Usain Bot was right there… Tiangong Ultra, the robot developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, finished a 100-meter race in a staggering 9.39 seconds in a heat at the World Humanoid Robot Games, now into its second year in the Chinese capital.

Tiangong Ultra’s time recorded on Saturday puts it almost .2 of a second quicker than the World Record time Usain Bolt clocked in Berlin 17 years ago. Admittedly, the bot’s performance after completing the race — it skidded clumsily into a blue sponge wall at the end of the track — pales in comparison to Bolt’s more composed post-run celebration.

The S&P 500 fell just under 0.3% and the Nasdaq 100 dropped almost 1% Monday as a decline in chip stocks pulled the major indices lower despite Treasury yields moving lower. 

As summer’s denouement hurtles ever closer, with the final few cookouts of the season just around the corner given Labor Day is only a couple weeks away, typical all-American scenes of friends and families relaxing in back yards and cracking open a few cold ones will begin to fade into the backs of minds and further down Instagram feeds.

A new summer 2026 Gallup survey, like a host of other data releases in the past, suggests that such scenarios (or at least the element of alcohol within them) have already been getting increasingly rare anyway, as American alcohol consumption continues to stagnate at record-low levels. 

The amount of articles devoted to Gen Z’s reported turn away from/embrace of/mixed feelings toward drinking culture has been, frankly, sobering. The youngest generation’s apparent abstention has probably been a consistent headache for execs at top alcohol brands like Constellation and AB InBev, too, and it’s not just Zoomers who may have pulled back on the booze a little.

According to Gallup figures, in 1978, a record-high 71% of Americans said they had occasion to use alcoholic drinks, while almost one in four conceded that they thought they drank more than they should at times in the same year. As of July 2026, those figures sat at just 54% and 13%, respectively, as more adults in the US change their drinking (and overdrinking) habits. 

Wherever you land on the seemingly unending Gen Z drinking-not-drinking debate likely depends on how many of them you know; how many of them you know well enough to tell you their weekend activities honestly; and how many Gen Z-ish hangouts you yourself frequent. 

More broadly though, there’s no getting away from fact that the population at large just aren’t drinking like they used to — a trend that will undoubtedly be a boon for the nation’s health moving forward, but is already proving to be a bane for bars, breweries, and the titans of the alcohol industry. 

— Tom Jones