Chris Lister, vice president of operations of the Tesla Gigafactory, provides insight during a tour on Dec. 3, 2018. Big numbers are one way to appreciateTesla's gargantuan Nevada Gigafactory. Operating 24-hours per day in shifts, workers produce enough battery packs and drive units in a week to power 5,300 of Tesla's Model 3 sedans. Tesla says at 5.4 million square feet, roughly equivalent to 50 Home Depot stores, the factory is just 30 percent of its potential size and is already producing more batteries than all other carmakers combined. With more than 7,000 Tesla workers, the factory is responsible for increasing manufacturing employment in the Reno-Sparks area by 55 percent since 2014, according to the Governor's Office of Economic Development.

A Bristol-based robotics company, Open Bionics, has developed the world's first medically-certified 3D-printed artificial arm for amputees. The Hero Arm, with its artificial hand, can fit children as young as nine years old. Its motor is controlled by muscles on the residual limb, allowing the user to carry out many tasks as if the hand was real. Open Bionics hope the £5,000 bionic arm could be made available on the NHS. BBC Click's Kathleen Hawkins went to meet Raimi, who says the arm has given her a new confidence.

Metamaterials seem like a technology out of science fiction. Because of the way these materials affect electromagnetic phenomena and physical attributes of materials, they can render objects invisible, leaving the observer in disbelief. While invisibility cloaks are a gee-whiz application, metamaterials now offer real-world commercial applications such as new antenna technologies for mobile phones. To get to the point where metamaterials are not just a curiosity, but also a viable commercial technology, they have had to evolve a new set of tricks . One example is the work of a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Google is working to reduce gender bias in its Google Translate tool after it was accused of sexism for automatically translating sentences to include masculine pronouns. Translations from English into French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish will also now provide a feminine alternative as well as a masculine one for gendered words such as "strong" or "beautiful." In the past, Google's algorithm had to choose between masculine or feminine when translating a word - automatically defaulting to masculine in many instances. Additionally, the tool will offer gender-specific translations for phrases and sentences from Turkish to English. The update comes after two Stanford University professors pointed out that the artificial intelligence used by Google Translate was converting news articles written in Spanish to English by changing phrases referring to women into "he said" or "he wrote."

DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Alphabet, has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance. The system, called AlphaZero, began its life last year by beating a DeepMind system that had been specialized just for Go. That earlier system had itself made history by beating one of the world's best Go players, but it needed human help to get through a months-long course of improvement. AlphaZero trained itself--in just 3 days. AlphaZero, playing White against Stockfish, began by identifying four candidate moves.

Artificial intelligence has made major strides in the past few years, but those rapid advances are now raising some big ethical conundrums. Chief among them is the way machine learning can identify people's faces in photos and video footage with great accuracy. This might let you unlock your phone with a smile, but it also means that governments and big corporations have been given a powerful new surveillance tool. A new report from the AI Now Institute (large PDF), an influential research institute based in New York, has just identified facial recognition as a key challenge for society and policymakers. The speed at which facial recognition has grown comes down to the rapid development of a type of machine learning known as deep learning.

On Wednesday, Waymo officially launched its self-driving taxi service in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. Sure, the cars still have humans behind the wheel and they're only open to a subset of the few hundred people already enrolled in the company's exclusive beta tester program, but it's a reminder that driverless cars are coming (if more slowly than many had hoped and hyped). So it's high time that these new robo-things get firmer rules, regulators, consumer advocates, and even the self-driving industry itself has reasoned. To that end, this week, senators began to circulate new language for the AV Start Act, a bill that has lingered in congressional limbo for almost a year. In this new draft language, the bill would create a loose framework for the testing and deployment of automated vehicles, as a bill passed by the House of Representatives did last fall.

A NAO humanoid robot powered by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) Watson technology sits on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Feb. 22, 2016. Ideas are becoming more expensive. Larger teams of scientists are taking longer and spending more to discover less. A common theory for these diminishing returns compares exploring the laws of nature to exploring land. Later generations must grope their way across remote and forbidding terrain to find anything new; their expeditions need more preparation, more equipment, and more support. One of the many marks of increasing strain is the advancing age at which Nobel laureates reach their prize-winning breakthroughs.

Of the 14 drones that will be used, 11 are DJI Mavic Pro quadcopters, a smaller device that can be deployed quickly for tactical operations. Two DJI M210 RTK quadcopters will be used for search and rescue missions. These are larger, weather-resistant drones with a high-zoom camera, thermal imaging capabilities and 3D mapping. The NYPD will also have one DJI Inspire 1 quadcopter, which will be used for training and testing purposes.