On Sunday, the Japanese prime minister turned up at the Olympics closing ceremonies to promote the 2020 Tokyo games dressed up as Mario, the eponymous hero of the popular video game series created in 1985. Who is Mario and how did he come by his global appeal? Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared as the Nintendo game character Super Mario at the Olympics closing ceremonies to promote the 2020 Tokyo games. Mario Brothers is the best-selling video franchise of all time, with more than 490 million units sold since 1995, according to research firm NPD. There are more than 100 games, for various gaming systems, ranging from Donkey Kong to Super Mario Kart, in which Mario is the primary character, and many more in which he makes appearances.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, dressed as Super Mario, holds a red ball during the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Japanese PM Shinzo Abe's show-stopping appearance at today's closing ceremony in Rio, dressed as iconic game character Super Mario, already sets the tone for what lies in store. Japan is known internationally for its technological innovations, so Tokyo 2020 organizers are aiming to launch ambitious tech projects that will boost the economy and wow crowds. Tourists staying next to the Olympic Village in Tokyo's Odaiba neighborhood can choose, for example, to hang out with robot helpers of all sizes and sorts that offer up tips on the best transport, food and entertainment options in Tokyo. And that won't be the only place they'll encounter their robotic counterparts.

The global healthcare Natural Language Processing (NLP) market is expected to grow from 1.10 billion in 2015 to 2.67 billion by 2020, according to a new report. "Natural Language Processing Market for Health Care and Life Sciences Industry by Type (Rule-Based, Statistical, and Hybrid NLP Solutions) – Worldwide Forecast and Analysis to 2015 – 2020" is published by MarketsandMarkets, The explosive growth in healthcare and life sciences industries, with their vast troves of unstructured clinical data in EHRs, are the main market drivers. As the report describes it, NLP technologies assist machines in understanding the language used by humans to communicate both reading and writing. This form of communication assists the computer in performing various other additional tasks. NLP techniques extract important information from the vast amount of clinical data and analyze it for enhanced processing and analytics.

Enrique Zarate, 19, had spent just a year in college when he landed an apprenticeship at a new BMW facility in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. If he performs well, in a year he'll win a well-paid position, with benefits, working with robots at the company's newest plant. Within a decade or so, most of the BMW 3 series cars that Americans buy will probably come from Mexico, built by people like Zarate. "When you start with such little experience, and get such a big salary, it's unbelievable," says Zarate, whose father is a taxi driver and whose mother is a housewife. Exports from Mexican factories have jumped 13% since 2012.

Do you have the talent to join multi-award winning startup WeFarm? We are a unique social enterprise providing a vital service for the world's 500 million smallholder farmers who live and work without internet access. This pioneering, peer-to-peer platform enables farmers to access crowdsourced information by SMS, creating social impact on a groundbreaking scale and generating a game-changing data feed through the use of cutting edge AI techniques. In just one year WeFarm has scaled to more than 72,000 farmers across Kenya, Uganda and Peru, has facilitated over 11.5 million interactions and featured in the FT, Forbes, Wired.co.uk, as well as winning awards from Google's Impact Challenge, The Venture and the European Commission's Ideas From Europe. With an ambitious goal to reach 1 million farmers in the next 12 months, we are looking for a talented Developer to join the team and support this growth.

Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft--the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web--to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. I don't want to be an alarmist, but there's a chance we're running out of swear words. Over the years, our language has become more coarse, and dropping F bombs and other profanities has been fully integrated into our daily exchanges. As use of the words becomes more acceptable, they lose their power.

In 2011, Bentley's new CEO decided to get into the luxury SUV market. Wolfgang Durheimer, the incoming boss, had migrated across parent company Volkswagen Group from the Porsche division. He saw what the popular Cayenne crossover had done for Porsche's bottom line. Durheimer gave the Bentley engineers a simple mandate: Make the most powerful, most luxurious and most exclusive SUV on the planet. With the 2017 Bentley Bentayga, the company's first crossover, he appears to have succeeded.

It may sound like something from the Minority Report, but this app can predict where crimes will take place. The software, called CrimeRadar, has just launched its prototype in the Olympic host city of Rio de Janeiro. The app uses advanced machine learning to predict crime rates in the city's neighbourhoods at different times of the day and night. The Olympic Games have, arguably, exposed crime levels in Rio de Janeiro to a wider audience. A string of high profile robberies, allegedly including members of the US swim team; Australian athletes; and even the Brazilian government's head of security for events falling prey to criminals, have been reported.

Your meat may soon be prepared by a robot butcher. Sadly, it won't be an android in a striped apron behind the meat counter at your local store, asking you in a metallic voice how you'd like your steak cut today, sir/ma'am? These robots will replace workers at meat-packing factories, and not a moment too soon. The meat-packing company JBS is part of the world's largest beef processor, and in its Greeley, Colorado plant, it is experimenting with robots on the production line. In order to automate the processing of the meat, JBS has invested in a New Zealand robot company called Scott Technology.

Drones are already capable of capturing stunning aerial images and videos that wouldn't be possible with grounded cameras. But combining the abilities of these airborne vehicles with 360-degree cameras produces new perspectives that are even more immersive and breathtaking. SkyPixel recently held a competition to calling for artists to submit their most impressive 360-degree aerial images. It honored six standout candidates, which includes three main winners and three recipients of its "Brilliant" prize. Photographer Stanislav Sedov's panorama of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is shown above, was named the third place winner.