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The Kelsey Plum sweepstakes are heating up. 

Unitree IPO Finally Puts A Real Price On Profitable Humanoid Robots

Chinese robotics maker Unitree formally launched its IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market on Thursday, opening the books on a deal that aims to raise about 4.2 billion yuan (roughly $618 million) at an implied valuation near 42 billion yuan ($5.9 billion). Once the shares start trading, the listing will put a real, daily market price on a profitable humanoid-robot maker operating at scale - the first the sector has had.

Until now, humanoid robotics companies have been raising capital based on numbers nobody could really challenge since nobody has had to actually clear a market. So far we have Figure AI sitting on a $39 billion private valuation, and a clutch of Chinese rivals each pushing past $3 billion in the primary market. A public listing swaps the euphoria of those private rounds for the discipline of a secondary one. Regulators approved the registration in early July after a review that took roughly 104 days from acceptance, one of the fastest STAR Market clearances on record. Observers have linked the speed directly to Beijing's push to channel capital toward strategic robotics and AI champions. That said, Unitree has been designated a Chinese military company in the US, and Washington is weighing action against subsidized Chinese robotics imports even as the machines turn up for sale on Amazon.

A Rare Profitable Name in a Sea of Losses

Unitree makes an unusually clean test case because unlike most of its peers, it actually turns a profit. The company reported 2025 revenue of about 1.7 billion yuan and adjusted profit around 591 million yuan - a net margin north of 35 percent that, in a field defined by cash burn, is close to an anomaly. It shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year, more than any other company globally, alongside cumulative quadruped sales above 33,000 units. Overseas revenue has consistently run past 40 percent of the total. Founder and chief executive Wang Xingxing controls roughly a third of the business. The prospectus earmarks the proceeds for robot "brains" and model research, robot bodies, new products, and a manufacturing base.

The rest of the field looks nothing like it. UBTech, which is pursuing its own A-share listing, has put its Walker S humanoid through more than 50,000 hours of training on BYD production lines but keeps running losses. It just launched a consumer-grade bionic robot priced as high as 990,000 yuan (about $146,000) in a bid to crack the home market. Overseas, Tesla's Optimus is slated to reach mass production this year. Every player in the space has a demo reel and a private valuation nobody has to defend. Unitree is about to have a share price that trades every day and settles the argument in public.

Whatever Unitree prints when it debuts becomes the benchmark for the entire "embodied intelligence" trade.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/31/2026 - 22:10

The bone and soft tissue cancer is exceptionally rare, affecting only about 200 to 240 children and teens nationwide each year.

Blake Snell doesn’t really use his ring or pinky fingers to manipulate his throws when he pitches.

The former child star ditched Hollywood as a teen opting for a normal life.

The former child star ditched Hollywood as a teen opting for a normal life.

Michigan has recorded the highest number of cyclosporiasis cases but the outbreak appears to be slowing down, experts say.

The convicted fraudster was hit with a three-year trading ban and agreed to pay $35,000 in fines and profits made off the wagers, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said of the settlement. 

California and Minnesota officials may have to shake down state taxpayers for a billion dollars to pay for their states’ Medicaid programs this year. 

Trump Defends Anti-Weaponization Fund But Admits It's Effectively 'Dead'

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump on Friday said that he still wants compensation for people he said were victimized by a weaponized federal government while acknowledging that a planned $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund is “dead” after the Department of Justice walked it back amid congressional opposition and court rulings.

“It is dead,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Friday.

“But I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you. I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused … and I’d like to see them compensated for their pain.

“Their families have been ruined. Many, many suicides—they’ve committed suicide,” he also said in the meeting, which was held at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

“People that were very successful, that wanted to go to a rally or an event and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror.

“And this fund, this fund was not for me,” he said.

“This fund was for those people.”

Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced the fund as part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit where Trump had sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide money for individuals who claimed to have been targeted by “weaponization and lawfare” under the previous administration. Trump’s lawsuit with the IRS was over a leak of his tax returns.

