If you met this lab-created critter over your beach vacation, you'd swear you saw a baby ray. In fact, the tiny, flexible swimmer is the product of a team of diverse scientists. They have built the most successful artificial animal yet. This disruptive technology opens the door much wider for lifelike robots and artificial intelligence. Like most disruption, it started with a simple idea.

Because the materials from a 3D printer aren't the most functional, their output has largely been limited to prototyping in the past. That should change in the near future with devices like MIT's own MultiFab, which can print up to 10 different materials at a time, but it still doesn't solve the problem of how to design such complex objects. That's where the new program called Foundry, created by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory comes in. According to MIT CSAIL, Foundry can import objects designed with traditional CAD programs like SolidWorks and then assign specific materials or properties to different parts of the object. While creating a multi-material object in the past might have required days of work and multiple 3D printers to create (assuming it was possible with existing technology at all), CSAIL says these sorts of designs can now be created in mere minutes.

Breakfast is no longer just the most important meal of the day - it is also the most entertaining. What began as a Lego creation and became a Kickstarter hit is now a working robot that uses 3D printing technology to transform boring round pancakes into various designs and characters. Users can upload images into the machine with an SD card, then using a robotic nozzle, the PancakeBot draws their creation with batter on an electrically powered griddle. Breakfast is no longer just the most important meal of the day - it is also the most creative. PancakeBot is equip with user-friendly software that allows you to design your own pancake by tracing any image right on your computer.

Ubuntu is partnering with IBM Power Systems and OpenPOWER to bring the POWER8 architecture into the mainstream of dev ops practices and cloud operations. In this short video featured at IBM Interconnect, Mark Shuttleworth talks about the number one workload to create competitive advantage, and how the OpenPOWER foundation has enabled IBM to bring innovation back into the data centre.

The relentless increase in computing power and the accumulation of big data over the years has sparked intense interest in machine learning and its associated techniques. The new SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning software will feed this need for smarter analytics. Advanced analytics offer insight to businesses, but machine learning and deep learning algorithms take it deeper, revealing insights that were previously out of reach. For example, machine learning use can include facial recognition in security systems, speech recognition in customer service applications, accurate product recommendations in e-commerce, self-driving cars and medical diagnostics. "SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning shatters barriers related to data volume and variety, limited analytical depth and computational bottlenecks. That means greater productivity – and faster, deeper insight," said Hugo D'Ulisse, Head of Analytical Platform, SAS UK & Ireland.

A wrong landing could be all it takes to break a robot. To protect our robot friends from their inevitable falls, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are creating customizable shock-absorbent padding. The team's "Programmable Viscoelastic Material" (PVM) technique allows users to digitally program every part of a 3D-printed object to exact levels of stiffness and elasticity. "We can make really effective dampers and those dampers can be tailored exactly to the application by controlling the amount of liquid and solid," one of the researchers, Robert MacCurdy, told Quartz. Although viscoelastics like rubber and plastic are cheap, compact, and readily available, they can prove hard to customize to specific levels of damping, which can reduce the rebound after impact.

Imagine a robot or a drone that is made with a'skin' of sorts capable of precise amounts of shock absorption, something tailored to meet the precise needs of the device. That's exactly what MIT researchers have made possible via a new shock-absorbing 3D material for robots that offers all sorts of interesting properties, not the least of which is less bouncy, more precise and controlled landings after a blow. Think of this material as being the very thing BattleBots creators dream of. The material is soft and made with a 3D printer, and it aims to make robots and other devices fitted with it more durable. This could be robots, of course, but also other things that have to take an impact and absorb high levels of shock: helmets, for example, or smartphones.

Over the last few decades, globalization has created great wealth and brought millions out of poverty. Today, a combination of technology, politics, and social pressures seems to be reversing globalization. While the new technology will continue to create wealth, it will favor developed countries. The increasing regionalization of economies and differences in rates of growth will create instability and challenge international security arrangements. The Economist defines globalization as the "global integration of the movement of goods, capital and jobs." The combination of labor cost advantages, efficient freight systems, and trade agreements fueled globalization by providing regional cost advantages for manufacturing. Over the last six decades, it transformed agricultural societies into industrial powerhouses.

John Deere announced that it is using advanced software innovations, including artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things and open APIs.

At the same time, it's upping its old-school manufacturing capabilities with technology that will allow it to quickly punch out industrial components, for airlines or anything else, to satisfy any client's whim.