An actual-size model of a Warhammer robot stands just inside the door of the Rams' new temporary offices in Agoura Hills. The action figure was left behind by a video game company that occupied the space before the Rams officially opened for business in Southern California. On Monday, the character was adorned in a No. 3 Rams jersey. "It's exciting for the staff to finally be together for the first time in an office space, to be the Los Angeles Rams," Kevin Demoff, the team's chief operating officer, said during a brief interview in his office. "It's fantastic to have the group here and really laying the foundation for the 2016 season and beyond."

Ever since the launch of Siri in its fully-integrated form on the iPhone 4s in 2011, digital assistants have become standard features on most modern smartphones. With competition growing from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with their Cortana, Google Now, and Echo respectively, Apple continues providing updates to Siri in an attempt to find a semblance of functional advantage. As Google recently added changes to its digital assistant – Google Now – with smart intonation and expression to its speech patterns to sound less robotic, Apple has followed with their own updates looking to target Siri towards specific audiences; in this case, sports fans. Leading up to the opening days of this year's Major League baseball season, Apple has dramatically increased Siri's knowledge of and access to in-depth baseball knowledge and statistics. Though Apple added sports scores to Siri's functionality back with iOS6, previously, when asked specific baseball-related questions, Siri would typically respond with a simple search or Google queries.

Lloyd Alter ( @lloydalter) writes about smart (and dumb) tech with a side of design and a dash of boomer angst.

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.

The world's first social robot went on show at the South by Southwest (SXSW) function in Austin on Saturday. JIBO has been specifically designed to serve in the home, offering various useful functions which accommodate to a domestic setting, including home security, storytelling and entertainment. Commenting on the robot's qualities, software developer Jonathan Ross said that "JIBO is a social robot for the home he can recognise you by your face by your voice" adding that "he can understand what you are saying and it can talk back to you." He went on to explain that humans "are hard wired to be responsive to social interactions. So by having a piece of hardware that actually acts like a person and can acknowledge you and can have a social presence, we can tap into that."

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.

In the first years of her career in brain research, Beth Stevens thought of microglia with annoyance if she thought of them at all. When she gazed into a microscope and saw these ubiquitous cells with their spidery tentacles, she did what most neuroscientists had been doing for generations: she looked right past them and focused on the rest of the brain tissue, just as you might look through specks of dirt on a windshield. "What are they doing there?" she thought. Stevens never would have guessed that just a few years later, she would be running a laboratory at Harvard and Boston's Children's Hospital devoted to the study of these obscure little clumps. Or that she would be arguing in the world's top scientific journals that microglia might hold the key to understanding not just normal brain development but also what causes Alzheimer's, Huntington's, autism, schizophrenia, and other intractable brain disorders. Microglia are part of a larger class of cells--known collectively as glia--that carry out an array of functions in the brain, guiding its development and serving as its immune system by gobbling up diseased or damaged cells and carting away debris. Along with her frequent collaborator and mentor, Stanford biologist Ben Barres, and a growing cadre of other scientists, Stevens, 45, is showing that these long-overlooked cells are more than mere support workers for the neurons they surround.

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.

In recent years however, information technology has entered the field of international politics gaming and made some major contributions. The most successful international politics games at present are concerned with the personalities of political adversaries. An interesting international politics game could define personality in several variables including concepts like aggressiveness, nastiness, and paranoia. Computer programs would allow then the international politics gamer to vary personalities by ascribing a different numerical value to each of these variables. In this way, an infinite number of different "artificial" personalities can be created by means of using concepts like heuristics, algorithms, fuzzy logic, statistics, neural networks, and virtual reality.