Researchers have developed robots that learn to live with damaged parts in less than a minute, instead of the many hours needed by traditional self-learning systems. The system paves the way for robots to be used in a wide variety of settings, coping with damage that occurs in the real world. Possible applications include robots looking after the elderly, rescuing earthquake victims or doing housework. We marvel at the robots we see in films: some try to wipe out humanity, such as Ultron in the recent Avengers film, while others like C-3PO in Star Wars are helpful albeit slightly annoying. But they are the still the stuff of science fiction, partly because if the slightest thing goes wrong with a real-life robot it usually stops working altogether.

You may think you choose to read one story over another, or to watch a particular video rather than all the others clamouring for your attention. But in truth, you are probably manipulated into doing so by publishers using clever machine learning algorithms. Every day the web carries about 500 million tweets, 430,000 hours of YouTube video uploads, and more than 80 million new Instagram photos. Just keeping up with our friends' Facebook and Twitter updates can seem like a full-time job. So publishers desperately trying to get us to read and watch their stuff in the face of competition from viral videos and pictures of cats that look like Hitler are enlisting the help of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

Sleepiness and stress are perennial risks for the long distance lorry driver, and accidents are sadly too frequent. However, a radical new driverless truck being trialled by Daimler may offer a solution. Earlier this month, the automotive giant was granted the first licence ever to test such a vehicle on a public highway by the US state of Nevada. Using a combination of GPS, radar and video cameras, the Freightliner Inspiration can drive by itself on open stretches of road, freeing a driver to take breaks, check his emails and even watch DVDs. The catch is that a qualified person must remain in front of the wheel at all times so they can take control if something goes wrong.

A hardware store in San Jose has a new star employee. It can speak English and Spanish, recognise any part at sight, and knows what the shop has in stock on a second by second basis. OSHbot, as it is called, measures roughly 5ft, and boasts a 3D scanner and touchscreen. "It's not just robots for robots' sake, or a marketing gimmick," insists Kyl Nel, executive director of Lowe's Innovation Labs. Lowe's is an American DIY chain, and the robot's ultimate employer.

The world's oldest technology magazine is the MIT Technology Review. Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2011 it produced a special supplement of original science fiction stories written by top writers from the genre. The Review says its normal mission is to identify important new technologies, and decipher the practical impact they will have on our lives. The sci-fi edition - with contributors such as Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear - was an attempt to do that in an unusual way. The magazine called this "hard" sci-fi.

Depending on your view, "she" is either at the cutting edge of the human-robot interface, or a modern reflection on some men's difficulties in relating to real-life partners. While sex aids are nothing new, what makes Roxxxy different is that "we've taken artificial intelligence" and "combined it with a human form," says creator Douglas Hines. Of course, humanoid robots have been the stuff of science fiction for decades - ever since Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, or Isaac Asimov's I, Robot stories. Walking robots currently have little commercial value - they are expensive and are prone to falling over if they are placed on anything other than a flat surface. One of the best of the bunch is Japan's all singing and dancing female robot, HRP-4C, from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

Two-thirds of the earth is underwater. We glide over the surface of the oceans, but we still have very little idea what is going on even a few metres down. We spend billions sending craft and people into space, but we do not really know what happens under the waves. One man who finds that more than curious is Graham Hawkes, a beneath-the-sea maverick who has been working on underwater craft for most of his life. It is a lonely, driven quest, relying rather dangerously on the engagement and backing of a few wealthy enthusiasts. Born in London, Mr Hawkes learnt his engineering expertise in the defence industry, working initially on torpedoes in Norfolk, England.

Many web search engines use the concept of a'spider' - automated software which goes out onto the web and trawls through the contents of each server it encounters, indexing documents as it finds them. This approach results in the kinds of databases maintained by services such as Alta Vista and Excite - huge indexes to a vast chunk of what's currently available on the web. However, the problems which users can face when using such databases are beginning to be well documented. A recent JISC-funded investigation [1] into the use of web search engines indicates that users can typically encounter a number of difficulties. These include the issue of finding information relevant to their needs, and the problem of information overload - when far too much information is returned from a search.

From 1966 through 1972, the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute) conducted research on a mobile robot system nicknamed "Shakey." Endowed with a limited ability to perceive and model its environment, Shakey could perform tasks that required planning, route-finding, and the rearranging of simple objects. Although the Shakey project led to numerous advances in AI techniques, many of which were reported in the literature, much specific information appears only in a series of previously relatively inaccessible SRI technical reports. In 1969, the demonstrations of Shakey were collected in a 24-minute film "SHAKEY: Experimentation in Robot Learning and Planning" (91.7MB The possibilities of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence caught the public's imagination.

The computer listens to the soloist and classifies the performance according to style. The styles are "lyrical," "syncopated," "pointilistic," and "frantic." The absolute meanings of these terms is not important. What is important is that the player and computer agree so that the computer can understand what the player intends. The computer actually learns about style from examples (see Dannenberg, Thom, and Watson, A Machine Learning Approach to Musical Style Recognition").