Broken and scorched black by fire, the dense, wedge-shaped marks etched into the ancient clay tablets are only just visible under the soft light at the British Museum. These tiny signs are the remains of the world's oldest writing system: cuneiform. Developed more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq now lies, cuneiform captured life in a complex and fascinating civilisation for some three millennia. From furious letters between warring royal siblings to rituals for soothing a fractious baby, the tablets offer a unique insight into a society at the dawn of history. An estimated half a million of them have been excavated, and more are still buried in the ground.

Slowly and silently, they glide across the floor wearing bright yellow dresses that look like they were plucked from a haunted 1920s boarding school. No, you haven't encountered some Mothman-like terror entombed inside a department store mannequin, the byproduct of a twisted, futuristic fever dream. You've merely stepped inside Mongkutwattana General Hospital in Bangkok, where a team of robot nurses has been unleashed to make life easier. Their job: ferrying documents between eight stations inside the health-care facility, a job that used to be carried out busy human nurses, hospital director Reintong Nanna told Newsflare last year. "These robotic nurses help to improve the efficiency and performance of working in the hospital," he said.

Sonos doesn't want you to see what it's been up to. The smart speaker company has released a whole range of new kit. Taken together, it is both a noticeable departure from the company's recent history but also a surprising embrace of its past: it wants to give you speakers that you can hide away, and is aiming them squarely at the professional installers that helped the company grow when it was founded less than 20 years ago. Sonos has announced not only that its new Amp will go on sale in a new and wider variety of places – including the UK and the rest of Europe, and allowing them to finally plug their existing speakers into the internet – but also that it will come alongside a new collection known as Sonos Architectural by Sonance, developed in partnership with the latter company. Those speakers are built to fade away: to stick to the walls and near-invisibly make sound, as well as also offering the first ever Sonos speaker made to live outside.

Google has urged owners of Nest cameras to reset their passwords, following reports of hackers taking over the smart home devices. In one incident last month, a family in Illinois had their home security system compromised by cyber criminals, who took control of connected Nest cameras to shout racial abuse through the device's speaker at a couple and their baby. "As I approached the baby's room and stood outside, I was shocked to hear a deep manly voice talking to my 7-month-old son," the victim told local media. In a separate incident that same month, a Californian family received an emergency broadcast alert through their Nest surveillance camera that detailed three North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to the United States. "It warned that the United States had retaliated against Pyongyang and that people in the affected areas had three hours to evacuate," The Nest owner told The Mercury News.

Instagram has committed to remove all images of graphic self-harm, the platform's boss has said. The move comes amid intense criticism of the Facebook-owned service, which has been accused of not doing enough to removes posts that glorify self-harm and suicide in the wake of the death of schoolgirl Molly Russell. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said the company had previously allowed people to share graphic images of self-harm. But it will be changing its policy to ban those posts as well as looking to find and remove posts. "Historically, we have allowed content related to self-harm that's'admission' because people sometimes need to tell their story – but we haven't allowed anything that promoted self-harm," he told the BBC. "But, moving forward, we're going to change our policy to not allow any graphic images of self-harm."

When people hear the word'Artificial Intelligence' (AI), the first thoughts and images that come to mind are those fed to us by Hollywood movies of the past few decades and recently by Netflix web series such as Black Mirror. This fictional representation paints a dire picture of AI destroying or enslaving humanity, but this vision of AI is too farfetched and distorts what is really happening in the field. At a recently concluded conference and exhibition on the subject conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), AI was talked about as more of a tool and the terms used were Augmented Intelligence and Machine Learning rather than AI. CII has initiated three outcome-based AI task forces on skill development, education and agriculture. Many pilot projects by these task forces are currently being conducted at various sites.

In 1974, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, created a revolutionary set of tiles that could be used to cover an infinite plane in a pattern that never repeats. In 1982, Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli crystallographer, discovered a metallic alloy whose atoms were organized unlike anything ever observed in materials science. Penrose garnered public renown on a scale rarely seen in mathematics. Shechtman won the Nobel Prize. Both scientists defied human intuition and changed our basic understanding of nature's design, revealing how infinite variation could emerge within a highly ordered environment. At the heart of their breakthroughs is "forbidden symmetry," so-called because it flies in the face of a deeply ingrained association between symmetry and repetition.

Skype is now going to hide probably the most embarrassing thing about video chats: your messy room. The company has introduced a new background blur feature intended to hide away all of those parts of your room that you'd rather people not see, as well as parents whose TV interviews are interrupted by children storming into their study. The tool uses artificial intelligence to pick out the users' hair, hands, and arms, as well as looking for people, and will keep those visible. Everything else will blend into the background, allowing people to focus on you as you speak. Turning it on is as simple as clicking the little video button during a chat.

Whether it's allegations of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka or the "gilets jaunes" protests in France, it is clear that social media platforms are helping spread divisive messages online at an alarming rate and potentially fueling offline violence. But the debate is about whether these platforms are an essential cause, without which these events could not have happened, or merely reflect real-world tensions. Read more: Debate: The'gilets jaunes' movement is not a Facebook revolution Algorithmic amplification is when some online content becomes popular at the expense of other viewpoints. This is a reality on many of the platforms we interact with today. The history of our clicks, likes, comments and shares are the data powering the algorithmic engine.

The UK-assembled rover that will be sent to Mars in 2020 will bear the name of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. The honour follows a public call for suggestions that drew nearly 36,000 responses from right across Europe. Astronaut Tim Peake unveiled the name at the Airbus factory in Stevenage where the robot is being put together. The six-wheeled vehicle will be equipped with instruments and a drill to search for evidence of past or present life on the Red Planet. Giving the rover a name associated with a molecule fundamental to biology seems therefore to be wholly appropriate.