Google is set to bring updates to many of its product lines at this year's I/O developer conference Google's annual developer conference I/O (short for "input/output" in computer science lingo) is set to take place this year in Mountain View, California from Wednesday, May 18, through Friday, May 20. And with the arrival of the conference comes the possibility of new products from the search company. While Google is known for releasing products and updates throughout the year, some of its biggest releases are often saved for the I/O conference. Last year's Google I/O 2015 brought fans Android M, Google Cardboard on the iPhone, and Now On Tap -- a smartphone feature that surfaces the right information at the right time. We can't know for sure what the company (which is now technically a subsidiary of the larger conglomerate known as Alphabet) will announce, but some hints have dropped.

Cable network USA's hacker drama Mr. Robot came out of nowhere last summer and turned out to be one of the most surprising, thought-provoking, and downright entertaining TV debuts of the past decade. And ever since we learned the truth about troubled hacktivist Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), the wait for season two --and the questions about what happened to Tyrell Wellick, Mr. Robot, and Evil Corp-- have been maddening. But USA finally dropped the first full trailer for Mr. Robot season two today... and it looks just as crazy as the first season. Backed by an anxiety-inducing track from Zack Hemsey, we get only snippets about lead character Elliot's mental capacity, the hacker group "fsociety," and the state of global order and the economy in the wake of the events of season one. Sam Esmail, the show's creator, has left viewers with some tantalizing imagery and dialog.

Iron Man may only exist in comics and movies, but some of his superpowers may soon be close at hand thanks to Hyundai. In a blog post, the South Korea-based car company reportedly revealed its prototype of a "wearable robot" suit that can lift things that are "hundreds of kilograms" in weight, multiple news outlets reported Friday:

Tomorrow, the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) opens in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the next three days, more than 1,200 robotics research papers will be presented through a bunch of concurrent interactive conference sessions, and we'll be running around doing our best to check out every single one of them. To give you a sense of the kind of thing that we're expecting to see, here are a quartet of highlights videos that ICRA put together from this year's paper submissions, featuring the yellow ducky mascot: See something you'd like details on? Let us know, and we'll find out more starting tomorrow. And check back the rest of the week (and probably on into next few weeks) for an in-depth look at the most interesting robotics research that we can find.

We'll find out this week what the tech giant is planning and how virtual and augmented reality factor into its goal to remain the world's most valuable company, as well as updates on the world's most popular operating system, Android, and possibly details on a return to China. On Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take the stage at the Shoreline Amphitheatre -- a 15-minute walk from his office at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters -- and deliver an update on the company's current and coming projects. Nominally a conference for developers, Google I/O is really a way of keeping everyone updated on what it is working on, to help give products that are underperforming a promotional push and to remain in the public eye about other projects that may have slipped from the public memory due to being in development so long. Last year, it was all about a big update to Android; the previous year Google pushed Android TV and Android Wear; in 2013 it was the launch of Google Music; and 2012 saw a team of skydivers drop onto the Moscone Center stage in San Francisco during the keynote, shooting their exploits on Google Glass and live streaming it to an awestruck audience. This year, while we will hear about Android, Chrome OS, driverless cars and Project Ara, the big focus will be on the tech world's hot topic: virtual reality.

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.

Nintendo may be making a return to the big screen, its president revealed in an interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun Monday. The company is exploring the potential of films based on popular video game franchises such as "Super Mario Bros." and "The Legend of Zelda." Another possibility is drawing on the material to create other digital content, a firm representative told Reuters. Nintendo is in talks with several production companies, with the goal of releasing its first new movie within the next three years. The production and its successors could introduce the firm's characters to a broader audience, which could bolster its video game business.

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.

Gem Spa, the narrow twenty-four-hour newsstand on St. Mark's Place, has served as a nerve center for generations of beats, hippies (undeterred by a sign reading, "No Combing of Hair--By Order of Health Dept"), rockers, and punks. The other day, Lily Tomlin, who is seventy-six, stopped by in the hope of getting an egg cream. Encountering a long line of customers waiting to buy magazines and lottery tickets, her personal assistant, Paul (burly, doting), shuffled her out. "I used to live up the street--this is back in the sixties--on Fifth between Second and Third," Tomlin said. She wore a navy overcoat, a silk scarf, and sunglasses.

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.