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China is laying the groundwork for a robot revolution by planning to automate the work currently done by millions of low-paid workers. The government’s plan will be crucial to a broader effort to reform China’s economy while also meeting the ambitious production goals laid out in its latest economic blueprint, which aims to double per capita income by 2020 from 2016 levels with at least 6.5 percent annual growth.

At a major robotics competition held in June, several multi-million-dollar robots struggled to perform even simple tasks like climbing a flight of stairs; some even toppled over with what seemed like impeccable comic timing.

In August last year, IBM unveiled a chip designed to operate something like the neurons and synapses of the brain.

Engineers at Harvard have developed a soft robotic glove that allows people with limited hand mobility to grasp and pick up objects. The device could help the estimated 6.8 million people in the United States who have hand mobility issues, whether from a degenerative condition, stroke, or old age.

The “artificial intelligence” found in most computer games isn’t very intelligent at all. Characters in the games tend to be controlled by algorithms that produce patterns of behaviors designed to seem natural and realistic, but the characters are actually rigid, with no capacity to learn or adapt.

The airy Berkeley office space of startup Rigetti Computing boasts three refrigerators - but only one of them stores food. The other two use liquid helium to cool experimental computer chips to a fraction of a degree from absolute zero. The two-year-old company is trying to build the hardware needed to power a quantum computer, which could trounce any conventional machine by tapping into quantum mechanics.

Gary Marcus became fascinated by the mind in high school after reading The Mind’s I, a collection of essays on consciousness edited by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, as well as Hofstadter’s metaphorical book on minds and machines, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Around the same time, he wrote a computer program designed to translate Latin into English.

The news that Padmasree Warrior, a former technology chief at Cisco and Motorola, was hired this week as CEO of the U.S. division of the Chinese company NextEV raised an obvious question: what exactly is NextEV?

Billy Maddox planted 100 acres of Roundup Ready soybeans this year. The big news is he didn't pay Monsanto a dime. It's been 20 years since Monsanto developed its first genetically modified crops. Now some of its early patents are starting to expire, leading to the first "generic GMOs" - off-patent seeds that cost half as much and which farmers are free to save and replant.

A colleague recently described a fun Friday night for his teenage son: staying home and chatting online. Every now and then there’s a party where all his friends talk on their laptops.

The American tradition of retirement at age 65 is crumbling. As older workers stay on the job longer, challenges ranging from eyestrain to aching joints become increasingly prevalent. In response, technologists and ergonomics experts are rethinking working conditions.

Donning headphones, we tapped into Skype Translator, a creation of Microsoft’s research team. My chatting partners were part-time consultants to Microsoft, who happened to be thousands of miles away from my West Coast U.S. base. When I asked Chen where he grew up, it didn’t faze me to hear him say a few lines in Mandarin. A few seconds later, a friendly synthetic voice told me: “My hometown is in the northeast in China, Liaoning Province, Anshan.”

Improving the energy efficiency of buildings is considered the fastest and least expensive way to cut energy use and, thus, carbon emissions. Although many states have programs in place to promote energy efficiency, mostly through rebates, the market has largely stalled because of high up-front costs, heavy regulation, limited funding mechanisms, and uncertainties surrounding the actual savings provided.

Metal 3-D printing, which has been around for decades, is finally coming into its own as a genuine mass manufacturing technology: Sales of machines that print metal objects have risen rapidly as manufacturers, especially in the aerospace industry, gear up for commercial production of additively made parts they’ve been developing for years.

Air particulates are invisible, but a new generation of indoor air monitors makes it easy to know the air quality instantaneously and take immediate corrective action. In my family’s case, we learned that turning on the exhaust fan helps - it lowers the PM2.5 from 250 to 100 micrograms per cubic meter, but getting the number below 50 required opening windows in the front and back of the house to get cross ventilation.

Facebook keeps its map of the social connections of the 1.6 billion people who use the service each month to itself. But it is giving away for free new maps it is building that describe patterns of population density in the world’s poorest countries in unprecedented detail.

Might the communities of microörganisms living in healthy plants hold the keys to dramatically increasing crop yields? A new venture-backed company is betting yes. Indigo, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, is developing microbe-based crop treatments identified through the study of the beneficial bacteria and fungi - collectively known as the microbiome - that naturally live in and around plants.

Early this week the Austrian security company SEC Consult found that more than three million routers, modems, and other devices are vulnerable to being hijacked over the Internet. Instead of giving each device a unique encryption key to secure its communications, manufacturers including Cisco and General Electric had lazily used a much smaller number of security keys over and over again.

One of China's leading carmakers is testing technology that promises to prevent accidents and ease congestion by allowing vehicles as well as traffic signals to communicate wirelessly. Although no standard for the technology has emerged in China yet, representatives at the company say it could introduce some form of car-to-car communications in 2018, ahead of many US automakers.

Facebook and Google compete intensely for your time online and for the ad dollars of corporations. But now the two companies are collaborating on efforts to use balloons and drone aircraft to expand Internet access to the four billion people that don’t have it.