Spider silk has long been hailed for its wondrous properties, such as incredible toughness. Now researchers have found a weird kind of webbing that acts as both a liquid and a solid. What's more, they've created an artificial version that could find use in soft robotics. Arnaud Antkowiak of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and his colleagues studied the "capture silk" of an orb-weaver spider – the sticky silk that makes up the spiral of a spider's web, rather than the radial spokes that hold it together. When they stretched the silk, they found it extended like a spring, just as you would expect from a solid material.

Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for seventy-eight thousand dollars. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn't been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt's memory. It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She'd been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She'd said to me, impulsively, "I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you've always wanted to go." To this I'd replied, for reasons I'm at a loss to reconstruct, "Antarctica?" Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise. Hoping to make Antarctica more palatable to my temperate Californian, I decided to spend Walt's money on the most deluxe of bookings--a three-week Lindblad National Geographic expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands. I paid a deposit, and the Californian and I proceeded to joke, uneasily, when the topic arose, about the nasty cold weather and the heaving South Polar seas to which she'd consented to subject herself. I kept reassuring her that as soon as she saw a penguin she'd be happy she'd made the trip. But when it came time to pay the balance, she asked if we might postpone by a year. Her mother's situation was unstable, and she was loath to put herself so irretrievably far from home. By this point, I, too, had developed a vague aversion to the trip, an inability to recall why I'd proposed Antarctica in the first place. The idea of "seeing it before it melts" was dismal and self-cancelling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations? I was also put off by the seventh continent's status as a trophy, too remote and expensive for the common tourist to set foot on. It was true that there were extraordinary birds to be seen, not just penguins but oddities like the snowy sheathbill and the world's southernmost-breeding songbird, the South Georgia pipit. But the number of Antarctic species is fairly small, and I'd already reconciled myself to never seeing every bird species in the world. The best reason I could think of for going to Antarctica was that it was absolutely not the kind of thing the Californian and I did; we'd learned that our ideal getaway lasts three days.

Suzanne, a young woman in San Francisco, met a man--call him John--on the dating site OKCupid. John was attractive and charming. More notably, he indulged in the kind of profligate displays of affection which signal a definite eagerness to commit. He sneaked Suzanne's favorite snacks into her purse as a workday surprise and insisted early on that she keep a key to his apartment. He asked her to help him choose a couch and then spooned with her on all the floor models. He even accompanied her, unprompted, to the D.M.V.--an act roughly equivalent, in today's gallantry currency, to Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster. As we learn from the podcast "Reply All," which reported the tale, Suzanne was not the only woman on whom John had chosen to bestow his favor. Six months into their relationship, she discovered that he was seeing half a dozen other women, one of whom he'd been stringing along for two years. All of them had received the couch-spooning treatment.

LET me hazard a guess that you think a real person has written what you're reading. Perhaps you should ask me to confirm it the way your computer does when it demands that you type those letters and numbers crammed like abstract art into that annoying little box. Because, these days, a shocking amount of what we're reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms. We probably should have suspected that the information assaulting us 24/7 couldn't all have been created by people bent over their laptops. The multitude of digital avenues now available to us demand content with an appetite that human effort can no longer satisfy.

John Markoff recently reported in the New York Times, "In its quest to maintain a United States military advantage, the Pentagon is aggressively turning to Silicon Valley's hottest technology -- artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter made his fourth trip to the tech industry's heartland since being named to his post last year. Before that, it had been 20 years since a defense secretary had visited the area, he noted in a speech at a Defense Department research facility near Google's headquarters. The Pentagon's intense interest in A.I. -- and by connection the Silicon Valley companies specializing in that technology -- has grown out of the'Third Offset' strategy articulated by Mr. Carter last fall. Concerned about the re-emergence of China and Russia as military competitors, he stated that computer-based, high-tech weapons would give the American military an edge in the future."

Difficult as it may be to remember now, there was a time when planning a vacation meant calling a travel agent. These professionals served as an intermediary between travelers and hotels, airlines and so on, taking vague notions ("We'd like to do two weeks across Europe") and turning them into itineraries. But over the past 15 years or so, do-it-yourself websites like Orbitz and Airbnb have empowered vacationers to pick their own accommodations, making travel agents increasingly unnecessary. The U.S. Department of Labor warns that the employment of travel agents is set to drop 12% by 2024, thanks largely to "the ability of travelers to use the Internet to research vacations and book their own trip." Those DIY sites have given rise to a new problem: too much choice.

Of course, gamers go into every year filled with excitement and anticipation. This is a medium that thrives on slow burn hype, with even tiny indie projects using months of teaser shots and YouTube trailers to garner interest. The good news is, there's usually enough brilliant, innovative and compelling fare to justify that enthusiasm – and 2016 looks to be no exception. Although you could fill a dozen'most anticipated' lists with all the grandiose sequels and blockbusting franchises due out this year, there are also dozens of smaller-scale independent projects, keeping the idiosyncratic and experimental heart of video game culture beating. Here, then, is our pick of the biggest, smallest and strangest titles to look out for in the coming 12 months.

Continuing the tradition of Machine Learning Summer Schools, this year's summer school is going to be held at the University of Cádiz, in Cádiz, Spain, from 11-21th May, 2016. The MLSS is a course offered to graduate students, researchers and professionals. The courses consists of lectures by respected researchers who come from the industry as well as from academia. The lectures will touch several fundamental as well as advanced concepts related to, but not limited to, machine learning, data analysis and inference. There will also be tutorials, which will concentrate on the practical aspect of machine learning.

"Crowd Control: Heaven Makes a Killing," CNET's crowdsourced science fiction novel written and edited by readers, continues. To read past installments, learn more about the project or see our contributor list, visit the digital table of contents. The headlines on Meta's screens were uncharacteristically ominous in the weeks leading up to his final certification at the academy. Discussions in classes were more easily derailed by questions about the future of interversal trade and immigration asked by students who just weeks earlier were more likely to be drooling or snoring through sessions that were largely remedial, a last chance to catch up. "I don't understand why we can't just offer more positions to the subs," Zulema shouted in frustration during one class, surprising her fellow students with her use of a derogatory term for migrants. "Yea, we need help now," echoed Nara.

A "smart" prosthetic leg is one of three finalists for the MacRobert Award, a major UK engineering prize. Made by Basingstoke firm Blatchford, the Linx Limb uses a network of sensors to adapt to changing conditions by adjusting its robotic knee and foot. Also on the shortlist are Jaguar Land Rover, for building its own innovative engines, and Siemens Magnet Technology, for pushing the boundaries of MRI scanning. The MacRobert Award, organised annually since 1969 by the Royal Academy of Engineering, will be presented for 2016 at a dinner on 23 June. Each of the three nominees would "have a positive impact on millions of people and bolster the UK economy", said the chair of the judging panel Dame Sue Ion.