Human communication goes beyond words. It is complex, rich in nuances and frequently includes non-verbal signs. Yet despite our technological limitations it is not impossible for some aspects of communication to be emulated by a machine with surprising effect. This has been part of the challenge in developing Harlie (Human and Robot Language Interaction Experiment), a smartphone chatbot app developed by researchers at the CSIRO and University of Queensland. It's primarily aimed at people who may have trouble conversing including those with neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease and dementia, or even autism. The following dialog excerpt took place between a human who has autism, let's call him Chris (pseudonym), and Harlie.

Google's gumdrop-shaped autonomous car looks like something you'd see in a Pixar movie, a cute and cuddly machine that makes the future look fun--until it ambushes you in a crosswalk, traps you like a fly in a web, and whisks you away. That horrific scenario comes to mind reading Google's recently approved patent for what amounts to slathering its cars in glue. To be fair, this has less to do with collecting humans than protecting them. Autonomous vehicles absolutely will reduce collisions and fatalities, but even the most ardent advocates concede one of them eventually will hit a pedestrian. Google engineers believe coating the front of a car with adhesive could prevent someone from bouncing onto the windshield, sliding under the wheels, or flying into the air and landing in the road.

Farmers, put your feet up. Autonomous robots are already being used to inspect crops, count yields and dig up weeds – now they are shepherds too. Sheep and cattle farms in the Australian outback are vast as well as remote. For example, the country's most isolated cattle station, Suplejack Downs in the Northern Territory, extends across 4000 square kilometres and takes 13 hours to reach by car from the nearest major town, Alice Springs. The livestock on these far-flung farms are monitored infrequently – sometimes only once or twice a year – meaning they often fall ill or get into trouble without anyone knowing.

If a giant robotic arm swooped in to destroy your home, you would probably be pretty angry. So it is hardly surprising that an octopus living off the Canadian coast in the Pacific Ocean jumped to the defence of the coil of cable it had been living under when a robot came to take it away. A video captured while the underwater robot tried to carry out maintenance work, shows the cephalopod playing tug of war with the robotic arm. The dispute was filmed by Nautilus Live while engineers were using a submarine's robotic arm to repair a cable which was part of the Ocean Networks Canada underwater observatory. Sadly, the fight was only going to end one way, and despite the octopuses valiant efforts to protect its home by hanging onto cord holding the cable coil together, it ultimately lost.

Unless you've been living under a rock (which will likely be affected by climate change soon, by the way), you know that between forest fires, illegal deforestation, poaching, and other crimes, an enormity of environmental issues puts our ecosystems in danger. According to the National Science Foundation, a century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed in the wild. Now, there are as few as 3,000 remaining. While human patrols can directly protect endangered animals, many protection agencies lack the resources necessary to cover the appropriate amount of ground, especially in large national parks where many of these illicit activities might occur. In 2011, Eve McDonald-Madden and her colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia lamented that a lack of money limits the impact that management strategies can have on preventing the extinction of a species.

The US Air Force is working on a'space fence' to protect spacecraft from orbiting junk. It plans to activate it in just under two years to replace a similar system that was shut down in 2013. While the military has dubbed the system a'fence', it is in fact a radar system that sends signal into space to track objects the size of a tennis ball. The US Air Force is working on a'space fence' to protect spacecraft from orbiting junk. It plans to activate it in just under two years to replace a similar system that was shut down in 2013.

The sea wasp, a kind of jellyfish, can kill people in as little as three minutes by wrapping them in ten-foot-long tentacles and inflicting stings all over the body, injecting them with a potent and extremely painful venom. Saab has developed technology named after this terrifying creature-- in the form of a robot that will be able to discover and tackle bombs hidden underwater off U.S. shores and near American vessels. To test its Sea Wasp technology, Saab has partnered with the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office. The U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Divers Group 2, the FBI Counter-IED Section, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division's Counter-Terrorist Operations Maritime Response Unit will all be testing the Sea Wasp over the next 10 to 12 months. The threat of improvised explosive devices underwater continues to grow.

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Google unveiled a brand new self-driving car prototype on Tuesday; the first company to build a car with no a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedal. The car's arrival marks the next stage in Google's self-driving car project, which was born from the Darpa Grand Challenges for robotic vehicles in the early 2000s. Google kickstarted its own self-driving car project in 2008, and it has been rumbling on ever since, first with modified Toyota Prius and then with customised Lexus SUVs, which took the car's existing sensors, such as the cruise-control cameras, and added a spinning laser scanner on the top. It is the first truly driverless electric car prototype built by Google to test the next stage of its five-year-old self-driving car project. It looks like a cross between a Smart car and a Nissan Micra, with two seats and room enough for a small amount of luggage.

Google is catching up to competitors Facebook, Apple and Amazon in messaging, video calling and home speaker-embedded digital assistants. But it's taking the lead in virtual reality and may have changed mobile phones forever with a new twist on mobile apps that allows them to play without being installed. That's the conclusion of Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research, who was at the Google I/O annual developers conference Wednesday in Mountain View, California. Dawson said Google's new Allo app focuses on the search giant's strengths in search and natural language recognition, but may have come too late behind bigger rivals to gain much use. In a research note he praised Google's new Daydream virtual reality platform, but noted it'll take time to become popular because the high bar for specifications means no devices can support it yet.