Meet the octobot, a unique new creation out of Harvard that the university says could be the first step in a new kind of bot. This totally soft robot has eight movable legs, just like its flesh-and-blood marine cousin, which was the inspiration for the device. Created partially through 3-D printing, the octobot is autonomous, according to Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Its power source is hydrogen peroxide, which together with a catalyst of platinum, creates gas that travels into the bot's appendages to move them. "One long-standing vision for the field of soft robotics has been to create robots that are entirely soft, but the struggle has always been in replacing rigid components like batteries and electronic controls with analogous soft systems and then putting it all together," Robert Wood, a professor of engineering and one of the lead researchers behind the octobot, said in a statement.

It seems as if everyone is finally talking about driverless vehicles, or AVs (autonomous vehicles) as they are commonly called. Even Tyler Brule, who normally likes to recount some unsatisfactory business travel experience, devoted a recent FT column to the subject. We know it's coming; so what can we expect from the driverless revolution? The upside to commuters is massive. Global auto accident deaths, around 1.25 million annually, will be radically reduced. Our cities will not only be safer, they'll be cleaner too.

While the current generation of industrial robots is primarily made of metal, the research community has been getting interested in the potential for soft-bodied robots. These have a number of advantages, such as being easy to customize via 3D printing and providing a flexibility that lets them squeeze through tight spaces. Many of the research demonstrations created so far, however, have required some compromises. For some iterations, this has meant the control hardware and power sources have been kept separate, connected to the robot via a tether. For other attempts, this has meant the final product is a mixture of hard and soft pieces.

In a dish of water in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a new kind of robot stirs, its tentacles twitching. Squashy and soft, this robot is different from its technological ancestors – Octobot runs without a power cable or rigid electronics, moving autonomously – if still clumsily – through the world. Soft robots have long been heralded as a new class of machine. But their tethers, and the electronics needed to control their movements, have held them back. Developed by Michael Wehner and colleagues at the Wyss Institute for Bioinspired Engineering, Harvard University, it's a big step towards fulfilling the potential of soft robots.

A pneumatic network, in red, is embedded within the octobot's entirely soft body and elastic arms, in blue. A pneumatic network, in red, is embedded within the octobot's entirely soft body and elastic arms, in blue. The squishy eight-legged robot described in the journal Nature is made entirely out of soft, flexible materials, runs on hydrogen peroxide, and looks like a 2-centimeter-tall baby octopus. It is a step forward for robotics, which has long relied on machines with hard skeletons (think The Terminator), or at least with rigid moving parts (like this other octopus-like guy designed by the Italian robot scientist Cecilia Laschi). In their paper, the authors say the systems behind their invention, which you can watch move in the video below, "may serve as a foundation for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous robots."

The ability to reason beyond established knowledge allows Organic Chemists to solve synthetic problems and to invent novel transformations. Here, we propose a model which mimics chemical reasoning and formalises reaction prediction as finding missing links in a knowledge graph. We have constructed a knowledge graph containing 14.4 million molecules and 8.2 million binary reactions, which represents the bulk of all chemical reactions ever published in the scientific literature. Our model outperforms a rule-based expert system in the reaction prediction task for 180,000 randomly selected binary reactions. We show that our data-driven model generalises even beyond known reaction types, and is thus capable of effectively (re-) discovering novel transformations (even including transition-metal catalysed reactions). Our model enables computers to infer hypotheses about reactivity and reactions by only considering the intrinsic local structure of the graph, and because each single reaction prediction is typically achieved in a sub-second time frame, our model can be used as a high-throughput generator of reaction hypotheses for reaction discovery.

By 2020, we will all have an Invisible Friend. Whether we call it Siri, Alexa, OK Google, or a chatbot, we are entering a world where an intelligence assistant recognizes our "intent." This could spawn a massive consumer behavior shift, as AI-influenced bots would mean far fewer Google searches by humans. This invisible friend would learn from its mistakes, maintain context, and continue to expand into new areas of expertise through judicious use of Knowledge Management (see below landscape). Although 2020 is our destination, now is a time of heightened activity among the companies that provide the elements of Intelligent Assistance.

During the 20th century, advances in fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanized farming technology helped make it possible to feed a dramatically growing world population. Now, advocates say, the next big advance in agricultural technology may come from the digital world, as modern computer vision, precision sensors, and machine-learning technology help farmers use last century's advances more efficiently and precisely to grow healthier and tastier food. "We're at the cusp of this next wave of innovation in agriculture, which we call digital agriculture," says Mike Stern, the president of The Climate Corporation. "It has to do with, over the past five to seven years, the farm really digitizing, not unlike how our society has changed in terms of the tools and types of things we can do." The Climate Corp., which was purchased by agriculture giant Monsanto for roughly 1 billion in 2013, is one of several companies working to build a digital analytics hub for farmers, merging images from satellites, drones, and cameras, as well as readings for everything from soil thermometers to tractors' on-board computers.

Soft robots aren't easy to make, since they require a completely different set of components from their rigid counterparts. It's even tougher to scale down the parts they typically use for locomotion. A team of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, however, successfully created a 15-millimeter soft micromachine that only needs light to be able to move. The microrobot is made of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (LCEs), smart materials that change shape when exposed to visible light. Under a light source, the machine's body contracts like a caterpillar and forms waves to propel it forward.

The use of data within an organisation to improve elements of the business such as the supply chain, improve decision making, and to make cost savings, is becoming more widely accepted as being vital. It is vital in respect to the business remaining competitive, vital to remaining relevant, and vital to the future of the business. One of the industries that has been looking significantly at the use of its data is the manufacturing industry, and stepping back one level to the steel industry. Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK), is the third largest steel company in Russia with a revenue of 9.3bn. Established in 1870, the company has taken to using machine learning technology from Yandex Data Factory to creative a competitive advantage that will see it being competitive for years to come.