If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution. But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs, seeing their livelihoods taken away by machines. Haven't we heard all this before, though? From the luddites of the 19th century to print unions protesting in the 1980s about computers, there have always been people fearful about the march of mechanisation.

In the summer of 2015, we launched a new funding scheme called the Pioneer Award, to support innovative science. We're encouraging researchers to think big – the sky is the limit – and bring with them new ideas that could be game-changing for cancer research. To quickly recap on how this new scheme works, it's a'Dragon's Den'-like way of funding research: applications are judged anonymously, and short-listed researchers are given five minutes to pitch their ideas to a panel of experts. There's a pot of up to 200,000 to those who succeed. Back in December, we unveiled the first round of successful projects, and now we have the next batch of bright ideas.

Schools are on the front lines in coping with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). More school-age kids are getting diagnosed with it each year (more than one in 10, according to the most recent National Survey of Children's Health) and the classroom is where kids often have their biggest problems with impulse control and an inability to sit still and focus. Some kids take medicine to control these symptoms, but many do not. And so principals and teachers are tremendously interested in non-medical therapies they can use at school to help children. Fortunately, it's an exciting time in ADHD research, thanks to developments in neuroscience, and psychologists hope they will find new tools for schools.

One of the striking things about Blizzard, the superstar developer behind some of gaming's biggest hits, including World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft, is how little it actually does. That's not to say the company's employees aren't constantly at work, although the Kendo lessons taking place on the lawn outside its headquarters in Irvine, California, on the sunny spring day I visit could give that impression. The HQ is a hive of industry, even if most of that industry is hidden behind doors marked Secret: No Visitors. But that list of smash hits above constitutes fully half of the franchises Blizzard is developing. Those three are stalwarts at the company: World of Warcraft is celebrating its 10th anniversary, Starcraft II is six years old and two expansion packs into its life, and Diablo III is enjoying a second wind as an acclaimed couch co-op game four years after it first launched.

It's by now a given that one of the best ways to eat better, whether that means consuming less calories and-or more vegetables and-or whatever, is to just actually pay attention to what we eat. This is the big secret behind dieting--any old fad diet is probably going to have a positive effect simply because the dieter is paying more attention to what they put into their face. And just by virtue of paying attention, they will probably eat healthier. The fad diet usually gets the credit, but just caring at all goes a very long way. Paying attention is hard, however.

A Weird Month for Artificial Intelligence Some of the more interesting and universally accessible developments in technology over the past decade (to me anyway) have been within the artificial intelligence world. Unlike many other industry advancements, stories of high-profile AI successes or failures make suitable discussion fodder at family dinner tables. The "Fork Me On GitHub" types appreciate the complexity of the required engineering efforts, while the "Hey Person Who Computers -- Can You Set My VCR Clock?" crowd can just think "whoa" without concern for what is happening under the hood. One somewhat recent and well-publicized AI event was the Jeopardy-playing Watson supercomputer built by IBM.

After a drawn-out battle, South Korea's Go grandmaster with 9-dan rank, Lee Sedol, lost his fifth game against Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo in Seoul on March 15, 2016. AlphaGo's win over one of the world's best players shocked the world's Go circle. Due to the complexity of the nature of Go, which requires intuition, creativity, and strategic thinking, it was believed that Go was the only board game that no computers could conquer. Hong Kong's Go champion, Lee Cheuk-leung, was surprised at the result of the fifth match, in which Lee Sedol had the upper hand in the first half of the game, but somehow lost to the computer eventually. Experts from the Go circle initially expected Lee Sedol to win all five games, but he ultimately lost four of them to the computer.

Some of the more interesting and universally accessible developments in technology over the past decade (to me anyway) have been within the artificial intelligence world. Unlike many other industry advancements, stories of high-profile AI successes or failures make suitable discussion fodder at family dinner tables. The "Fork Me On GitHub" types appreciate the complexity of the required engineering efforts, while the "Hey Person Who Computers -- Can You Set My VCR Clock?" crowd can just think "whoa" without concern for what is happening under the hood. One somewhat recent and well-publicized AI event was the Jeopardy-playing Watson supercomputer built by IBM. Those in the technology community understood the difficulties of natural language processing (all while being required to answer in the form of a question) while much of the world just wanted to see a computer built by anonymous geeks humiliate more smug geeks on live TV.

"I had a half-cup of oatmeal, with two-tablesoons of maple syrup and a cup of coffee. Oh, I put a handful of blueberries in the oatmeal, and there was milk in the coffee. Ask someone what they had for breakfast, and this is the kind of description you might get. And that's one of the reasons keeping track of food intake is such a problem for tech that's meant to help a person lose weight or stick to a diet for other reasons. Logging food for nutrition and calories is important to sticking to a diet, according to Susan Roberts, director of the Boston-based Energy Metabolism Lab at Tufts University. "It makes people more self-aware about the junk they are eating and how little they actually enjoy it, and the shock of huge portions, et cetera.

Child care is a hard job, but somebody, or something, has got to do it. Japanese researchers have developed androids to meet that need, which includes happily reading that fairy tale again and again and again. The androids, which were created by a team of education and robotics specialists at a research facility in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, are part of a larger system called RoHo Care. Short for Robotic Hoikujo (day care center), RoHo is being touted as a high-tech solution to the staffing crisis that forced the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to announce emergency measures this week. "I never thought I'd see this day, but we're now confident that RoHo could blaze a trail for child care worldwide," said team leader Makoto Hara.