Yes, after pulling herself out of her 1950's rut as a swimsuit model to become everything from a doctor, lawyer, computer scientist, astronaut and even the president of the United States, Barbie has now become a 3D-animated hologram that can serve up the weather on command. As first reported in Wired, The Hello Barbie Hologram debuted at the New York Toy Fair this week. And like the original Hello Barbie doll, her laser-beamed character combines motion-capture animation with peppy, Amazon Echo-like answers to your child's questions. Want to remind your child to brush their teeth? Hello Barbie Hologram does that, too.

The XPrize Foundation has named 21 semifinalists for its $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize contest to advance technologies for deep water exploration, including San Diego's Orca Robotics. The semifinalists were announced at the Catch the Next Wave conference in San Diego on Thursday, with teams from 13 countries making the cut. Several teams affiliated with U.S. universities are among the semifinalists, including Duke, Rutgers, Texas A&M, Lehigh University, Virginia Tech and Old Dominion. "These semifinalist teams are on the cutting-edge, pushing the boundaries in developing deep-sea underwater technologies that will work in the lightless, cold depths to fully map one of our world's final frontiers like never before," said Jyotika Virmani, who is overseeing the contest as head of XPrize's Energy and Environment Group. Teams have tapped technologies ranging from underwater gliders to robotic swarms and autonomous vehicles.

Bill Gates thinks robots should get taxed just like humans, he said in a recent interview with Quartz. "Right now if a human worker does you know, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed," the billionaire said. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think we would tax the robot at a similar level." Gates said robots can be good thing by doing certain types of labor done by humans so that people can focus in other fields where there is a shortage of workers. "If you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you're net ahead," Gates explained, "But you can't just give up that income tax, because that's part of how you've been funding that level of human workers."

As the Trump administration struggles to determine the future of a controversial executive order banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, the futures of international students from those countries hang in the balance. Even though the ban was struck down by a federal court and travel has resumed, the students still face uncertainty, especially since President Trump says he may issue a new version of the executive order. Not only are many indefinitely separated from their families, but their professional opportunities are also at risk. For students who have already achieved success in research or entrepreneurship during their time in the United States, the executive order is particularly troubling. One of the seven countries named in the executive order, Iran has long contributed to American intellectual advancement.

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 two 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. One advantage of Cassie that has maybe not been properly appreciated? I like the explosives idea.

When it comes to defending against pesky drones, the French military has gone to the birds. These drone-hunting birds of prey are being trained at a French Air Force base in Southwestern France. They're literally born on top of drones, and kept there during early stages of feeding. When they're ready to fly, they're brought to a field to intercept drones. In turn, they're rewarded with meat.

Last week, a senior White House official shared a candid theory with me about why President Donald Trump and his team have been adrift since November: they've yet to adjust to the post-election reality, and they haven't yet learned how to operate without a single, common enemy--Hillary Clinton--to focus on. It was a frank admission that a team built for winning a campaign has so far failed at governing. Incoming Presidents usually trade in some of their political tacticians for experienced Washington hands when they take office, but Trump installed his entire senior campaign leadership into top positions in the White House, a place where few of them have ever worked before. In fact, one of the only senior Trump staffers with previous White House experience is Omarosa Manigault, the reality-star villain from "The Apprentice," who briefly worked in the Clinton White House when she was twenty-three years old. The early results of this experiment in governance by the least experienced have not been promising.

Mathematical models have been used to augment or replace human decision-making since the invention of the calculator, bolstered by the notion that a machine won't make mistakes. Yet many people are averse to using algorithms, preferring instead to rely on their instincts when it comes to a variety of decisions. New research from Cade Massey and Joseph Simmons, professors in Wharton's department of operations, information and decisions, and Berkeley J. Dietvorst from the University of Chicago finds that control is at the core of the matter. If you give decision-makers a measure of control over the model, they are more like to use it. Massey and Simmons spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about the implications of their research.

Last winter, as meteorologists warned of a monster El Niño, researchers at the Nature Conservancy in California prepared to mobilize. El Niño promised to bring in king tides that would raise the sea level by as much as one foot above normal during high tide, causing flooding along the coastline that researchers could study as a preview of climate change-induced sea level rise. But when a king tide arrives, it floods lots of pockets along the coastline at once. So they decided to try a new, distributed surveillance strategy: commercial drones, co-opted from a gung-ho statewide network of citizen scientists. The plan had a lot of advantages.

Mattel introduced its first Barbie doll way back in 1959, and she's found herself at the center of cultural controversy ever since. To her credit, she keeps adapting to the times. Today she is actually several Barbies, a gang of dolls more diverse and less infuriating in terms of body proportions. And she's enjoyed an enviable career path, with stints as an astronaut, a sk8er, the president and vice president of the United States, and a rapper, among other things. Now, at age 58, Barbie is a hologram.