Bots are showing themselves to be one of the darlings of adtech in 2016. They may potentially disrupt brand-consumer interaction as we know it, creating both opportunity and chaos for marketers. And yet, as with websites and apps, building an effective brand asset doesn't happen overnight -- or come without challenges. And that's certainly true for bots, whose technology is still very imperfect and will require extensive development before all is said and done. Even so, the benefits outweigh the risks, and brands should act now, as first movers will likely see major advantages. Previously, I spoke with more than a dozen executives to learn what bot implementations hold the most promise (See: 10 ways bots can surprise and delight your customers).

I'm sorry to be writing you under these circumstances; I wish I didn't have to. We've spoken a number of times, we've met in person, and you seem like a genuinely nice guy. I mean, it's not Jupiter Ascending, but still, there's nothing to it. It's got blood and guts, but no blood and guts, you know? So I've been thinking about what happened, and I think what happened is this: You made a film to bring a videogame universe to life.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your seafaring 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. Within the last 30 years half of all corals have died already. However, there are selective measures in restoring coral reefs by cultivating and eventually statically outplanting them on reefs.

Antibiotics are used to help tackle infections in both humans and animals, but their overuse has led to growing fears of bacteria becoming resistant to the drugs. Now scientists are turning to unexpected methods to find new antibiotics, and the latest help could come in the form of machines that have long been seen as the enemy - in science fiction at least. A new project is helping researchers discover new strains of antibiotic, by gathering bacteria from as many people as possible. A new project is helping researchers discover new strains of antibiotic, by gathering bacteria from as many people as possible. In the latest episode of BBC's Inside Science radio programme, Dr Adam Rutherford took swabs from a Dalek (pictured) in the BBC headquarters Dr Adam Roberts at University College London is leading a project named'Swab and Send', which encourages people to take samples from around their homes and send them to the lab. The project is still calling for people to get involved, by swabbing strange places in their homes and posting them to the UCL lab.

The sports fields are empty, the science labs closed. No babies have been born for years. Cut to a split screen of human and robots kissing passionately. "They're trapped!" says the narrator, voice like gravel. Words slam against the screen, a warning. Except Futurama's 2001 episode "I Dated a Robot", with its post-apocalyptic world of silvers and blues, wildly overestimated how long it would take before this fear became flesh. It's November 2015, and in Malaysia, where humidity is at 89% and it is almost certainly still raining, David Levy, a founder of the second annual Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, is free to talk on the phone – he is less busy than planned.

For the second time in months, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said "we will fight on to liberate every inch of our land". The last time Assad made a similar statement, he was scolded by the Russian ambassador to the UN who said this was not in line with the Kremlin's policies. At the time, it wasn't - Russia was pushing for a political settlement and was involved in efforts with the United States to bring about a cessation of hostilities to create a conducive atmosphere for peace talks. This time around, however, Assad has so far not been told off. Instead, Russia sent its defence minister to Iran's capital Tehran to take part in talks with his Syrian and Iranian counterparts.

"I'm a weird person," he says, "who has a foot in each world, of model-making and of actual experiments and psychological theory building." In 2012 he and two similarly broad-minded Harvard professors, Martin Nowak and Joshua Greene, tackled a question that exercised the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes? They collected data from 10 experiments, most of them using a standard economics scenario called a public-goods game.1 Groups of four people, either American college students or American adults participating online, were given some money. They were allowed to place some of it into a pool, which was then multiplied and distributed evenly. A participant could maximize his or her income by contributing nothing and just sharing in the gains, but people usually gave something. Despite the temptation to be selfish, most people showed selflessness. The fuzziness of psychological ideas makes them hard to test.

We look at the latest developments in robotics, including'cobots': intelligent devices that may soon be appearing at a care home near you. The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones has been meeting some of them at Europe's leading annual robotics exhibition. Also, we talk to Hillary Clinton's former senior advisor for innovation, Alec Ross, who's written a book called The Industries of the Future about evolutions in the workplace. And we talk to Chetan Dube, president and CEO of the company Ipsoft, who's just announced that his company is building an entire business practice around a virtual agent called Amelia. Is all of this innovation a burden off our backs?

For a while now, Google's company DeepMind has been working on an artificial intelligence (AI) which plays Atari games better than you remember your older brother playing them in the 1980s. The AI is not only extremely proficient at playing these cult classics but has also learned to play 49 of them completely on its own. Despite this impressive feat, the DeepMind's creation isn't perfect and some games have simply proved to be too complicated for it to learn them on its own, Montezuma's Revenge being one of them. However, the Google-owned company has recently been hard at work correcting the flaws in its AI which has finally mastered the unforgiving 1984 platformer developed by the now-defunct Utopia Software. As its developers explain it, they had to make the AI "curious enough" for it to want to actually win the game.

Imagine, a family vehicle that sounds like 16 lawnmowers. Flying cars are a forever icon of the future. Personal aircraft, with the ease and convenience of home automobiles, and without any of the downsides of airplanes or helicopters, have so far proven if not impossible then impractical, despite decades of attempts. But Google cofounder Larry Page isn't about to let all that history get in his way. The first, founded in 2010, is Zee.Aero.