Westworld is soon to return with season three. Four episodes in to the impossibly glamorous, highly urbanised future, I can't wait to find out what's going on, writes Emily Wilson

A temporary coronavirus hospital ward in China is being staffed entirely by robots. Around 200 patients with mild symptoms will be fed and treated by machines, while medical staff issue commands from outside

A robot can recreate the mechanism plants use to transport water to bend itself towards the sun and open its leaves like a real plant

Robots are being developed to help with tasks like fixing the sea cages where fish are farmed, and their size seems to be all that affects how the fish react

The UK government has pledged to make smart motorways safer by rolling out a radar detection system within the next three years, but New Scientist can reveal that just 7 per cent of the roads are protected by the measure today

An artificially intelligent eco-assistant can persuade hotel guests and staff to reduce their electricity use by up to a third

Kate Darling researches human-robot interaction. She explains why we are prone to forming emotional connections with robots and what we can learn from our relationships with pets and other animals

Lab-grown ‘meat’ often uses gelatin produced in slaughterhouses to give artificial beef a meat-like texture – but substituting soya protein can achieve that without killing animals

Pollen has a natural tendency to adsorb mercury and forms the basis of a new class of tiny robots that speed through toxic water to purify it

Fabric with tiny vibrating motors elicits sensations associated with clouds, water and rocks on the skin and has been made into a dress that could improve emotions

Many countries are hoping to use contact-tracing apps to leave lockdown and suppress further coronavirus outbreaks, but the use of such technology has many issues

Artificial intelligence can tell whether a human or a bot is posting on Twitter based on how regularly they post and how much they reply to others, which could help identify fake accounts

Robots made of 3D-printed muscle and rat spines could help us understand conditions like motor neurone disease and the technique may eventually be used to build prosthetic devices

A robot that uses artificial intelligence to find and remove weeds could eventually be used as an alternative to chemical insecticides

Martha Wells's action-packed novel Network Effect puts you inside the head of a Murderbot. It raises fascinating questions you will think about for a long time, says Sally Adee

TfL as in Transport for London. Greeeeeaaat.

While such a plan might sound appealing, it’s likely to provide a false sense of security

Personally, I welcome whatever reality TV drivel Twitch dreams up to feed our insatiable appetite for content.

Because Amazon movie purchases are really just long-term rentals that can disappear from your library at any time.

Exhaust fumes and cold KFC?

As well as announcing reminders to stay away from each other, the robots also estimate how many people are in the park at any given time.

It does make several enormous assumptions about the future that now seem perilously flaky.

While this experiment may sound odd, it could represent the start of a whole new field of research.

The majority of these children have tested positive for the virus or seem to carry antibodies from an earlier infection.

X-37B? Sorry, I thought you said your name was X Æ A-12.

Alison Roman’s latest comments about Marie Kondo have not sparked joy.

In an interview with The New Consumer about her increased popularity and the avenues she might pursue to capitalize on it, the popular food columnist discussed her hesitance to put her name on a product line—citing the Japanese organization maven and Chrissy Teigen as examples of what she did not foresee in her own future.

“I have a collaboration coming out with [the cookware startup] Material, a capsule collection,” Roman said. “It’s limited edition, a few tools that I designed that are based on tools that I use that aren’t in production anywhere—vintage spoons and very specific things that are one-offs that I found at antique markets that they have made for me.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Adele posted a message to her social media channels this week thanking those on the front lines fighting COVID-19. In the process, the celebrated singer unveiled a thinner frame—and the internet had a lot of thoughts about it, almost all trash.

Enter Bill Maher, noted #MeToo skeptic, with perhaps the most garbage take of them all.

On Friday night, during the interview portion of his HBO show Real Time, the comedian began by placing the bulk of the blame for the high amount of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. compared to other countries on America’s obesity problem—not, say, the fact that the Trump administration didn’t do a single thing during the month of February to contain the spread of the virus.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Being at home this long, or really, just in one place for this long, has led me to see how much waste I produce. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot more than I thought. But I’m not here to shame anyone, in fact, quite the opposite. I think there are plenty of small ways we can cut down our carbon footprint, from driving less (check), to not using a washing machine or dryer (also, sadly, check), but gardening is what I’ve been doing, and is something that I’d recommend everyone give a shot now that we all have a little more times on our hands.

GETTING STARTED

Composting is a natural way to recycle all of the organic materials in your house through decomposition. Compost can improve your soil’s water retention, which saves you money on your water bills, and helps keep excess garbage out of landfills, too. To get started you need two things. The first is a compost bin for your kitchen. This is great whether you want to start a compost at home or if you have a compost center you can bring them to. You want something sleek, designy, yet simple because after all, it’s really just a trash can. This is an excellent one.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

BRITAIN'S summer holiday destinations will face some of the biggest economic hits of the coronavirus pandemic with fears of massive job losses in coastal communities, a study has claimed.

CORONAVIRUS has forced people to re-evaluate their finances as income takes a hit and budgets are stretched. One of the first port of calls for change has been direct debits and new research reveals that some people may find themselves with more cash available once this all ends.

Tottenham will need to be creative in the transfer market this summer.

Whether it was driverless cars, lab-grown meat or faster-than-light neutrinos, some things just didn't live up to the hype in the 2010s

Two stars in the constellation Sagitta are predicted to smash together in the year 2083, producing an explosion that will outshine every star in the sky

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, set to launch on 7 February, will give us our first clear views of the sun’s poles and help unravel the mystery of the solar wind

Strange, powerful blasts of radio waves from space called fast radio bursts sometimes flash repeatedly, but never with any discernible pattern – until now

There’s nothing like crash-landing on an alien planet. Journey to the Savage Planet doesn't always get it right, but it has echoes of classic Metroid Prime, says Jacob Aron

A team of researchers say they have discovered a protein molecule inside a meteorite, the first extraterrestrial example ever found, but others are sceptical

Exoplanet WASP-76b, which is about 390 light years from the solar system, has a strange iron signature in its atmosphere, suggesting the metal is raining down on the planet's night side

Strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down

An explosion 4.6 billion light years away has released 10 times more energy than the sun will put out in its lifetime, making it the most extreme supernova ever found

Arrokoth, a strange two-lobed space rock, was hit by another rock at some point – the collision may have snapped Arrokoth’s narrow neck before it reformed again

Strange orbits of distant space rocks have been used to infer that the solar system has an unseen ninth planet, but those orbits may be less strange than we thought, meaning there is no need for a new planet

Extraterrestrial oceans are an obvious place to search for alien life, but getting there and having a look won't be easy, says NASA's Kevin Hand in his book Alien Oceans

Weird blasts of radio waves from space called fast radio bursts have been baffling astronomers since they were discovered, but after finding one in our galaxy we may finally know what creates them

There is something deeply unsettling about the lionization of Andrew Cuomo and his handling of the epidemic, especially in the light of the raw statistics

A new computational method allows robotic characters to perform fast motions without excessive vibrations

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

This clay robot can squeeze and squish itself into different shapes