In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, writer Douglas Adams describes a "small, yellow, leech-like creature" called the Babel fish which "feeds on brain-wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language". Botanists have not discovered anything like the Babel fish, but the science fiction of universal translation is rapidly becoming reality thanks to technological advances. Most exciting for Hitchhiker fans is the Pilot earbud, backed by $3.5 million in crowdfunding raised by a startup called Waverly Labs. The company's chief executive Andrew Ochoa says: "We were really inspired with wearable technology and began working on the idea of a smart earpiece that could solve a global challenge. We were a small team back then, but we all came from different backgrounds and spoke different languages, and that's how we came up with the idea."

Robotics undoubtedly has the potential to improve lives in the developing world. However, with limited budgets and expertise on the ground, putting this technology in place is no small task. Step forwards WeRobotics, a new Swiss/American NGO dedicated to meeting this goal through the creation of in-country'flying labs'. Co-founder Adam Klaptocz explains all. Let's start with this: what is WeRobotics?

The first autonomous car race, named Roborace, occurred this weekend in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a prelude to the Formula E championship. Two self-driving racecars took to the track, but sadly one crashed before the race ended. The Devbot electric vehicle misjudged a corner while travelling at over 150km/h, faster than most self-driving car tests carried out by Google, Tesla, and other automakers. "One of the cars was trying to perform a manoeuvre, and it went really full-throttle and took the corner quite sharply and caught the edge of the barrier," Roborace's chief marketing officer Justin Cooke told the BBC. "It's actually fantastic for us because the more we see these moments the more we are able to learn and understand what was the thinking behind the computer and its data."

I went to my neighbor's house for something to eat yesterday. It's pretty simple--English speakers would know precisely what it means. But what does it actually tell you--or, more to the point, what does it not tell you? It doesn't specify facts like the subject's gender or the neighbor's, or what direction the speaker traveled, or the nature of the neighbors' relationship, or whether the food was just a cookie or a complex curry. English doesn't require speakers to give any of that information, but if the sentence were in French, say, the gender of every person involved would be specified.

February 21, 2017 --Scientists have compiled a map detailing wild bee activity across the US, but the picture it paints isn't great. It's no secret that bees are struggling to stay aloft. The precise reasons are up for debate, but many experts agree that a perfect storm of pressures from pesticide use, the rise of monocrop agriculture, declines in natural habitat, and global warming are squeezing many bee populations out of existence. A 2016 UN report found that 2 out of every 5 spineless pollinator species are facing extinction. Unchecked, this trend could have disastrous consequences for global agriculture.

It's the beginning of the end for smartphone apps as we have known and tapped on them, reckons Gartner. The analyst is calling the start of a "post-apps" era, based on changes in consumer interactions that appear driven, in large part, by the rise of dominant messaging platforms designed to consume more and more of mobile users' time and attention. It reckons messaging apps will become more popular than social media apps within the next two years. In a new report, based on a survey of mobile users in the US, China and the UK, Gartner's reading of the app usage tea-leaves shows signs of messaging platforms cannibalizing other apps, with for example, usage of dedicated video apps declining four percentage points between the 2015 and 2016 editions of the survey. Usage of standalone maps apps also shrunk by three percentage points, year-over-year, according to Gartner's data.

Brevan Jorgenson's grandma kept her cool when he took her for a nighttime spin in the Honda Civic he's modified to drive itself on the highway. A homemade device in place of the rear-view mirror can control the brakes, accelerator, and steering, and it uses a camera to identify road markings and other cars. "She wasn't really flabbergasted--I think because she's seen so much from technology by now," says Jorgenson, a senior at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Others are more wary of the system, which he built using plans and software downloaded from the Internet, plus about $700 in parts. Jorgenson says the fact that he closely supervises his homebrew autopilot hasn't convinced his girlfriend to trust the gadget's driving.

Google has launched its Fact Check tag in three more countries, as it steps up its efforts to combat fake news. The label will now appear in the expand story box in Google News search results and the Google News and Weather app in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The feature first launched in the US last October, ahead of the Presidential election, and has since been rolled out in France and Germany. 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. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

The Pacific Ocean might be hiding a whole other continent, Bill Gates wants to tax the robots, and some other robots crash in the midst of a road race. A pretty thrilling Monday morning, we'd say. Funds could help humans find new work when automation takes over. How would you deal with the likelihood that robots and automation will lead to many people losing their jobs? For Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the answer is straightforward: tax the robots.

"This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.