New concerns have been raised about the political influence of Google after research found at least 80 "revolving door" moves in the past decade – instances where the online giant took on government employees and European governments employed Google staff. The research was carried out by the Google Transparency Project, an initiative run by the Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a US organisation that scrutinises corporations and politicians. The CfA has suggested that the moves are a result of Google seeking to boost its influence in Europe as the company seeks to head off antitrust action and moves to tighten up on online privacy. In the UK, Google has hired people from Downing Street, the Home Office, the Treasury, the Department for Education and the Department for Transport. Overall, the company has hired at least 28 British public officials since 2005.

While much of the media attention around autonomous vehicle technology has been focused on fully self-driving cars, consumers shouldn't expect cars to act like chauffeurs any time soon. The vast majority of mainstream vehicles adopting autonomous driving features will be controlled by advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or "guardian angels" that learn over time, Gil Pratt, CEO Toyota Research Institute, told reporters and analysts last week. Speaking at the New England Motor Press Association Technology Conference at MIT, Pratt said that 30,000 motor vehicle fatalities occur in the U.S. each year. That number may seem high, but as a whole, U.S. drivers are excellent at avoiding crashes. So, instead of taking the wheel from drivers' hands, as a fully autonomous vehicle would do, auto makers are more focused on assisting drivers for years to come.

Most people have heard about self-driving cars, with companies from Google to Honda developing autonomous vehicles. But driverless technology could be going beyond cars, with the testing of a self-flying helicopter. A Sikorsky S-76 commercial helicopter has now successfully taken off and flown autonomously 30 miles, before landing itself safely. The helicopter in the trial was the Sikorsky S-76 model which used Sikorsky's MATRIX system The Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA), used Sikorsky's MATRIX system. This is the same system that is use in the Optionally Piloted Black Hawk (OPBH) Demonstrator.

Hours before the Federal Reserve Bank of New York approved four fraudulent requests to send 81 million from a Bangladesh Bank account to cyber thieves, the Fed branch blocked those same requests because they lacked information required to transfer money, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Facial recognition for whales may sound like a terrible elevator pitch, but to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the data scientists at Deepsense.io, Piotr Niedzwiedz told the story of how marine biologist Christin Khan - whose day job is flying over the ocean taking pictures of endangered whales for NOAA - was taking a break one afternoon and logged into Facebook. Here she was asked to identify her friends in photos and thought: "Why couldn't she do something similar with whales?" So she set up a competition on the data science website Kaggle - called Right Whale Recognition - to help them catalogue and track the small remaining population of the endangered whale. Piotr Niedzwiedz was simply that: "Humans are completely incapable of remembering 500 whale faces. The key to recognising this breed of whale is the unique white callosity pattern surrounding the blow hole."

Failure to advance a digital single market undermines the EU's arguments against Brexit. A new species has arrived: the Health Care Optimist. Last year, the European Commission came out with an ambitious, multipronged strategy to create a digital single market in Europe. National interests and powerful lobbies force Commission to scale back ambitions for digital single market. 'We should be leading Europe, not leaving it,' says ex-British prime minister.

LONDON – The machine that Hitler used to send coded messages to his generals on Friday met the supercomputer that revealed its secrets, watched by veteran operatives whose painstaking work helped bring World War II to an end. Scientists at Bletchley Park in southern England, the WWII code-breaking headquarters, fired up the valves, whirring wheels and spinning tors of the two machines to re-create how German military chiefs sent secret messages and how they were deciphered. Hitler's Lorenz machine boasted 1.6 million billion possible coding combinations thanks to a series of twelve rotors, a million times more complex than the more feted Enigma machine. Through luck and the ingenuity of engineer Tommy Flowers, scientists were able to deduce how the machine operated and then build a machine to work out the settings of Lorenz's rotors. "Colossus" is regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic digital computer, but received little attention as the project was kept secret for decades, depriving those responsible of due accolades.

A sign on a door located on the ninth floor of UCLA's Boelter Hall reads, "Beware of Robot." Inside, stationed at the center of the room, is Tony. He stands more than 5 feet tall with a black torso, dark red rolling base, two large arms, an Internet router on his back and an Xbox One Kinect mounted on his head. Assembled part by part over the past year and costing more than 60,000, Tony has been programmed to open doors, fold clothes and assemble furniture. Surrounding him is a team of researchers who aim to eventually give him human-level cognition.

Switzerland will become the first country in the world to hold a nationwide referendum on the introduction of a basic income on Sunday. The proposal, if passed, would give every adult legally resident in Switzerland an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs ( 1,755; 2,554) a month, whether they work or not. Supporters point to the fact that 21st-Century work is increasingly automated, with more and more traditional jobs, in factories, retail and even in finance and accounting, being done by machines. And they do not need salaries. The campaign has staged some eyecatching demonstrations, including one in which hundreds of "robots" danced through the streets of Zurich, promising to "free" humans from the daily grind of Monday to Friday work, just to pay the bills. "The robots are saying'we don't want to grab your work and make you suffer'," said campaigner Che Wagner.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your edgy 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. IHMC has managed to get their ATLAS balancing on the edge of cinder blocks, balancing itself with outstretched arms as it does so. The robot is able to detect and explore partial footholds (in this case line contacts).