Daily Info Dose

In the Qur'anic account in Surah Al-Kahf, a righteous ruler known as Dhul-Qarnayn travels to a land between two mountains, where people ask for protection from Yajuj and Majuj, known in English as Gog and Magog, whose corruption was harming the land. He does not simply build an ordinary wall. With their help he fills the gap with blocks of iron, covers it with molten copper, and makes a barrier so smooth and strong that Gog and Magog could neither climb over it nor dig through it. That barrier, by Allah's mercy, would hold them back until a time He alone has decreed. Part 12 focuses on what happens behind that wall every single day. In the narration, Gog and Magog dig at the barrier from morning until they can almost see light coming through the other side. Exhausted, their leader tells them to stop and return tomorrow to finish the work. During the night, however, Allah restores the wall to how it was before, even stronger than the day before. When they return in the morning, ...

Most people picture Yajuj Majuj, known in English as Gog and Magog, only as a distant and frightening force at the end of time. Part 11 of this Daily Info Dose series takes a different approach. It asks a simple and surprisingly human question: what if they also worry? Instead of presenting them only through fear, this short episode invites viewers to imagine their inner life — uncertainty about the future, concern for their own people and frustration when things do not go as planned. That shift matters because it turns a familiar story into something viewers can reflect on personally. In Islamic tradition, Yajuj Majuj are described in the Qur'an, including in Surah Al-Kahf in connection with Dhul-Qarnayn and the barrier built to hold them back, and in Surah Al-Anbiya in connection with their eventual emergence. Later traditions and popular retellings expand on their numbers, their persistence and their daily efforts. Part 11 builds on that background but focuses on emotion rather ...

Robots Are Getting Their Own Brain Chip: GlobalFoundries' FDX Fusion Robots do not think like data centres. A machine that moves through the real world has to sense, compute, decide and act in real time — and it has to do all of that without draining a huge power supply. That is exactly the problem GlobalFoundries wants to solve with FDX Fusion, its newly unveiled chip platform for "Physical AI." FDX Fusion is designed for robots, autonomous machines and industrial systems. It targets 7-nanometre-class digital performance on an energy-efficient FD-SOI process, combining digital, analogue, memory and radio-frequency functions on a single platform — powerful, but sipping power. The platform was announced alongside the topping-out of a €1.1 billion expansion of GlobalFoundries' fab in Dresden, Germany, where FDX Fusion will be developed and manufactured. Put the two stories together and a picture forms: robots are being hired like employees, and now they are getting ...

This Warehouse Robot Is Not For Sale — You Hire It By The Month Most robots are products you buy. This one is more like an employee you hire. Brooklyn-based startup Ultra has announced a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Framework Ventures with Y Combinator participating, bringing its total announced funding to $62 million including an earlier $12 million seed round. Ultra's robot is called Operator (OP1). It is a dual-arm stationary robot that works from a fixed workstation with a footprint of just 5 by 5 feet, plugging into a standard wall outlet. Each arm can handle payloads of up to 10 pounds, and its job is the everyday warehouse work of packing, sorting and kitting. The twist is the business model. Instead of selling robots, Ultra rents them monthly — "robots as a service" — charging an integration fee plus monthly hardware and software fees. The robot's AI comes from a deepened partnership with Physical Intelligence, whose "robot brain" mo...

Mystery Pits on Mars That Nobody Can Explain NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars since 2012 — fourteen years on the Red Planet — and it is still finding things nobody can explain. Its latest puzzle: broad, shallow pits, about one centimetre wide, scattered through the bedrock of Mount Sharp. In a mission update, Michelle Minitti, deputy principal investigator of the rover's MAHLI camera, described the features as "unlike quite anything we have seen in the past." That is a striking statement from a team that has spent over a decade studying Martian rock up close. Normally, a pit like this has a simple explanation: a small pebble sits in the rock for ages and eventually weathers out, leaving a hole behind. But these pits break that rule. They are broader and shallower than the usual kind, and there is no object anywhere nearby that could once have filled them. Wind does not explain them either. Some headlines joked that the pits look like tiny "footp...

The Lab That Runs Itself: SLAC's SPIRE Project Imagine a laboratory where the experiments run themselves. On 8 October 2026, the US Department of Energy announced SPIRE — the "Source-to-Discovery Platform for Instrumentation, Robotics and Embodied AI" — a project led by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory together with Stanford and other labs and industry partners. Its goal: self-driving laboratories where AI agents and robots run experiments from start to finish. SPIRE will work at two of SLAC's flagship facilities: the LCLS, the world's most powerful X-ray laser, and the SSRL synchrotron. These machines are extraordinary, but they have created a new problem — the X-ray laser now produces data faster than scientists can process it. Brilliant experiments are no longer limited by the hardware; they are limited by human speed. The project attacks the problem on three fronts. First, robots that delicately handle experimental samples. Second, X-ray and electron be...

What might an ordinary day look like on the other side of one of the most mysterious barriers mentioned in the Qur'an? Part 10 of this Daily Info Dose series turns away from the building of the wall itself and asks a more human question: how might Yajuj and Majuj, known in English as Gog and Magog, actually live from day to day while they are confined behind it? According to the account in Surah Al-Kahf, the righteous traveller Dhul-Qarnayn built a strong barrier of iron blocks covered with molten copper between two mountains, sealing in a people whose corruption on earth had become a source of fear for neighbouring communities. The barrier was never presented as an ordinary prison, and its exact location is not given, which is why daily life behind it remains a subject of curiosity, reflection and careful speculation. Traditional Islamic narrations do not provide a detailed diary of life behind the wall, so this episode separates what is reported from what can only be imagined. Th...