"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year. The talking, bio-monitoring Bragi Dash will be reaching early Kickstarters soon, while fellow startup Here has raised 17 million to compete in the smart earbud space.

Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance, expects to see more innovators trying to tap into the unbanked and unrepresented consumer market. He said: "The firm Pockit, for example, gives customers an account and card that they can use to manage their money and make payments. Users can deposit money into their account at thousands of locations across the UK or have their salaries or benefits paid into their account. Pockit users also get cash back deals on the high street and online." So-called "challenger banks" are popping up and Monese is the latest to make waves.

Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future. Here we are, stepping off the curb and into the backseat of a vehicle. As you close the car door behind you, the address of your office--our destination--automatically appears on a screen embedded in the back of a leather panel in front of you. "Good morning," says the car's humanoid voice, greeting you by name before turning on NPR for you like it does each day. You decide you'd like a cup of coffee, and you tell the vehicle so.

When we first began to explore the idea of building a step classifier, we knew we would be constrained to a very limited population of individuals (Jawbone employees) available to us for early development and testing. It seemed certain that the development of the classifier would be very iterative in that, as we tested larger and more varied sets of individuals and behaviors, we would undoubtedly find issues that we needed to quickly correct. So we would need a technical approach that was suited to rapid updates and that those updates would need to be essentially risk free. We could not afford the risk and development time of actually writing new code as we iterated. In short, we needed a step classifier that learned.

At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation. The company admits it employs a small kitchen staff, and one employee is present in the front of the house, answering questions about how to order and dodging questions about what's going on behind the wall of magic cubbies.

Everything you do changes your brain. Right now, wherever you are, looking at these words is shaping and modifying the connections between neurons inside your head. It seems like a scary thought, but this process – known as neuroplasticity – is fundamental to our ability to learn new skills, keep hold of old ones, and form new memories. Imagine, then, if we could take control of that process. If we could target specific types of skills and cognitive processes, then we could teach our brains to be better at, well, anything.

At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Related: Would you bet against sex robots? AI'could leave half of world unemployed' Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your biped Automaton bloggers. We're also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few 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. This a clever little promotional commercial for IBM's Watson, with Carrie Fisher and some other people you might recognize: The best thing about this is that almost all of those robots were physically constructed, not CGI. And each of them has its own little vignette, which you can see on IBM's YouTube channel.

A fast-food chain with restaurants in 28 states is getting ready to start serving burgers and fries in Champaign-Urbana. Bruce Kim, director of franchise development for Checkers and Rally's Restaurants, said the company is in the process of awarding a franchise for up to three new Checkers restaurants in the area. "We are a quick-service restaurant," he said. "We are known for our seasoned, seared and grilled burgers; fries; grilled, all-meat hot dogs; crazy good chicken wings; golden fish sandwiches; and ice cream. "Our seasoned fries were named the best fries for 2015 by Yahoo." Kim said Checkers restaurants typically stay open late, with most of them serving customers in their double drive-thru until 2 or 3 a.m. The Tampa, Fla.-based chain has 828 locations nationwide, and the website Thrillist recently named Checkers the fastest-growing fast-food chain in Illinois. Kim said the chain is up to 20 Checkers restaurants and seven Rally's restaurants in the state, and the next step is to start building stores in Champaign County. "There is plenty of room to grow, and we are trying to build several locations in Champaign-Urbana," Kim said. "Our studies show we have room for three stores, with our growth franchise-driven." "The community has a good, solid income base, good ethnic diversity and lots of university students.

Biology seems to be a science in its own right, or set of sciences having common aims, and so it should have its own language and explanatory concepts; yet when any specifically biological concept is suggested and used as an explanatory concept it seems to be unsatisfactory and even mystical. There are many biological concepts of this kind: Purpose, Drive, elan vital, Entelechy, Gestalten.* Physicists and engineers seem, on the other hand, to have clearly defined concepts having great power within biology.