As Marcus du Sautoy greets me at the entrance to New College, Oxford, his appearance is a quiet riot of colour. His clothes rather suggest someone who ran into White Stuff or Fat Face and frantically grabbed anything he could find – in this case, a salmon zip-up top, multihued check trousers and shoes that are a headache-inducing shade of turquoise. When we settle down to talk in a nearby meeting room, he repeatedly glances at a notepad – whose pages, just to add to all the garishness, are a bold shade of yellow.

Vinod Khosla, a legendary Silicon Valley investor, argues that robots will replace doctors by 2035. And there is some evidence that he may be right. A 2017 study out of the Massachusetts General Hospital and MIT showed that an artificial intelligence (AI) system was equal or better than radiologists at reading mammograms for high risk cancer lesions needing surgery.

Robots have put half a million people out of work in the United States, and researchers estimate that bots could take 800 million jobs by 2030. But New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that widespread automation is an exciting proposition–as long as some kind of government safety net is in place to equitably help the people who are displaced.

Billionaire Bill Gates and left-wing political wunderkind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might disagree on how much taxes the rich should pay, but they are on the same page when it comes to robots. Tax them, too.

Next time you head to the airport in France there might be a robot waiting to pick up your car. French firm Stanley Robotics has been trialling its self-driving robot valets for a few years, and this week started its first full-time service at France’s Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport. The system works like this. Customers park their cars in special hangars where the vehicles are scanned to confirm their make and model.

For a newborn giraffe or wildebeest, being born can be a perilous introduction to the world—predators lie in wait for an opportunity to make a meal of the herd’s weakest member. This is why many species have evolved ways for their juveniles to find their footing within minutes of birth.

Weird-looking robots are the best robots.

Stop & Shop's parent company, the Dutch food retailer Ahold Delhaize, has started deploying robots named Marty to more than 100 Massachusetts locations. Marty, a six-foot-tall pillar with googly eyes, roams the stores, beeping gently as it scans the floor for trash and spills.

Boston Dynamics has a new YouTube video showing off its newest robot design. This one is a reimagining of the "Handle" robot that the company originally showed off in 2017. Back then the robot could jump four feet in the air and do all kinds of tricks; now its purpose is to load pallets.

Handle is a mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets. The on-board vision system on Handle tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing.

Yoshua Bengio is worried that innovations in artificial intelligence that he helped pioneer could lead to a dark future, if “killer robots” get into the wrong hands. But the soft-spoken, 55-year-old Canadian computer scientist, a recipient of this year’s A.M. Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize for computing — prefers to see the world though the idealism of “Star Trek” rather than the apocalyptic vision of “The Terminator.”

Conventional six-axis industrial robots typically run a series of cables along the outside of the robotic arm to control power consumption, movement and other dynamic functions. These cables are usually housed in a plastic or rubber tube or tied together using materials as rudimentary as rubber bands or duct tape.

Dogs are so last year -- or that’s what Sony wants you to think. The company has been releasing adorable Sony Aibo robot dogs for the past two decades, and they’ve become smarter, smoother, and decidedly creepier. Sony’s newest pup, the Aibo ERS-1000 ($2,899.99), is a far cry from that plastic pup your rich neighbor used to have.

A couple of "Astrobees" are set to join the crew at the International Space Station to help out with chores and special experiments by the end of April 2019. Bees are known as one of Earth's busiest and most hardworking animals, so it's not surprising that NASA is taking inspiration from them for their newest robotic helpers in space.

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Picking strawberries takes speed, stamina, and skill. Can a robot do it?

Researchers may have found a way to protect Florida strawberries fields from mildew with ultraviolet light. The University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences teamed up with the Norway-based startup, Saga Robotics, to test out the autonomous robot, Thorvald. For several months, one night a week, students test drive the robot and document how the ultraviolet light eliminates mildew from strawberry fields on the Wimauma, Fla. Campus.

Three papers from influential economists cast doubt on the idea that there are beneficial aspects to automation. Beneficial aspects to workers, that is.

On April 19, the Cygnus spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. Among plenty of other cargo, it carried special passengers: two small robots named Honey and Bumble. These “Astrobees” will soon become part of the station’s working crew, helping with such tasks as checking inventory, recording astronauts and experiments and running their own research projects.

For pretty much as long as robots have existed, humans have wanted robot butlers: autonomous machines that do our bidding around the home. But our imagination exceeds our technological capabilities, and the closest we’ve come to building Rosie the Robot is either specialized machines like robot vacuum cleaners or voice-activated gadgets like Amazon’s Alexa.