Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Last week, I interviewed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on stage at our third annual Code Conference. It wasn't my first such public conversation with Bezos -- we had done an earlier interview in 2008 at the D conference, the predecessor to Code. Bezos joked that he appeared at our conferences "every eight years like clockwork." Back in May of 2008, the Kindle was still quite new, and we focused on that.

Early trial data shows a drug developed using artificial intelligence can slow the growth of cancer in clinical trials. The data, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, showed some tumours shrank by around a quarter. The compound will now be taken into more advanced trials. Scientists said we were now in an explosive stage of merging advances in computing with medicine. Spotting every difference between a cancerous and a healthy cell is beyond even the brightest human minds.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

The Financial Times is reporting that Adidas is going to bring back production to its native Germany for the first time in 30 years. It's spent the last six months testing a robotic factory with automated production lines creating soles and uppers separately before stitching them together. Spurred on by the results, the company is working on a large facility near Ansbach which will begin making sneakers for sale at some point next year. Another facility will be built in the US, although both are expected to produce just a tiny fraction of the 301 million pairs the firm made last year. The paper explains that a robot production line takes about five hours to create each pair of sneakers from scratch. By comparison, it apparently takes "several weeks" to do the same job in an Asian factory with human workers.

This isn't a far-fetched idea, and not just because robots have a long track-record of automating human labor. There are already algorithms that can write stories. Bots can easily be programmed to write other basic stories--things like box scores and real estate listings, even obituaries. In January, Wired had a news-writing bot produce a remembrance of Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer. The result was a little dry compared with the obituary for Minksy written by a human at The New York Times--but the machine version was decent.

My colleague Harold Cohen, who has died aged 87, was a computer art pioneer and developer of the popular Aaron program. He was born in London, the son of Victor and Leah Cohen, who ran a general store and expected Harold to enter the family business. His passion, however, saw him enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he obtained a diploma in 1951. He then spent a year on a fellowship in Rome and came back to Britain to teach at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and at the University of Nottingham. Harold became well known in London as an abstract painter, representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, Documenta – the German modern art show – and other international exhibitions in the 1960s.

This isn't a far-fetched idea, and not just because robots have a long track-record of automating human labor. There are already algorithms that can write stories. Bots can easily be programmed to write other basic stories--things like box scores and real estate listings, even obituaries. In January, Wired had a news-writing bot produce a remembrance of Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer. The result was a little dry compared with the obituary for Minksy written by a human at The New York Times--but the machine version was decent.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

You submitted your questions about artificial intelligence and robotics, and we put them – and some of our own – to The Conversation's experts. It is 100% plausible that we'll have human-like artificial intelligence. I say this even though the human brain is the most complex system in the universe that we know of. But there are also no physical laws we know of that would prevent us reproducing or exceeding its capabilities. Popular AI from Issac Asimov to Steven Spielberg is plausible. What the question doesn't address is: when will it be plausible? Most AI researchers (including me) see little or no evidence of it coming anytime soon. Progress on the major AI challenges is slow, if real.

Soon, you may be able to give commands to machines just by "thinking" them. A team of researchers and engineers at Melbourne University are developing a stentrode, a tiny implant to be placed into a blood vessel next to the brain, which can record electric activity from a specific part of the brain. The information will then be decoded and interpreted into thoughts. Dr. Tom Oxley, research lead, said the study is purely focused on harnessing the possibilities of bionics to improve the medical industry, particularly in the treatment of paralysis and epilepsy. Using the stentrode implant, people who are suffering from paralysis or severe spinal cord injuries can use their thoughts to control the movement systems attached to their bodies, allowing them to interact with their surroundings again.