The world's most pampered rhino is having his mudpack applied by hand. Sudan the veteran northern white rhinoceros stands placidly and allows his personal assistant to rub dollops of wet clay into his hide, to moisturise his skin and keep insects away. 'He loves that,' says Zach, his 24-hour-a-day PA. Zach lives next door to the rhino enclosure, permanently on call in case His Lordship should require anything. And Sudan is very high maintenance – he used to have a man whose job was rubbing oil into his hooves.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We've written about extra robot arms for humans in the past, but these are more complicated and perhaps capable than most: I'm not completely sold on the control system here, since it essentially means you're trading the use of your legs for the use of some extra arms. If this isn't enough reason to get a RoboThespian, I don't know what is: ROBOTIS was running this demo at ICRA as well; the first TurtleBot is using its laser for person-detection and following, while the other TurtleBots are wirelessly following the first.

We hear again and again that AI and robots are going to take away human jobs. My broken kettle says otherwise. Yesterday, I set my electric kettle down awkwardly on the edge of the sink. It toppled over and smashed. I searched Amazon for a replacement, found several that were highly rated, and within minutes had placed an order.

A convention center packed with video games large and small. E3 is a magical week for anyone who likes to spend their free time pushing buttons on plastic gamepads. It's like the Super Bowl, the Oscars and a presidential election rolled into one. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo stand out as the hardware heavyweights, while EA, Ubisoft and Bethesda lead the third-party-publisher tussle. Throw in Square Enix, Activision and the occasional Capcom appearance, and you have the makings of a truly special show.

In the event of a natural disaster that disrupts phone and Internet systems over a wide area, autonomous aircraft could potentially hover over affected regions, carrying communications payloads that provide temporary telecommunications coverage to those in need. However, such unpiloted aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are often expensive to operate, and can only remain in the air for a day or two, as is the case with most autonomous surveillance aircraft operated by the U.S. Air Force. Providing adequate and persistent coverage would require a relay of multiple aircraft, landing and refueling around the clock, with operational costs of thousands of dollars per hour, per vehicle. Now a team of MIT engineers has come up with a much less expensive UAV design that can hover for longer durations to provide wide-ranging communications support. The researchers designed, built, and tested a UAV resembling a thin glider with a 24-foot wingspan.

They have black skin featuring large yellow spots ontheir back and head. These spots are a warning coloration meant to keep predators atbay. Full-grown salamanders can be over a foot in length.Far eastern fire salamanders live in subtropical shrubland and forests near rivers orother freshwater bodies. They spend most of their life on land, but lay their eggs inthe water. They subsist mostly on a diet of insects, worms, and small crustaceans, butoccasionally eat other salamanders.

E3, the video game industry trade show, is dead. Long live E3 the consumer-facing show. Faced with an adapt-or-die situation the ESA's chosen to adapt, inviting 15,000 members of the public to attend the 2017 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles next week. Maybe we'll see you there. For the rest of you, the next week will pass as usual, in a flurry of game announcements, demos, and trailers--and Microsoft's grand reveal of Xbox's Project Scorpio console.

When Microsoft debuted its AI chatbot "Tay" last year, she greeted Twitter users excitedly, gushing that she was "stoked" to be on the social network and that "humans are super cool". Within 24 hours Tay, which was designed to emulate a teenage girl, was telling followers to "f*** her", calling them "Daddy" and declaring "I f***ing hate feminists". Microsoft subsequently abandoned the project and deleted her from the internet. Of course, Tay's offensive outbursts were partly due to internet users' determination to interfere with a corporate PR stunt. But they also highlighted a major problem faced by the AI industry: if robots learn from humans, there's a good chance they'll also adopt the biases – gender, racial and socio-economic – that exist in society.

Ubisoft's upcoming new Assassin's Creed game has leaked once again ahead of its official reveal at E3 2017. A preorder card for Assassin's Creed: Origins has surfaced online, confirming the game's Egyptian setting and bonus content. The leaked preorder card for Assassin's Creed: Origins was first shared online on the NeoGAF forums. The card appears to be from retailer Target and confirms the game will have a steelbook gold edition. This version of the game appears to include the deluxe pack and season pass.

So I recently did a talk at the Jozi Developer User Group and I was asked to turn it into a blog post, so here it goes. We live in a world where everyone knows enough about the Buzzwords "Deep Learning" and "Big Data" to write shitty buzzfeed articles about (leaving this here as it will prompt another article). On the other hand, we also live in a world where if you're a developer you can, while knowing nothing about machine learning, go from zero to training a OCR model in the space of an hour. Give it a few more hours, and you can have yourself your very own Trump-like tweet generator. The world of machine learning is extremely open.