In the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch was writing a new novel, as she'd done 25 times before in her life. But this time something was terribly off. Her protagonist, Jackson, an English manservant who has a mysterious effect on a circle of friends, once meticulously realized in her head, had become a stranger to her. As Murdoch later told Joanna Coles, a Guardian journalist who visited her in her house in North Oxford in 1996, a year after the publication of the book, Jackson's Dilemma, she was suffering from a bad writer's block. It began with Jackson and now the shadows had suffused her life. "At the moment I'm just falling, falling … just falling as it were," Murdoch told Coles.

Che Voigt believes his company has solved problems that have plagued the working world since the advent of typing. It's a solution to hunched backs, stiff necks and tight shoulders. It's a workstation that, with a push of a button, transitions from a standing desk to a seated table to a fully reclined platform like a dentist's chair. Its seat expands and retracts, supporting the whole body from head to heels. There's a screen and mouse and keyboard that follows the user's eyes and hands.

During practices, American football coaches typically stay on the sidelines, grim-faced, as they order their players through drills. But during an afternoon this past May, in the cavernous training facility for the Pittsburgh Steelers, head coach Mike Tomlin couldn't resist getting in on the action. As a human-size robot sped over the artificial turf, the grinning coach ran onto the field and tackled it. The MVP, or Mobile Virtual Player, was designed to take precisely this kind of hit--the sort of jarring blow that, inflicted repeatedly, can injure the brains of human players. American football has been rocked by controversy over the last decade, as it has become clear that the repeated collisions inherent to the sport are giving players concussions and sometimes causing debilitating and permanent brain trauma. In response, the U.S. National Football League (NFL) has altered rules and contributed millions to medical research. Meanwhile, the same head-injury concerns have found even greater resonance in college and youth football.

Boston-based Lose It! (incorporated as FitNow Inc.) has released a new beta feature today called Snap It within its weight loss and calorie tracking app. As is easily guessed by the name, Snap It beta lets users take photos of their daily meals and snacks to automatically log them and derive approximate calorie counts. For now, users will be able to open the Lose It! app, pick a meal-type (breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack), take a photo of their food, submit and wait briefly for Snap It to analyze it. Snap It will present users with a few best guesses of what food was portrayed in the submitted pic. Users can then confirm the food seen in the photo, and add more detail.

Likewise, I am convinced that the revolution in artificial intelligence will enable computers and robots to do many of the tasks that white-collar workers now do. It's not surprising, therefore, that many people are worried about the fate of those whose jobs are vulnerable -- or have already been lost -- to the latest disruptive technology. What will happen to the millions of men and women who now drive trucks and taxis when the trucks and taxis can drive themselves? What will happen to the accountants and health workers when computers can do their jobs? Some analysts have estimated that, with many fewer employees needed to produce the current volume of goods and services, a large share of current employment could be made redundant.

For African American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows. In a study presented Wednesday to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys, than they did on white students. When asked which of four videotaped children -- a boy and girl who were black and a pair who were white -- required their closest attention, educators black and white alike chose the study's African American boy most frequently. The study's white boy came in a distant second and two girls -- one white and one black -- drew the least scrutiny from the teachers. But when subjects in the new study were asked to rate the severity of a child's disruptive behavior and recommend consequences for it, race played a more unexpected role: African American pre-K educators, the study found, judged misbehavior attributed to a black child more harshly than did white educators.

Over the last decade, the "data revolution" has touched every aspect of our work and personal lives. Today's business challenges have never been more complex, and the critical insights that can address these challenges are often buried in an avalanche of data. In today's marketplace, the business that wins, is the business that "thinks." The viability of a company in the marketplace now depends on its ability to use data and analytics to fuel a thinking business. Companies in industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, banking and manufacturing are already using cognitive technologies to reshape business and do things faster and more efficiently than ever before.

If you're a dog lover, you may have heard of Chaser, the border collie who has been called a "genius" and the "smartest dog in the world." Retired psychology professor John Pilley, Chaser's owner and co-author of a recent book about her, says he was able to teach her 1,000 words, the largest "vocabulary" of any non-human animal on record. Dog lovers and handlers alike tend to agree that some canines are quicker to catch-on, learn new tricks, and solve problems than other dogs. But how do we know that one dog is really smarter than another--possessing greater general intelligence--and not just more talented at specific tasks, such as learning words, or more easily trained? Despite growing interest in dog cognition over the past 20 years, it wasn't until very recently that scientists tried to answer this particular question empirically.

Deakin University in Melbourne has unveiled the HeroSurg robot, which gives surgeons, for the first time, the sense of touch while they perform surgery via a computer. Unveiled on Wednesday at the Australasian Simulation Congress, the university claims HeroSurg to be a major breakthrough compared to current technology, which limits robotic surgery to the sense of sight. Giving surgeons the added sense of touch through technology known as haptic feedback means laparoscopic or keyhole microsurgery will be safer and more accurate by reducing trauma and lowering the risk of blood loss and infection. HeroSurg is the world's first robot that provides surgeons the sense of touch HeroSurg was developed in the laboratory at Deakin's Waurn Ponds campus in Geelong by engineers from Deakin and Harvard, along with professor Suren Krishnan, who in 2008 became the first Australian surgeon to use the da Vinci surgical system for ear, nose, and throat procedures. Krishnan, from the Royal Adelaide Hospital and an honorary professor at the Deakin Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation (IISRI), said HeroSurg's added sense of touch improves the ability of surgeons to distinguish between normal tissue and tissue affected by cancer.

But if, as they say in this electoral season, you're looking to "grow your base," exercising emotional intelligence -- expressing empathy, checking your emotions in a bid to avoid conflict, and investing in personal relationships -- is a strategy that beats narcissism over the long term. A new exploration of how we make friends and influence people rigorously measured the emergence of popularity in small groups -- first-year college students organized into 15 study groups of about 20 in Poland. In the first week of their assignment to a group and then again three months later, 170 of the freshmen named the person or people they most liked in their group. Upon recruitment into the study, each participant completed standard inventories assessing their narcissistic personality traits and gauging their emotional intelligence. The findings: When a group of strangers is thrown together, individuals who score high on narcissism enjoy an early surge of admiration, recognition and friendship among their peers.