Microsoft is to launch a radical'Netflix for games' service for $9.99 per month. The'Game Pass' service will offer 100 Xbox One and Backward Compatible Xbox 360 games to users. It will update its catalogue of games each month, and users will have the option to download games - although they must keep paying their subscription to play them. The'Game Pass' service will offer 100 Xbox One and Backward Compatible Xbox 360 games to users. It will update its catalogue of games each month.

Derrick Campana kneels beside Angel Marie, a three-legged mini horse who wears a prosthetic leg made by Campana. This first thing you notice about Derrick Campana's workshop is the machinery. Between the ovens, sewing machines and vacuum tubes lining the walls, it's easy to think Campana is a home economics teacher -- until you catch sight of the dusty paw prints. Campana and and his team use the tools not for domestic projects, but to build prosthetic and orthotic devices for animals. Campana, one of the world's leading experts in animal orthotics, is on a mission to give disabled pets and farm animals options for more mobile lives.

At IROS in Chicago a few years back, then Harvard grad student Michael Tolley introduced us to a robot that used explosions to jump. It was soft, it was pink, it had three wiggly legs that it used to position itself, and it was kinda freaky looking. As it turns out, Tolley now has his own robotics lab at UC San Diego, and they've been working on ways of efficiently fabricating useful soft robots. Their latest paper, which will be presented at ICRA in Singapore next week, throws a fourth wiggly leg into the mix to make a soft quadruped robot that can walk. Soft robots (with soft actuators) have the potential to be easy and cheap to construct in lots of very different, very adaptable, and intrinsically safe configurations.

Got no one to dance with? Not to worry – you might soon be gliding through the moves, thanks to a robotic instructor designed to teach humans how to dance. The robot's designers had already created mechanical dance partners that follow a human's lead, but the new machine gently guides novices through routines while adapting to their skill level. This is trickier, says Diego Felipe Paez Granados at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, who led the research, because the robot must keep students on course without becoming too forceful. The 1.8-metre-tall robot has wheels, but its upper body moves like that of a human dancer.

DeepMind's artificial intelligence AlphaGo has defeated Ke Jie, the world's number one player, in the first of three games of Go played in Wuzhen, China. The AI won by half a point – the smallest possible margin of victory – in a match lasting 4 hours and 15 minutes. Although the scoreline looks close, AlphaGo was in the lead from relatively early on in the game. Because the AI favours moves that are more likely to guarantee victory, it doesn't usually trounce opponents. In a press conference after the match, Ke said AlphaGo had learned from its recent victories against Go champions.

Let's hear it for the written word. Learning to read can have profound effects on the wiring of the adult brain – even in regions that aren't usually associated with reading and writing. That's what Michael Skeide of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues found when they taught a group of illiterate adults in rural India to read and write. Skeide and his colleagues wanted to study how culture changes the brain, so focused on reading and writing. These cultural inventions have appeared only recently in our evolutionary history, so we haven't had a chance to evolve specific genes for such skills.

JD.com has made a major investment in this space beyond the work in Shaanxi. It is also building a 30-acre logistic and robotics research center in Xian, which will include HQ for JD Logistics, a cloud computing center, and a drone factory. After it establishes a working concept for large-scale drone delivery, JD.com wants to master inter-province drone aerial delivery, and then branch off to include global partnerships with international logistics providers.

Drone company DJI launched a $499 mini camera drone that lifts off from the palm of the hand. It captures and shares photos on the go, and can be controlled by hand gestures alone. It allows users to send the drone up and away, take a selfie and be called with a hand gesture – and weighs less than a can of soda. The drone, called Spark, weighs just 10.6 ounces (300 grams) and can be operated by a remote controller, a mobile device, or via hand gestures. The drone will be sold in five different colors: White, blue, green, red and yellow.

The slow-moving, unidentified object flying over South Korea's border on Tuesday afternoon caused so much concern that soldiers issued loudspeaker warnings and ultimately fired more than 90 machine gun rounds in the air. What first seemed like a provocative North Korean military incursion -- perhaps a drone flight over the two countries' highly secured border -- turned out to be much more innocuous, the South Korean military said Wednesday. After studying radar evidence and thermal imagery, those military officials now believe the incident was sparked by a group of large North Korean balloons -- likely an effort to drop propaganda leaflets on the rogue state's ideological adversaries in the South. Though less serious than first reported, the incident underscores the heightened tensions along the border, and the region generally. That's because of the North's continued advancement as a nuclear state and its increasing technical prowess in developing missiles that can deliver warheads.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology, which AlaphGo used to beat the world's top Go player in human-versus-machine matches, will soon be used in more general sectors, industry officials and scientists told a forum yesterday. AI, which covers voice and picture recognition, machine translation and self-driving, can also be applied to energy, health care, government and more sectors in the future, said Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent firm. AI is seen as major catalyst to boost economies and innovation in the next decade, industry officials told the Future of AI Forum in Wuzhen yesterday. Ke Jie, the world's top ranking Go player, was beaten by AlaphGo on Tuesday in Wuzhen. Ke and AlphaGo will face off again today and Saturday in the watertown in Zhejiang Province.