Grim news heralded in a report published this week by the Video Game History Foundation, which claims that 87% of video games released before 2010 are no longer commercially available. This equates to a lacuna of tens of thousands of works, many of which represent key moments in the medium's evolution. It's an excruciating loss of source material for the people who worked on these games, as well as for historians and archivists, for gem-hunters and for any younger player who might wish to enjoy interactive works created in different socio-political circumstances, against different technological constraints and fashions or within different market conditions. The void is not unique to video games – there are books that are no longer published even in digital form, some films can only be watched on defunct formats, others disappear from streaming services mere months after release – but the scale of the video game void is unmatched in other media. According to the report, less than 5% of games from the Commodore 64 are still available today.

When San Francisco first began offering driverless, commercial "robotaxis" to ferry the public, it seemed as though the city could actually turn a feat promised by science fiction into a reality. Then, things started going wrong. A car stopped in the middle of the street during rush hour, causing a two-mile traffic jam. Another drove into a construction zone. Emergency responders racing towards a medical call were held up for 8 minutes as they rapped on the windows of a driverless car blocking the way.

The TSA is using facial recognition technology for a limited purpose that the agency says is accurate. As flying reaches record highs again this summer, the technology could improve safety and efficiency with fewer risks than controversial uses of facial recognition such as police trying to identify crime suspects from vast numbers of images.

In 2016, an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo from Google's DeepMind AI lab made history by defeating a champion player of the board game Go. Now Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's cofounder and CEO, says his engineers are using techniques from AlphaGo to make an AI system dubbed Gemini that will be more capable than that behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. DeepMind's Gemini, which is still in development, is a large language model that works with text and is similar in nature to GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT. But Hassabis says his team will combine that technology with techniques used in AlphaGo, aiming to give the system new capabilities such as planning or the ability to solve problems. "At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models," Hassabis says.

A small robot that can shape-shift and produce heat could incinerate cancer cells or stop bleeding from inside the body. It could also be used to ferry drugs directly to tumours or hard-to-reach places like arteries. Tiny robots with soft bodies have shown promise for delivering drugs without causing damage – but adding hard elements could make them more useful. Ren Hao Soon at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues designed the centimetre-sized robot to have overlapping aluminium plates inspired by pangolins, the only mammal with scales. They layered rectangular "scales" over softer, magnetic material, which let the robot change its shape.

While advances in wearable robotics have helped restore mobility for people with lower limb impairments, current control methods for exoskeletons are limited in their ability to provide natural and intuitive movements for users. This can compromise balance and contribute to user fatigue and discomfort. Few studies have focused on the development of robust controllers that can optimize the user's experience in terms of safety and independence. Existing exoskeletons for lower limb rehabilitation employ a variety of technologies to help the user maintain balance, including special crutches and sensors, according to co-author Ghaith Androwis, PhD, senior research scientist in the Center for Mobility and Rehabilitation Engineering Research at Kessler Foundation and director of the Center's Rehabilitation Robotics and Research Laboratory. Exoskeletons that operate without such helpers allow more independent walking, but at the cost of added weight and slow walking speed.

Neil Thomas wished he could have been awake during the operation to remove a 6cm cancerous tumour from his colon. He was one of the first people to go under the scalpel of University Hospital of Wales's new robotic systems in June 2022. Thomas's surgeon, James Ansell, would once have stooped over his patient's body to perform the operation. Instead, he stood behind a console on another side of the theatre wearing 3D glasses. His hands grasped two joysticks, which controlled the four robotic arms that huddled around Thomas's unconscious body.

Other industry leaders are taking a different tact, blitzing Congress with their vision for how Washington should regulate their companies. Altman in May had private meetings and a dinner with lawmakers, where he demonstrated -- to their amusement -- how ChatGPT could write a speech for them to deliver on the chamber floor. Smith has given legislators a lesson on the technical stack that underpins generative AI models like ChatGPT, including computing infrastructure and applications. And Smith recently unveiled his blueprint for AI regulation at a speech in Washington attended by half a dozen lawmakers.

Male fruit flies reared in a lab are more successful at mating after an encounter with a robotic dummy designed to look like a rival male. The finding could boost efforts to control populations of the flies, which are a major crop pest. The Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis capitata) is one of the most destructive fruit pests in the world, found on every continent except Antarctica.

Generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and Google's Bard generates certain text in response to a query using natural language processing and machine learning. Meta's new generative AI, Voicebox, does things a little differently -- by producing audio clips. Voicebox, announced Friday by Facebook's parent company Meta, can synthesize speech using a 2-second audio sample. With that clip, it can match the audio style as well as do text-to-speech generation or re-create a portion of the speech that may have been interrupted by some external noise. Voicebox can also take that sample and have it read English text in other languages such as French, German, Spanish, Polish or Portuguese. Meta says Voicebox can be used to give a natural-sounding voice to virtual assistants or nonplayer characters in the metaverse, which are digital worlds in which people will gather to work, play and hang out.