A multifaceted decahedral black ceramic bezel and sandwich-style three-piece case—a reworking of Bremont’s signature Trip-Tick construction—house a chronometer-rated automatic chronograph movement made by Sellita, with a 62-hour power reserve.

The watch will be a passenger aboard the FLIP rover, due to launch as part of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1), expected to land at the lunar south pole at some point in the second half of this year.

It’s a one-way mission: The rover will remain permanently on the lunar surface, with the watch ticking away as it roams the landscape. FLIP’s objectives include reaching elevated positions on the lunar terrain, gathering data on lunar dust accumulation, testing dust-mitigation coatings, and surviving a two-week lunar night in hibernation (which would be a first for a US rover).

In terms of serious timekeeping data for Bremont, the mission is frankly symbolic. The watch will be positioned vertically in a specially designed housing within the FLIP’s chassis, between its front wheels. Only the watch head, weighing 107 grams, is included, glued in place using a specialist composite, its face visible to FLIP’s HD cameras. But the hibernatory periods will mean the watch (whose mechanical movement is driven in normal circumstances by the motion of the wearer’s arm) will stop running once its 62-hour power reserve runs down.

When the FLIP is on the move again, its motion should—in theory—jolt the mechanism into action once more. Despite the gravitational pull that’s a sixth of the Earth’s, the acceleration, pitches, and tilts of the rover should swing the winding rotor, if with less torque and efficiency than on Earth.

“My guess is that the watch will function from time to time, but for short periods,” Cerrato says. “We will learn along the way. But that’s what is exciting—it projects us into a thinking process that is absolutely out of the box. Just the fact of having it there is inspiring.” However, there is little doubt that Bremont will, just like other brands with any ties to the cosmos, mine its new space connection for all it is worth.

FLIP itself, which weighs just 1,058 pounds and carries a mix of commercial and government payloads, four HD cameras, and a deployable solar array, is fundamentally a technology demonstrator for Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX), Astrolab’s much larger SUV-sized rover destined to support NASA’s Artemis program. The firm developed the FLIP from scratch after NASA’s equivalent vehicle for which the Griffin-1 mission was contracted, the VIPER, was put on pause in 2024. This left Astrobotic seeking a stand-in in short order. Astrolab, which signed the contract within a month of hearing about the opportunity in the fall of 2024, took the FLIP from blank sheet to finished rover in roughly a year.

Its standout feature is its hyper-deformable wheels, minutely structured from silicone, composite, and stainless steel, which create a soft, enlarged contact surface with the terrain. “It’s like if you’re off-roading in a Jeep or Land Rover where you let some air out of the tires to go softer and spread the load over a larger area,” explains Astrolab’s founder, Jaret Matthews. While the moon’s nighttime temperatures of around -200 degrees Celsius (around -328 Fahrenheit) would cause conventional rubber tires to become glass-like and shatter, Astrolab’s solution is intended to keep the rover from sinking into the unconsolidated lunar dust—or regolith—that covers the environment.

Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has partnered with OpenAI to support drug research and development. Through the partnership, Novo Nordisk said it plans to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to analyse complex datasets, identify promising drug candidates and reduce the time required to move from research to patient.

The company said its use of AI has been structured with strict data protection, governance and human oversight to ensure ethical and compliant use. This latest partnership is being positioned as a key part of the company’s strategy to use AI to transform healthcare and enable it to bring new and better treatment options to patients faster.

In 2024, a break-out session run during its Capitals Market Day presented Novo Nordisk’s strategy, discussing how it uses data science and AI and its future plans. The presentation shows that the company set up an AI centre of excellence in 2021, and had begun ramping up investment in high performance computing and graphics processor units (GPUs) by 2023. The company said it has deployed a data pool called FounData, where all data from completed clinical trials are pooled and prepared for insights-generation.

It has also deployed NovoScribe, an AI-powered platform built using MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, Amazon Bedrock and LangChain to automate and accelerate the creation of clinical study reports. Novo Nordisk said NovoScribe reduces the time to regulatory submissions.

At the time, the company said external partnerships and collaborations would continue to play an important role in reaching its AI ambitions.

Earlier this year, Christos Nicolaou, a senior scientific director at Novo Nordisk, posted on LinkedIn that the company has now joined Ligand-AI, a new project funded by the EU public-private partnership, Innovative Health Initiative (IHI).

In the post, he said the project’s goal is to generate high quality, large, open datasets of protein-ligand interactions for thousands of proteins. “In the spirit of open science collaboration, these datasets will be shared and used to implement models and methods to improve AI-driven drug discovery,” he said.

