A few weeks ago the notion of a classic but modernized and fully realized Metroid game would have seemed chimerical. Yet here we are, just a few months shy of Metroid: Samus Returns, a reimagined version of the similarly titled 1991 Game Boy adventure. The entire summer's games lineup feels unusually robust, from Splatoon 2's eSports-angled, ink-splashed madness or Uncharted: The Lost Legacy's fortune-hunting antics, to Pyre's curious action-roleplaying inversions and Tacoma's evocative exploration-driven enticements. Studio Grezzo, best known for its work with Nintendo on 3DS games like The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes, takes a stab at a roleplaying game of its own in which players complete missions to fund an ever-expanding sanctuary. More than a spiffed up remaster of this 2006 fantasy roleplaying romp, Square Enix's return to a world of warring city-states will include a reimagined (and previously Japan-only) character progression system.

For all of modern gaming's advances, conversation is still a fairly unsophisticated affair. Starship Commander, an upcoming virtual reality game on Oculus and SteamVR, illustrates both the promise and challenge of a new paradigm seeking to remedy that: using your voice. In an early demo, I control a starship delivering classified goods across treacherous space. Everything is controlled by my voice: flying the ship is as simple as saying "computer, use the autopilot," while my sergeant pops up in live action video to answer questions. At one point, my ship is intercepted and disabled by a villain, who pops onto my screen and starts grilling me. After a little back and forth, it turns out he wants a deal: "Tell you what, you take me to the Delta outpost and I'll let you live."

Artificial intelligence is completely reshaping the $445 billion beauty industry by creating AI-powered shopping experiences despite the widespread brick-and-mortar retail crisis. "Cracking e-commerce for beauty has been notoriously difficult compared to other verticals," Headliner Labs co-founder Caroline Klatt told International Business Times. "Getting a recommendation from a stylist is the number one driver of sales in stores." New York-based Headliner is just one of many companies creating custom AI chatbots for beauty brands. To understand just how dramatic this high-tech shift really is, let's recall how people got beauty products just 15 years ago.

Nissan's next-generation Leaf EV will be its first car featuring its ProPilot driver-assist self-driving technology. The system will be activated by a button on the steering wheel and will control acceleration, braking and steering. The ProPilot system consists of a suite of assists, semi-autonomous functions and is designed mainly for highways, and not for busy city traffic. The company has been testing the system in Japan for some time and now and it is ready for a rollout in North America and Europe. "In the coming years, Nissan's ProPilot technology will offer increasing levels of autonomy, with the system eventually able to navigate city intersections.

Ready or not, there are robots in your future. And some of them will be for health care. There has been growing concern that the rise of robots, along with artificial intelligence (AI), will create huge impacts on jobs. Within the last few months both McKinsey and PwC have issued white papers on the topic. The former found that nearly half of jobs have the potential to be automated (although most not totally), while the latter expects 38% of U.S. jobs at at high risk of automation within 20 years.

Laparoscopic surgeries are often automatically recorded from the point of view of the endoscope's lens. This is thanks to built-in recording equipment that accompanies many commercial endoscopic systems. What isn't easy is reviewing all those hours of footage to find something that may be useful for training clinicians or that may be used to improve laparoscopy-related equipment. Now researchers at MIT have reported at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore on a new video processing system that can, on its own, identify different stages of laparoscopic surgeries, potentially allowing researchers to quickly find relevant scenes that they can easily study. The computer vision algorithm powering the system can spot when a biopsy is performed, a wound irrigated, or tissue stapled, among other activities.

The passwords of thousands of British politicians, senior police officers and other top officials have been stolen and traded by hackers, it has been reported. The login details of education secretary Justine Greening and business secretary Greg Clark are believed to be some of those that were reportedly exchanged by Russian hackers. The head of IT at the Foreign Office, the director-general of the Department for Exiting the European Union and former detective chief inspector Andy Redwood were also reportedly affected. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Facebook is encouraging users to counter hate speech online, with the UK launch of its Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI) in the UK. The social network says it wants to promote "the civil courage displayed by organisations and grassroots activists", in order to tackle online extremism. Technology companies were fiercely criticised by Theresa May in the wake of the London Bridge terror attack, and were accused of providing terrorists with "safe spaces" online. Facebook was quick to defend its efforts, but has since tried to step them up. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

The PSA Group's first fully-autonomous cars will reach market in 2020, after semi-autonomous systems are offered on the DS 7 Crossback next year. The first PSA car with'hands-off' Level 2 autonomous system will be the DS 7 Crossback SUV, which is due for launch early in 2018. The Citroën C5 Aircross will follow suit in the second half of 2018 after launching in China at the end of this year. Equipped with a Level 2 system called Connected Pilot, the 7 Crossback will be capable of maintaining lane and choosing station to the left or right of the lane to allow cycles or motorcycles to pass. It will also be equipped with self-parking without any intervention by the driver, initiated by pressing a button on the centre console.

Artificial intelligence is finding its way into the world of music, literature and art, raising never-before-considered questions about a creators' role. A team led by Shigeki Sagayama, professor of mathematical engineering and information physics at Meiji University, has created software that can compose a melody to accompany any given lyric. Available for use online, the automatic composition software, named Orpheus, has produced hundreds of thousands of pieces of music since its launch in 2007. Sagayama has developed a method to produce melodies based on the cadence of the Japanese language. He said AI works well in the field of musical composition as the established theories, rules and systems -- such as harmonics -- make programming feasible.