Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Subway commuters in Shenzhen, China, may soon need to make room for a fleet of chunky, snack-carrying delivery robots. Earlier this week, more than three dozen autonomous, four-wheeled delivery robots boarded and exited active subway trains, and eventually delivered packages to several 7-Eleven convenience stores. Although this demonstration was only a preliminary test and took place during off-peak hours, the company behind the subway-riding robots believes they could soon help stock shelves at around 100 7-Eleven locations. The initiative is part of a broader effort in China and other countries to normalize the presence of delivery robots operating in public spaces.

Anyone who has rode the New York City subway can tell you that it has a lot of problems, from strange noises to flammable debris on the tracks. Now, as is the solution for everything these days, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is testing how AI could improve the repair process with the help of six Google Pixel phones. In this case, the Google Pixel phones rode on four different subway cars between last September and January. The experiment, conducted in partnership with Google Public Sector, used the phone's accelerometers, magnetometers and microphones to pick up on any worrisome noises. This data was thn sent to cloud-based systems that generated predictive insights using machine learning algorithms.

In the first thirty seconds of the director and artist Paul Trillo's short film "Thank You for Not Answering," a woman gazes out the window of a subway car that appears to have sunk underwater. A man appears in the window swimming toward the car, his body materializing from the darkness and swirling water. It's a frightening, claustrophobic, violent scene--one that could have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of props and special effects to shoot, but Trillo generated it in a matter of minutes using an experimental tool kit made by an artificial-intelligence company called Runway. The figures in the film appear real, played by humans who may actually be underwater. But another glance reveals the uncanniness in their blank eyes, distended limbs, mushy features.