A visitor to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona tries on a virtual-reality headset, one of a coming wave of VR devices. SAN FRANCISCO – I love watching people experience virtual reality for the first time. The cumbersome headsets exaggerate their movements as they scan left to right, and then nod up and down. And every time they look in another direction and spot something new, you can almost feel their amazement through the goggles. Lately, I feel as though I've put on a VR headset and never took it off. Because every time I turn, it seems, I spy something truly inspirational.

More than a week after his death, Prince is everywhere. Artists the world over counted him as an influence and mentor, and Japan is no exception. When news of Prince's death broke, Japanese musicians, from pop idols to rappers, tweeted their goodbyes. But what a lot of people may not realize is that Prince also had profoundly affected one of the most bizarre comic and anime franchises Japan has ever produced – a series called, appropriately enough, "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure." The series isn't quite as popular as titles like "One Piece" or "Dragon Ball Z," but it has been running since 1985, spawned video game and novel spinoffs and produced a serious cult following.

Editor's note: This month marks the centennial of the birth of Claude Shannon, the American mathematician and electrical engineer whose groundbreaking work laid out the theoretical foundation for modern digital communications. To celebrate the occasion, we're republishing online a memorable profile of Shannon that IEEE Spectrum ran in its April 1992 issue. Written by former Spectrum editor John Horgan, who interviewed Shannon at his home in Winchester, Mass., the profile reveals the many facets of Shannon's character: While best known as the father of information theory, Shannon was also an inventor, tinkerer, puzzle solver, and prankster. The 1992 profile included a portrait of Shannon taken by Boston-area photographer Stanley Rowin. On this page we're reproducing that portrait along with other Shannon photos by Rowin that Spectrum has never published. Shannon died in 2001 at age 84 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. He is regarded as one of the greatest electrical engineering heroes of all time.

First it was software, then the website, then the app. While it is still too early to say for certain whether or not this will indeed be the case, the hands of intelligent automation are becoming more and more common across multiple industries and fintech is certainly among them. Here are three reasons why AI and smart bots will play a greater role in payments. The first quarter of 2016 saw payments firms raise USD274.3m in disclosed investment deals. This was down 45% on figures from Q1 2015, where payments startups raised USD500m.

The last few years have seen considerable advances in artificial intelligence (AI) using technology inspired by animal brains. Neural networks and deep reinforcement learning allowed Google Deep Mind's AlphaGo AI to beat champion Go player Lee Se-dol. The same methods are being used to teach AI to explore in Minecraft and win deathmatches in Doom. Neural networks can even influence the art world. Google's Deep Mind famously produces surreal art that took the internet by storm.

Once your business is no longer the innovative upstart and you become the establishment entity, how do you maintain an entrepreneurial and disruptive spirit that gets results? That's the question Apple had to ask itself this week, following an iffy earnings report. This week, Apple posted the earnings results for the second quarter of 2016, and reported a year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue for the first time in 13 years. The company took in 50.6 billion in quarterly revenue and 10.5 billion in quarterly net income. On a call with investors, CEO Tim Cook characterized that 13 percent dip in revenue as a "pause in our growth," that had stemmed from "ongoing macroeconomic headwinds in much of the world." Despite the break in the company's decade plus streak of "record" growth, it's unlikely that the tech giant's standing as one of most valuable and authentic brands in the world will be dinged in any significant way.

Apply now to be an Enterpreneur360 company and let us tell the world your success story. Once your business is no longer the innovative upstart and you become the establishment entity, how do you maintain an entrepreneurial and disruptive spirit that gets results? That's the question Apple had to ask itself this week, following an iffy earnings report. This week, Apple posted the earnings results for the second quarter of 2016, and reported a year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue for the first time in 13 years. The company took in 50.6 billion in quarterly revenue and 10.5 billion in quarterly net income. On a call with investors, CEO Tim Cook characterized that 13 percent dip in revenue as a "pause in our growth," that had stemmed from "ongoing macroeconomic headwinds in much of the world."

Even with bottled oxygen and elite training, there are underwater locations that lie well beyond our physical capabilities. But via haptic feedback technology and artificial intelligence, Stanford University's humanoid diving robot is now putting the ocean's depths within human reach. In its maiden expedition, the OceanOne droid has just scoured an untouched shipwreck off the coast of France and returned with a delicate, 17th century vase in its grip. Researchers are now eyeing future voyages to coral reefs, oil rigs and underwater disaster zones. With our deep sea diving capabilities only taking us so far, we have long sought to send robots down below to do the investigating for us.

A new invention has emerged from the sea as a robotic humanoid capable to explore the ocean while its driver is safe into a boat. This is not a dream but a reality taken off from a science-fiction page. This machine was designed by Oussama Kathib, a professor at Stanford University in the field of computer science in an attempt to develop better ways to study the deepest oceans and all treasures the sea may hide. It was created as the perfect representation of the human being.The machine was named OceanOne and its capability for underwater exploration is incredible. This robot has two hands, a stereo vision and the best of all: the robot driver can feel what the robot is doing without the dangers or time limits associated with diving.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your non-flexible 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. Friend o' the blog Markus Waibel sent us this video of the craziest ETH Zurich Flying Machine Arena project (so far): the monocopter, which has one prop and nothing else. We're told that Markus bet that this thing could only work in theory, and lost: This video introduces the monospinner, the mechanically simplest controllable flying machine in existence.