Fish high

Chinese robots have improved their running ability.

When developers tested how fast their Androids could run in a marathon last year, many of the machines experienced mishaps and were unable to finish the race. The top robot finisher clocked 2 hours and 40 minutes, more than twice the time of the human winner of the conventional race, according to the New York Post (NYP).

In a half-marathon race in Beijing, China, last Sunday, robot runners had improved, with several of them finishing more than 10 minutes ahead of their human counterparts, the NYP reported.

The winning robot, developed by Chinese smartphone brand Honor, finished the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, several minutes faster than the half-marathon world record set by Ugandan ​runner Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month.

The robots ran autonomously by remote control in a separate lane to avoid colliding with human runners.

Meanwhile, scientists learned in an experiment that wild fish can also swim farther, though not in a race against human swimmers.

The finding was contained in a joint research released Monday by scientists at Australia’s Griffith University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

The researchers took a hundred wild Atlantic salmon in Sweden’s Lake Vattern and exposed them to both cocaine and benzoylecgonine — -a metabolite created by the drug in the liver — -and then tracked their movements, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

Salmon exposed to coke traveled 1.9 times farther per week than those that were not exposed to the drug, according to AFP.

Those exposed to benzoylecgonine swam up to 12.3 kilometers farther, the study found.

The experiment indicated the widespread contamination of the waterways by the drug that is widely used, the increasing risk of polluted water, and the need to improve wastewater treatment and monitoring.

WJG @tribunephl_wjg