This latest partnership with OpenAI builds on technology partnerships it has with AWS, Microsoft, Google and Hugging Face, as well as its existing collaboration with OpenAI.

“This partnership is one important step in positioning Novo Nordisk to lead in the next era of healthcare,” said Mike Doustdar, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk. “There are millions of people living with obesity and diabetes who need treatment options, and we know there are therapies still waiting to be discovered that could change their lives.

“Integrating AI in our everyday work gives us the ability to analyse datasets at a scale that was previously impossible, identify patterns we could not see, and test hypotheses faster than ever. This means discovering new therapies and bringing them to market faster than ever before.”

OpenAI said it would be assisting Novo Nordisk in upskilling the company’s global workforce and enhancing AI literacy. Through the partnership OpenAI’s capabilities will also be used to improve efficiency in manufacturing, supply chain and distribution, and corporate operations. The company is starting pilot programmes across research and development, and manufacturing and commercial operations, with full integration by the end of 2026.

Listing consumer electronics on the internet’s large ecommerce marketplaces is a key step in “democratizing” the products, allowing them to be purchased by anyone with just a click. It has happened to cars (in the United States, you can buy a Hyundai on Amazon), and now it’s happening to humanoid robots.

The Chinese manufacturer Unitree Robotics, among the most active robot-makers in the field, is preparing to bring its most affordable model, the Unitree R1, to international markets through Alibaba Group’s marketplace. According to reports in The South China Morning Post, the rollout will initially cover North America, Japan, Singapore, and Europe. There’s no exact on-sale date for the robots yet, but the Post report says it will show up as soon as this week.

This is not the first time Unitree has used AliExpress as a global storefront. The company’s G1 model, the more powerful and more expensive predecessor to the R1, is already listed at just under $19,000.

It’s as much of a symbolic step before as a commercial one; selling a humanoid robot on a global marketplace positions the product as easily attainable. This serves as a step toward normalization of the tech, which is still not widely adopted. The sale of the R1 simply lowers the threshold of access even further, and shifts humanoid robots from the territory of promise to that of concrete availability.

Lower Price, Higher Demand

When it was announced last summer, the starting price of the R1 was 39,900 yuan, or about $5,900. Today, the basic version starts at 29,900 yuan, or about $4,370.

That price will fluctuate given changes in exchange rates and shipping costs that add on import taxes and tariffs. Still, that figure sounds surprisingly low considering that some of the R1’s other competitors in the humanoid robotics landscape are far more expensive.

The price tag for Unitree’s own flagship H1 robot approaches $90,000. Tesla’s Optimus robot, which is not yet on sale to the public, is aiming for a starting price under $20,000, but that price will only be attainable when Tesla reaches production of 1 million units a year. Meanwhile, robots from Figure AI and Apptronik are hovering around $50,000 per unit. The R1’s objectively low price essentially makes it a hatchback in a world of sedans.

The R1 is 4 feet tall, weighs 50 pounds, and has 26 smart joints. You can talk to it and give it commands; Unitree’s large-language multimodal model with voice and image recognition is on board. Curious coders can program it using a software developer’s kit. But the real calling card is the R1’s physical performance. The robot can do cartwheels, lie down and stand up independently, and run downhill. Unitree calls it “born for sport,” and videos of its presentation made the rounds months ago. Handstands and wheel kicks are not exactly what you’d expect from a robot that costs less than a used car.

Put It to Work

As impressive as the Unitree R1’s moves are, it lacks hands with articulated fingers, and its motors can’t generate a lot of torque. It is not designed to be a domestic helper or to manipulate complex objects. The company presents it as an “intelligent companion” for interaction, research, and software development.

The EDU model (Go2 EDU, G1 EDU) add an Nvidia Jetson Orin module with more computing power for artificial intelligence tasks. That model also has two degrees of freedom for the head and optional right hands. In that robot’s case, the target market is laboratories and universities. The limitations of the basic R1 put it largely in the same camp. This is not a household robot that makes coffee and walks the dog, but it is a good choice for researchers, labs, and anyone who wants to test robotics algorithms on solid hardware without spending a fortune.

It is true that bringing a relatively capable humanoid to global markets at this price does lower the barrier to entry for developers, researchers, and enthusiasts. It is a real leap from a few years ago, even if some people will buy it just to keep it in the living room to take a bow when guests arrive.

This story was originally published by WIRED Italia and translated from Italian.