisation: thousands of artificial specialists working together on one medical problem.

NASA satellite image of wildfire haze over Borneo
Historical NASA satellite haze image, Borneo (2019) · public domain.
Under the Radar

In Indonesia, the ground itself can keep burning

Indonesia's wildfire haze is not only produced by trees burning above ground.

In drained peatlands across Sumatra and Borneo, fire can move into the carbon-rich soil and smoulder underground for weeks.

That makes peat fires particularly nasty. Flames on the surface can disappear while the fire keeps creeping below, then re-emerges somewhere else later.

That one physical fact explains why this year's haze has been so difficult to control.

More than 12.5 million people across seven provinces have been exposed to smoke from the fires. Respiratory illness cases surged in early September, and the haze has crossed borders into neighbouring countries including Malaysia and Singapore.

Indonesia has deployed aircraft, water bombing and cloud seeding. Communities have distributed masks and oxygen. But firefighters are sometimes dealing with something stranger than a visible wall of flame.

The landscape itself is burning below their feet.

Archaeology & Human Past

We finally have Denisovan life, not just Denisovan DNA

Artist reconstruction of Denisovan life at Bianfu Cave
Artist reconstruction of Denisovan life at Bianfu Cave, based on current fossil and archaeological evidence.

Denisovans are one of the strangest chapters in the human story because we discovered them almost backwards.

In 2010, scientists analysed DNA from a tiny finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia. It belonged to neither a modern human nor a Neanderthal. The DNA revealed another group of ancient humans — now called Denisovans.

We know they mixed with our ancestors because Denisovan DNA still survives in people today, especially in parts of Asia and Oceania. But for years there was an odd gap in the story: we could see Denisovans clearly in genetics while barely seeing them in the ground.

A finger bone. A few teeth. A jaw. Enough DNA to prove they existed, but very little to show what Denisovan life actually looked like.

That is why Bianfu Cave in southwestern China matters.

Researchers have identified Denisovan fossils there dating to roughly 167,000–134,000 years ago, including teeth, skull fragments and the first confirmed Denisovan forearm bone. The same cave contained animal remains with butchery marks and more than 1,300 stone tools.

Those objects begin to move Denisovans out of genetics and into archaeology. We can start asking what animals they processed, what tools they made and how they used the places where they lived.

We have known Denisovans through their DNA for only about sixteen years.

Now we're beginning to meet the people who left it behind.

Weekly Ink illustration of fictional obsolete software preserved as a museum artifact
IDEA OF THE WEEK

Build a Dead Software Museum

Apps disappear constantly. Most leave behind a few screenshots, an old forum post and somebody saying, “I loved that thing.”

I can still find an old Game Boy, a 1990s magazine or a Nokia phone in a museum or somebody's collection.

Software is different. An app can be used by millions of people and then almost completely disappear.

The company closes. The servers go offline. The website gets replaced. The App Store listing vanishes. A few years later, you remember using the thing but can barely find a decent screenshot of it.

That feels like a strange hole in how we preserve technology.

So I'd like a Dead Software Museum: a small online collection of apps, websites and services that were once genuinely part of people's lives and no longer exist.

Not just famous failures. The interesting ones would be the ordinary products people actually miss — an old music app, a forgotten messenger, a strange productivity tool, a social network that briefly had its moment.

Each entry only needs enough to bring it back for a few minutes: what it looked like, what it did, why people used it and what happened to it.

Why Now
  • A surprising amount of early web and app history is already difficult to reconstruct properly.
  • Screenshots, archived pages, old reviews and videos are usually enough to preserve the experience before more of it disappears.
  • The collection could grow from people's memories: “I used this every day. Does anyone remember it?”
Ridiculously Small MVP

Start with 10 dead apps or websites you genuinely remember. For each one: a screenshot, a short description, why people liked it and what happened to it. Put them on one simple site and see whether people start suggesting things you forgot.

Tools

Lovable, Replit or Figma Make. The first version only needs to be a small static archive.

Weekly Ink retro-futurist illustration of scientists scanning through a wall in Tutankhamun’s tomb
TINFOIL HAT

There may actually be hidden rooms behind Tutankhamun’s tomb

Ten years after the first hidden-room theory became tangled in contradictory radar scans, the mystery is back. A new 2026 geophysical study combines fresh ground-penetrating radar with microgravity measurements around KV62 — and the researchers say the pattern could fit a hidden complex of corridors and rooms.

That does not mean Nefertiti is behind the wall. Independent geophysicists have called the new evidence intriguing but say there is still not enough data for a definitive conclusion.

What we know

Earlier surveys disagreed. A major 2018 radar study found no large empty chambers immediately behind the burial room. The new team says fresh radar plus more than 1,200 microgravity readings reveal low-density, right-angled anomalies around the tomb that deserve another look.

What the claim is

The researchers propose a roughly two-metre-wide, rubble-filled corridor leading away from the burial chamber and possible rooms beyond the north and west walls. One hypothesis is that KV62 was once part of a larger royal tomb — potentially connected to Nefertiti — but that remains unconfirmed.

What could settle it

The next step could be surprisingly direct. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities must first approve any intervention, but study co-author George Ballard told Nature that careful drilling to deploy miniature camera-equipped devices could begin as early as November 2026.

If that happens, the question finally moves beyond radar patterns and density measurements. A camera could show whether the anomalies are natural geology, packed rubble or constructed spaces.

Photorealistic reconstruction of a Tasmanian devil scavenging near a prehistoric human camp on mainland Australia
One Last Thing

Tasmania’s devils once weren’t Tasmanian

Tasmanian devils are named after the place where they survive today, not the place where they began.

Fossils show they once lived across mainland Australia and shared the continent with humans for tens of thousands of years. Then, roughly 3,000 years ago, they disappeared from the mainland.

They were scavengers as well as hunters, which means they would have occupied the same landscape as people in a very practical way. Humans butchered animals and left bones and scraps behind. Devils could arrive later and chew through what was left.

That small detail makes the relationship easier to picture: not domestication, not cooperation in the modern sense, but two species repeatedly using the same food landscape.

Why devils vanished from the mainland is still debated. Dingoes may have increased competition, while climate and human activity may also have played a part. Tasmania, separated from the mainland and without dingoes, became their last refuge.

The animal we now think of as distinctly Tasmanian once belonged to a much larger Australian ecosystem — including the edges of human camps.

Issue 001 · End
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