Japanese scientists have devised a way to attach living skin tissue to robotic faces and make them "smile," in a breakthrough that holds out promise of applications in cosmetics and medicine. Researchers at the University of Tokyo grew human skin cells in the shape of a face and pulled it into a wide grin, using embedded ligament-like attachments. The result, though eerie, is an important step toward building more life-like robots, said lead researcher Shoji Takeuchi. "By attaching these actuators and anchors, it became possible to manipulate living skin for the first time," he added. The smiling robot, featured in a study published online last month by Cell Reports Physical Science, is the fruit of a decade of research by Takeuchi and his lab on how best to combine biological and artificial machines.

Many female celebrities, like Victoria Beckham, are rarely caught on camera smiling, perhaps for fear of showing age-revealing laughter lines. But smiling for the camera could actually make you look more attractive, a study suggests. Researchers recruited 112 volunteers and presented them each with 80 pictures of people who either had a neutral expression or were slightly smiling. Asked to rate the faces for attractiveness, they gave higher scores to people who were smiling. Asked how they judged attractiveness, more of the study participants took into account someone's facial expression and whether they looked friendly than their clothing, hairstyle and level of grooming.

Kurt'The CyberGuy' Knutsson shows the best way to take voice control selfies. How cool would it be if you could just say "Cheese!" and voilà, your phone would capture the perfect selfie without you ever lifting a finger? Oh yes, you heard that right. Aside from selfies, there are several other benefits of setting up a voice-controlled camera. It can capture speech much faster than you can type.

I'm old enough (safely in my thirties) to remember a time before we all carried digital cameras with almost unlimited memory. With a roll of film, you had 24 chances to capture a moment. What you had was what you got. As a kid, the only opportunity I had to really perfect my pose was when my mom took me to the mall to get our glamour shots done. I was reminded of this when I showed my coworker my Pixy selfies, cringing, and he remarked that it looked like I was putting out a garage rock album. Punk and grunge pics are ostentatiously unposed and unfiltered, which is exactly how the Pixy rolls.

They were alive thousands of years ago, in a time of frequent war, where people were still sacrificed to the gods. But, incredibly, Mayan civilisations may still have used the same facial expressions we have today. A study by researchers from California has found that modern-day people can still recognise the emotions of those living up to 3,500 years ago. Shown only the face of a captured warrior from a Mayan sculpture, people can still figure out that he probably looked sad. Presented with nothing but the facial expression of a grandmother with a child from a Mayan ceramic, they can guess that she appeared joyful and amused by the infant.

Automation is important for the city-state as it faces a labor crunch across many of its industries. It is also key for Changi given it is the world's sixth busiest for international traffic and is already operating close to total capacity, having last added a terminal almost a decade ago.