Japan is famously wary of immigration, fearing that foreign workers will undermine job security and upset familiar ways of life. But there is one kind of industrious interloper that is greeted more enthusiastically in Japan than in any other country. Robots or "immigrants from the future", as my colleague Oliver Morton calls them, are unusually well assimilated into Japanese society. Japan's obsession with robots is well documented. Foreign journalists seem to like Japan's affection for robots almost as much as Japan likes robots.

With the general availability of the "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us. We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than a processor since it includes high bandwidth memory and fabric interconnect adapters on a single package – is what the future looks like. And that goes for Knights family processors and co-processors as well as the "Pascal" and "Volta" accelerators made by Nvidia, the Sparc64-XIfx and ARM chips that will be used in the used in the Post-K system in Japan made by Fujitsu, the Matrix2000 DSP accelerator being created by China for one of its pre-exascale systems, or the CPU-GPU hybrids based on its "Zen" Opterons that AMD is cooking up for supercomputing systems in the United States and, with licensing partners, in China. During the recent ISC16 supercomputing conference in Frankfurt, Germany, Intel gathered up the executives in charge of some of the largest supercomputing facilities on the planet who are also – not coincidentally, but absolutely intentionally – also early adopters of the Knights Landing Xeon Phi and, in some cases, the Omni-Path interconnect that is a kicker to Intel's True Scale InfiniBand networking.

Dyson has been teasing a robot vacuum for more than a decade. Two years ago, it finally unveiled one--but it wasn't available in the U.S. Today in New York, Dyson introduced the 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner to Americans. Already on sale in Japan, the Eye will finally be available to U.S consumers on August 1 at an initial price of 999. With that kind of a price tag, Dyson is showing how confident it is in the 360 Eye's engineering. We've been following this automatic floor cleaner since IFA Berlin 2014.

A mall security robot has effectively redefined the term artificial intelligence after it barreled into a toddler last week at a northern California shopping center, running him over and leaving him with various bumps and bruises. The robot, weighing in at 300 pounds and standing at 5 feet, is typically an attraction for patrons at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. But this time around it was more of an attractive nuisance, the 16-month-old boy's mother told KGO-TV, the local ABC affiliate. "The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," said Tiffany Teng said. The runaway robot caused the young boy to experience a sore head, swelling in a foot and bruising on a leg.

Japanese auto manufacturer Nissan Motor Co unveiled to the media on July 12 its new self driving technology'ProPilot,' which assists the driver in maintaining speed during heavy traffic, changing lanes, and other driving maneuvers on a highway. Nissan's 2016 model Serena will be the first model to have the ProPilot technology, which is made possible by relatively simple technologies including a front-facing camera, an electronic parking break, and a 7-inch display monitor inside the car. "As part of the first step in (pursuing) our self driving technology called ProPilot, we are implementing the system into Serena. This is part of the company's roadmap, which in 2016 we begin implementing ProPilot (technology) that works within a single lane on highways," Nissan's Manager of Advanced driver assistance systems engineering department, Kiwamu Aoyanagi, said. By 2018, Nissan aims to have ProPilot be able to operate multiple lane changes, and by 2020, to be able to turn left and right at intersections.

U.S. officials covered up the Chinese government's attempt to hack computers used by the nation's banking regulator, Republican lawmakers claimed Wednesday. The report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology alleges that the Chinese government was spying on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which stores confidential data on the nation's largest financial institutions, over a three-year period starting in 2010. "Even the former chairwoman's computer had been hacked by a foreign government, likely the Chinese," the report claims. The intruders were reportedly seeking "economic intelligence," Reuters reported. FDIC officials allegedly tried to cover up the hack to protect the regulator's incoming chairman.

The story first turned up in mid-May: Foxconn, Apple's favorite manufacturer, was replacing 60,000 of its workers with robots. Everyone from the BBC to Apple fan sites soon reported the ground-shifting news. There was just one problem: It was mostly false. Last weekend, a Foxconn spokesperson told Chinese media that the company hadn't laid off anyone, much less replaced them with automation. That part of the story came from overly enthusiastic bureaucrats in Kunshan, a manufacturing town keen to promote itself as a hub for innovation. The incident seemed like an apt metaphor.

The sight of flying umbrellas, changing altitude with a fluttering rhythm, looks more like an animated Disney scene than graduate work by a student engineer. "I wanted to push the envelope of coordinating drones in the sky," says the project's creator Alan Kwan, a student in MIT's "ACT" (Art, Culture and Technology) program. He wanted his drones to act almost alive, "not like things to be controlled by an algorithm," he says, "but flying creatures that take on a synchronous life." A Hong Kong native, Kwan, 25, has explored scientific art before. He won an award for his Beating Clock project, a reanimated pig heart that keeps time.

Four small rotors to take off and land, one big engine to fly through the sky. Could crowds design the drone of the future? European aviation giant Airbus and Arizona-based open-source manufacturing company Local Motors held a contest for designers across the world to create a new drone concept. This morning, they announced all the winners. Check out the Zelator, by Alexey Medvedev of Omsk, Russia, which won first place in the Airbus Main Prize.

The revolution is here--and it will be televised, Friend. Tonight, in fact, as the highly anticipated season 2 of Mr. Robot premieres. The unusual show struck a chord with audiences last summer and garnered immediate praise from critics and the public, even stealing a Golden Globe from Game of Thrones. Now, the program will have to sustain that interest as it continues the arresting story of Elliot Alderson, a mentally unstable hacker and member of the anarchic hacktivist group fsociety. An amalgam of Fight Club, V is for Vendetta and The Matrix, the show was initially conceived of as a feature film by creator Sam Esmail--but his big-canvas aspirations haven't been lost in the move to smaller screens.