The fund, however, was met with legal setbacks as a federal judge blocked it from going into effect. That block was extended in mid-June.

Plaintiffs who sued to block the payouts argue that the government can’t legally divert taxpayer money into what they alleged was a slush fund for compensating Trump’s allies.

Also in June, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the government is scrapping its plans for the fund in the face of a bipartisan backlash, and government attorneys have argued that lawsuits challenging the fund are now moot.

During a House hearing on June 2, Blanche said, “We are not moving forward with the fund, period.”

“Not moving forward ever?” asked Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.).

“Correct,” Blanche answered.

Earlier on Friday, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that the fund was meant to defend “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed” by the Biden administration.

The president added that regarding the alleged victims, “perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.”

“They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them,” he said, adding that Blanche should also be approved as attorney general by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Friday’s meeting is the first televised Cabinet session ever conducted at Camp David. The Trump administration previously attempted to hold the meeting in May, but it was scrapped due to bad weather.

During his first term in office, Trump held a Cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat that was closed to the press.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/31/2026 - 21:45

California is bracing for a scorching heat wave this weekend, with temps hitting triple digits.

Aaron Donald could be closing in on a decision to return to the Rams.

More than 100 women’s college basketball players have joined the UCAA to unionize, led by a petition from 10 Oregon State athletes.

Grande once slammed "dangerous" comments about her appearance in a past interview.

Grande once slammed "dangerous" comments about her appearance in a past interview.

After holding off on signing him for nearly a month, the Nets finally officially added the veteran big man Friday. 

Gavin Newsom is secretly pursuing an 11th-hour push to shield California's three for-profit utility monopolies from the financial consequences of the wildfires they cause, shifting those costs onto consumers instead.

One enforcement arm is supposed to be the International Stabilization Force, but it's meant to have a mere 5,000 troops — and so far only seems to actually have 200 or so even pledged by a few countries.

The Strange Reason Scientists Still Need Pre-1945 Steel

The world's most sensitive radiation detectors sometimes rely on low background steel produced before the first atomic bomb test in July 1945, according to a new report from SpaceDaily.

Steel manufactured before the nuclear age lacks the tiny traces of radioactive fallout that atmospheric weapons testing later introduced into the environment, making it valuable for experiments searching for extraordinarily rare particles and faint radiation signals.

The report says that this gave rise to the popular story that scientists depend on steel salvaged from pre war shipwrecks resting on the ocean floor. While there is some truth to that, the claim has been greatly exaggerated. Some laboratories have indeed used steel from old warships for shielding, but it is not true that nearly every sensitive detector depends on sunken ships or that science faces a crisis as this supply disappears.

The reason low background steel matters is that, in cutting edge physics experiments, even the detector's own walls can generate enough background radiation to interfere with measurements. Facilities searching for dark matter, rare nuclear decays, or other elusive phenomena go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate every possible source of interference, often operating deep underground and surrounding detectors with multiple layers of carefully selected shielding materials.

Today, researchers no longer rely exclusively on pre 1945 steel. Advances in metallurgy allow laboratories to manufacture and rigorously screen modern stainless steel, titanium, copper, and other materials with extremely low levels of radioactivity. In many cases, these newly produced metals perform just as well as their pre war counterparts, making the finite supply of old ship steel far less important than popular accounts suggest.

The enduring lesson is not that modern science depends on scavenging sunken fleets, but that the atomic age permanently changed the way physicists design their experiments.

When scientists are trying to detect just a handful of events over the course of an entire year, even the manufacturing history of the steel surrounding an experiment can make the difference between finding a signal and measuring nothing but noise.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/31/2026 - 21:20

Al Gore’s alarmist documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” 20 years ago triggered the “inculcation” in “millions of Americans” of the belief that “climate change poses an existential crisis” to humanity, fumes Juan Davis Rojas at UnHerd.