Apple has created a new robot – not for building products, but for ripping iPhones apart. The robot, named Daisy, can take nine different iPhones models apart and extract the important parts of them, in ways traditional recyclers cannot. They can then be used all over again, helping to cut wastage out of the process of making phones. The new announcement is part of Apple's broad plans for Earth Day, the event held on 22 April each year to mark green efforts. It also said that it would encourage people to recycle more of their phones, so that they can be broken up by Daisy: for every iPhone handed in until 30 April through its GiveBack recycling scheme, it will make a donation to Conservation International.

USA Today's Nathan Bomey takes Cadillac's Super Cruise for a test drive. In this Friday March 23, 2018 photo provided by KTVU, emergency personnel work a the scene where a Tesla electric SUV crashed into a barrier on U.S. Highway 101 in Mountain View, Calif. The National Transportation Safety Board has sent two investigators to look into a fatal crash and fire Friday in California that involved a Tesla electric SUV. The agency says on Twitter that it's not clear whether the Tesla Model X was operating on its semi-autonomous control system called Autopilot at the time. Investigators will study the fire that broke out after the crash.

The Amazon Alexa of the future could be listening to you all the time – and building up a detailed picture of what you want to buy. That's the suggestion of a patent filed by the company that details the idea of'voice-sniffing' technology. Such software would allow the device to eavesdrop on conversations and analyse them, feeding that into a database for ads. At the moment, Amazon's Echo products are hardwired so they will only listen to users when they say the "Alexa" wake word. Amazon has denied that it uses voice recordings for advertising at the moment, and said that the patent might never actually come to the market.

Now available, Apple's smart speaker has integrated Siri support, so wake it up and ask a question or give a command. You probably know about Siri's funny responses to questions like "What's the meaning of life?" or "Are you alive?" And you may have complained when the assistant stumbles or can't follow your question. Spoiler alert: This column won't show you how to make Siri fault-proof. But it will help you get more out of it, particularly when you're in situations where you couldn't or shouldn't be using your hands.

Among the issues investigators on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are digging into are whether IRA and other Russian organizations used any Facebook data, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Also, whether the use of such data had any impact on the U.S. election, and how much Facebook data may have been acquired by Russian entities, the sources said.

Newsbeat's De'Graft Mensah took the plunge and let an online security expert comb through his easily-downloadable Facebook data.

Robot Wars has been axed by the BBC for a second time. The show featuring duelling robots was rebooted on BBC Two in 2016 and ran for three series. Presented by Dara Ó Briain and Angela Scanlon since its return, it is to be scrapped to "make room for new shows", the BBC said. Soon after the announcement the hashtag #BringBackRobotWars started trending on social media. Sad to confirm the BBC's decision to de-activate our House Robots.

The British chip design firm ARM came up with the processors used in virtually all the world's smartphones. Now it plans to add the hardware that will let them run artificial-intelligence algorithms, too. ARM announced today that it has created its first dedicated machine-learning chips, which are meant for use in mobile and smart-home devices. The company says it's sharing the plans with its hardware partners, including smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm, and expects to see devices packing the hardware by early 2019. Currently, most small or portable devices that use machine learning lack the horsepower to run AI algorithms, so they enlist the help of big servers in the cloud.

Several people who own Amazon's Echo speakers have reported a strange bug: the Alexa voice assistant has been laughing for no reason. Some users on Twitter and Reddit say the outbursts have been entirely spontaneous. Others have said that Alexa has laughed after being asked to turn on the lights -- and may have misheard the command. "Having an office conversation about pretty confidential stuff and Alexa just laughed," Twitter user @DavidSven wrote recently. "Anybody else ever have that?

In early 2014, Srikanth Thirumalai met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Thirumalai, a computer scientist who'd left IBM in 2005 to head Amazon's recommendations team, had come to propose a sweeping new plan for incorporating the latest advances in artificial intelligence into his division.