DNA patterns DNA is a versatile molecule with many potential technological applications because it can organize itself into all manner of useful patterns. Researchers from Duke University and the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science have expanded on their DNA grids by giving them the ability to organize other molecules. The DNA grids are made from DNA tiles, or combinations of DNA strands that form rigid structures. The grids can incorporate different types of molecules at specific points, including molecules that could be used to make electronic and optical components. The grids are more than 60 times smaller than a red blood cell and are part of an ongoing project to build computer chips using DNA to assemble components such as carbon nanotubes into logic circuits.

What is minimally invasive surgery? Some argue that this benign-sounding concept just transfers the pain of the operation from the patient to the surgeon. Others can't even agree on a definition of the term, believing that any procedure that causes less morbidity is by nature minimally invasive. I think that the definition question at least should be left up to the patient. When the person who will have to undergo the procedure asks, "Do I have to?" it's a good bet you're talking about something invasive.

Today, mathematics and computer science often appear as the province of geniuses working at the very edge of human ability and imagination. Even as American high schools struggle to employ qualified math and science teachers, American popular culture has embraced math, science, and computers as a mystic realm of extraordinary intellectual power, even verging on madness. Movies like A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, and Pi all present human intelligence in the esoteric symbolism of long, indecipherable, but visually captivating equations. One has to think of such prosaic activities as paying the mortgage and grocery shopping to be reminded of the quiet and non-revelatory quality of rudimentary arithmetic. Which is not to put such labor down.

Deep in the heart of Imperial College, London, a computer is learning how to play Pac-Man. Like many humans, it struggles to get the hang of the classic 1980s video game at first. With time though, experience helps it decide which manoeuvres will allow it to evade the clutches of a relentless gang of animated ghosts. This is just one of dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) projects slowly transforming the UK into the global hub for a technology that elicits fascination and fear in equal measure. The point of teaching a computer to master Pac-Man is to help it "think" and learn like a human.

Google DeepMind, the tech giant's London-based company most famous for its groundbreaking use of artificial intelligence, is developing a software in partnership with NHS hospitals to alert staff to patients at risk of deterioration and death through kidney failure. The technology, which is run through a smartphone app, has the support of Lord Darzi, the surgeon and former health minister in the Blair government who is director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. "Innovation is the only solution we have for a sustainable NHS, both economically and in meeting the challenges and demands upon it," Darzi told the Guardian in a preview of the technology. Darzi has led a team working on a smartphone app called Hark for the last five years, which DeepMind has now acquired and will develop. Hark identifies the tasks that need to be performed to prevent a patient who has been admitted to hospital deteriorating, allocates them to the right staff, and tracks what has been done – or not done.

Demis Hassabis has a modest demeanour and an unassuming countenance, but he is deadly serious when he tells me he is on a mission to "solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else". Coming from almost anyone else, the statement would be laughable; from him, not so much. Hassabis is the 39-year-old former chess master and video-games designer whose artificial intelligence research start-up, DeepMind, was bought by Google in 2014 for a reported $625 million. He is the son of immigrants, attended a state comprehensive in Finchley and holds degrees from Cambridge and UCL in computer science and cognitive neuroscience. A "visionary" manager, according to those who work with him, Hassabis also reckons he has found a way to "make science research efficient" and says he is leading an "Apollo programme for the 21st century". He's the sort of normal-looking bloke you wouldn't look twice at on the street, but Tim Berners-Lee once described him to me as one of the smartest human beings on the planet. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, of course, every time we interrogate Siri or get a recommendation on Android. And in the short term, Google products will surely benefit from Hassabis's research, even if improvements in personalisation, search, YouTube, and speech and facial recognition are not presented as "AI" as such. "It's just stuff that works.") In the longer term, though, the technology he is developing is about more than emotional robots and smarter phones.

Experts in artificial intelligence, lawyers and activists organized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to warn against a growing reliance on cheap drones and "stupid AI" that can be unpredictable in the real world. "Terminator always comes up," Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the sci-fi cyborg on a mission to wipe out mankind. "But it's not really Terminator that we're worried about at the moment. I think that Terminator is perhaps 50 or so years away." But there are concerning technologies "only a few years, at best, away", Walsh said, and with semi-autonomous systems, such as drones, "it would take very little to remove the human from that loop and replace them with a computer".

Fears that artificial intelligence will wipe out human beings are completely overblown, according to the co-founder of Britain's DeepMind, who has insisted that the technology will help tackle some of the world's biggest problems including accessing clean water, financial inequality and stock market risks. Mustafa Suleyman, who with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg set up the London-based machine learning company that was bought by Google in January 2014 for £400m, mounted a spirited defence of the company's successes. He told a conference on machine learning that "artificial intelligence, AI, has arrived. This isn't just some brief summer for this technology, and it's not about to go away again. High-profile figures including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have all warned that the rise of AI poses a threat to humanity – a threat that has been echoed in recent Hollywood films such as Ex Machina, The Terminator and Transcendence. Yet Suleyman insisted that AI is, and will remain, a tool that humans can control and direct, rather than a threat. The best use for AI would be to help decisions about how to tackle some of the world's biggest problems such as lack of access to clean water, inequality of access to food and finance, and stock market risks, he suggested. DeepMind's systems use neural networks and "deep learning" methods that deploy low-level transistor networks to produce high-level effects so that they can, for instance, distinguish a cat's face from a human one – a trivial task for a human, but hard for a machine. That has been developed into "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) that can learn to solve tasks without prior programming, and have already been used to replace 60 hand-crafted systems across Google. The AGI system's deployment into speech recognition, now used in Android phones and Google Translate, had led to the biggest overall improvement in speech recognition in 20 years, Suleyman said, with a 30% reduction in transcription error rates. Yet training the program for the task took less than five days. Speaking to a conference on machine intelligence in London on Friday, Suleyman said that he was dismayed by the negative attitudes being shown towards AI. "It's sad how quickly we've adopted to the reality and don't acknowledge the magic and the good that these systems can bring.

In December, Amazon announced that it intended to deliver packages to customers using drones. But its "Amazon Prime Air" initiative, revealed on US current affairs show 60 Minutes, was widely ridiculed for being an over-hyped announcement with little to show for it. This summer, Google demonstrated its own drone-based delivery service, using a fixed-wing aircraft to deliver packages including chocolate bars, dog treats and cattle vaccines to farmers in the Australian outback. But now, German delivery firm DHL has beaten the tech firms to the post, announcing a regular drone delivery service for the first time, nine months after it launched its "parcelcopter" research project in December 2013. The service will use an autonomous quadcopter to deliver small parcels to the German island of Juist, a sandbar island 12km into the North Sea from the German coast, inhabited by 2,000 people.

It has taken 16 years but James Dyson has achieved one of his dreams: to build a robotic vacuum cleaner. As befits a device of the modern age, it can be controlled remotely via a smartphone app – and reports on where it has been. Announced on Thursday, the Dyson 360 Eye relies on two breakthroughs: a machine vision system that takes in a whole room from a single camera lens and a powerful lightweight digital motor that enhances battery life. Sir James Dyson says that the machine vision system for the device – which was introduced in Japan and is due to go on sale in the UK in summer 2015 – will have applications beyond household appliances. "We think vision is a technology of the future," Dyson told the Guardian.