Step aside, Mr Aldrin, because there's a new buzz in town - and it's coming from robot bees that NASA is sending to work on the International Space Station. Dubbed'Astrobees', the cube-shaped robots will fly about the orbiting laboratory, running experiments and helping out the crew by using their attachable manipulator arms. The design of the little bots was inspired by the flying combat remote from Star Wars, which teaches the film's hero Luke Skywalker to fight with a lightsaber. Dubbed'Astrobees', the cube-shaped robots will fly about the orbiting laboratory, running experiments and helping out the crew by using their attachable manipulator arms The design of the little bots was inspired by the flying combat remote from Star Wars, which teaches the film's hero Luke Skywalker to fight with a lightsaber (pictured) The robots were built and developed at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, where engineers created a mock-up of the interior of the International Space Station where they tested the Astrobees' capabilities. 'There are some things only humans can do in space.

Late Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Amazon could be working on a pair of wireless earbuds, similar to Apple's AirPods. Just as the latest AirPods offer hands-free access to Siri, the rumored Amazon pair will also likely work with Alexa. They'll also apparently have gesture controls and come in a charging case, again, much like the AirPods. But as much as it seems Amazon is going after Apple with this new venture, the company might really be going after another rival too: Google. When it comes to the virtual assistant wars, there are really two main players: Alexa and Google Assistant.

Two of the Switch's biggest games are about to get virtual reality updates. Both Mario and Zelda are getting new features that will allow people to disappear into a cardboard headset and find themselves in New Donk City or Hyrule. The new updates follow the new Nintendo Labo kit, which allows players to buy and then create their own cardboard virtual reality headset. The Switch itself will then slot in the front, allowing the cardboard creation to work as a normal VR headset. We'll tell you what's true.

Google's attempt to wrest more cloud computing dollars from market leaders Amazon and Microsoft got a new boss late last year. Next week, Thomas Kurian is expected to lay out his vision for the business at the company's cloud computing conference, building on his predecessor's strategy of emphasizing Google's strength in artificial intelligence. That strategy is complicated by controversies over how Google and its clients use the powerful technology. After employee protests over a Pentagon contract in which Google trained algorithms to interpret drone imagery, the cloud unit now subjects its--and its customers'--AI projects to ethical reviews. They have caused Google to turn away some business.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Dorabot has brilliant realized that machine learning requires machine teaching. Isn't it time to get a smart robot to teach your dumb robots to be less stupid?

Algorithms are biased--and Facebook's is no exception. Just last week, the tech giant was sued by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development over the way it let advertisers purposely target their ads by race, gender, and religion--all protected classes under US law. The company announced that it would stop allowing this. But new evidence shows that Facebook's algorithm, which automatically decides who is shown an ad, carries out the same discrimination anyway, serving up ads to over two billion users on the basis of their demographic information. A team led by Muhammad Ali and Piotr Sapiezynski at Northeastern University ran a series of otherwise identical ads with slight variations in available budget, headline, text, or image.

None were more widely reported on than the first known fatal accident between a self-driving car and a pedestrian in Arizona earlier in the year.

One of Australia's leading venture capital advisers had asked me that question back when the first dotcom bubble was about to burst, in the year 2000 or 2001. Here's how it's related to artificial intelligence, how it works and why it matters. I was involved with a startup, and we were meeting to discuss what the business plan needed to look like. The basic requirement, we were told, was a growth chart that went up and to the right at an acceptable rate. Investors needed to see that they'd get the return they'd expect.

Are you sick and tired of hearing about'killer robots' or vague conjecture of what AI could mean for us all? The truth is, there's a lot of conflicting information floating around on what AI can or can't do when it comes to marketing, and we wanted to set the record straight. In the latest installment of Meltwater's London Biz Breakfast series, the global media intelligence firm aims to tackle the subject of how AI in marketing really works – in partnership with leading technology authority, Katie King. Commenting on the rationale behind these morning sessions, Meltwater's area director for the UK and Ireland, Matt Barclay, remarked: "We want the industry to thrive as a whole and the Biz Breakfast sessions are a good place to regroup, look at the reality and keep fostering a best-practice approach to how we view innovation in marketing. They've been designed to bring tech, PR and marketing professionals together for knowledge-sharing, because these disciplines should work in sync in an ideal world." And for this particular session, Meltwater has enlisted the perfect mentor to shed some extra light on the subject.

Rapid technological advances have created opportunities for smaller companies to serve customers around the world and effectively compete with larger companies for new customers. These smaller companies are rapidly going global, deploying a variety of technology-enabled solutions such as automated call centers, customer service bots, and digital marketing intelligence. But these advances, designed to facilitate customer interaction and service in new ways, can present a danger. Companies that embrace the various forms of new customer-focused technology risk losing a personal connection with their customers and a nuanced understanding of their needs. When it comes to understanding how your company can better serve customers, email surveys are no substitute for real human contact.