Should you always do what other people tell you to do? Clearly not. Everyone knows that. So should future robots always obey our commands? At first glance, you might think they should, simply because they are machines and that’s what they are designed to do. But then think of all the times you would not mindlessly carry out others' instructions—and put robots into those situations.

A two-year investigation of electronics recycling using GPS tracking devices has revealed that policies aimed at curtailing the trade in toxic e-waste have been unsuccessful, with nearly one-third of the devices being exported to developing countries, where equipment is often dismantled in low-tech workshops — often by children — endangering workers, their families, and contaminating the surrounding environment.

Australian physicists, perhaps searching for a way to shorten the work week, have created an AI that can run and even improve a complex physics experiment with little oversight. The research could eventually allow human scientists to focus on high-level problems and research design, leaving the nuts and bolts to a robotic lab assistant. The experiment the AI performed was the creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, a hyper-cold gas, the process for which won three physicists the Nobel Prize in 2001. It involves using directed radiation to slow a group of atoms nearly to a standstill, producing all manner of interesting effects.

Touted by its creators as the "world's largest solar-powered computer," it could offer a quantum leap for development across rural Africa. The Watly machine, created by an Italian-Spanish start-up of the same name, resembles a futuristic space capsule. But its mission is to provide electricity, clean water, and Internet services that could transform lives and economies across rural Africa. Around 625 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are currently without electricity -- more than two-thirds of the population -- while 39% lack access to safe water.

In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound. The new work, which the researchers are presenting this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, builds on a long sequence of papers on origami robots from the research group of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Among the many injustices women face globally, inadequate health care is one of the most serious. In the developing world, where childbirth complications cause the death of more than 800 women every day, a lack of resources makes it impossible for women to maintain their health on a daily basis. And in more developed nations, stigma creates an environment that fails women who, for example, are trans or need more accessible birth control. Advances in technology, however, have made it easier to provide solutions to the many health problems women face around the world. Here are a just few innovative health solutions making a difference in women's lives.

Robots have become the norm in numerous industries, taking over repetitive tasks that humans aren't necessarily needed for -- or want to do -- such as the production of cars and electronics. One step up the technological spectrum is artificial intelligence, where robots are now making informed decisions based on the tasks they're presented with, highlighted by the burgeoning field of driverless cars. As we get used to the idea of machines producing our goods, we're slowly coming around to them making decisions for us, but would you put your life in their hands? More specifically, would you let a robot perform surgery on you?

Recently, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work publicly confirmed that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was “dropping cyberbombs,” taking its ongoing battle against the Islamic State group into the online world. Other American officials, including President Barack Obama, have discussed offensive cyber activities, too. The American public has only glimpsed the country’s alleged cyberattack abilities. In 2012 The New York Times revealed the first digital weapon, the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear program. In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a classified presidential directive outlining America’s approach to conducting Internet-based warfare.

A professional group for high school and middle school computer science teachers is looking to educate its own members about cybersecurity so they can better prepare tomorrow's workforce. Following a recent one-day cybersecurity program for students, sponsored by the NSA, "One of the pieces of feedback we got from the teachers is they thought they could do better at it if they actually understood cybersecurity a little better," explained Mark Nelson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association.

Say what you will about cybercriminals, says Angela Sasse, “their victims rave about the customer service”. Sasse is talking about ransomware: an extortion scheme in which hackers encrypt the data on a user's computer, then demand money for the digital key to unlock them. Victims get detailed, easy-to-follow instructions for the payment process (all major credit cards accepted), and how to use the key. If they run into technical difficulties, there are 24/7 call centers. “It's better support than they get from their own Internet service providers,” says Sasse, a psychologist and computer scientist at University College London who heads the Research Institute in Science of Cyber Security.

Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright on Monday identified himself as the creator of Bitcoin following years of speculation about who invented the pioneering digital currency. Wright was named by three media outlets—the BBC, The Economist and GQ magazine—and posted a blog on his website. However, in a defiant interview with the BBC, the 45-year-old insisted that he would have preferred his identity to remain secret, adding he was not seeking cash or honors.

Finding the perfect employee/employer match is a little like trying to find "the one." It takes time, patience and often a little bit of compromise. Though there's debate about whether or not there's an actual "talent shortage" in the tech world, one thing is clear: Tech companies today struggle with hiring, particularly within a few specific roles. Candidates that are perfect fits for job titles such as database engineer or software architect simply aren't a dime a dozen. Often, there are more job listings for such roles than available candidates.

Viruses’ natural mutational agility has long been problematic for established therapies. Determining a therapeutic compound’s effectiveness against a mutated viral pathogen mostly entails empirical screening of he mutated virus with compounds to gauge effectiveness. This week researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and IrsiCaixa, the Catalan AIDS Research Institute reported developing a bioinformatics method to predict the effect of each mutation on the resistance of the virus to existing HIV drugs. This is an important step forward.

A piece of paper is one of the most common, versatile daily items. Children use it to draw their favorite animals and practice writing the A-B-Cs, and adults print reports or scribble a hasty grocery list. Now, connecting real-world items such as a paper airplane or a classroom survey form to the larger Internet of Things environment is possible using off-the-shelf technology and a pen, sticker or stencil pattern. Researchers from the University of Washington, Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University have created ways to give a piece of paper sensing capabilities that allows it to respond to gesture commands and connect to the digital world.

The healthcare industry, with its maddening inefficiencies and an economic model that incentivizes disease care over health care, desperately needs a Silicon Valley-style overhaul. But even as waves of technological and economic disruption have washed over almost every industry in the United States over the last decade or two — commerce, finance, media, telecommunications — the everyday experience of healthcare stands unperturbed, stuck somewhere in the mid- to late-1990s. Why is the nation’s $3 trillion creaky, monstrous and convoluted healthcare sector seemingly impervious to technological change?

Artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, cognitive computing — whatever you want to call machines that are capable of understanding and acting upon their environment — is no longer solely the purview of highly credentialed lab directors and deep-thinking computer scientists. It has entered mainstream consciousness, and the public expects IT to play a leadership role as machine learning enters our workplaces, our living spaces and our lives. Will you be ready?

Whether it's self-driving cars, automated package delivery systems, or Barbie dolls that converse with children, the ways in which humans and robots interact is a rapidly growing field. Movies such as Star Wars, Wall-E, and Ex-Machina reveal how society is fascinated by both the positive and negative implications. In his newly published scan of the literature, expert Thomas B. Sheridan concludes that the time is ripe for human factors researchers to contribute scientific insights that can tackle the many challenges of human-robot interaction.

At Facebook’s recent annual developer conference, Marc Zuckerberg outlined the social network’s artificial intelligence (AI) plans to “build systems that are better than people in perception.” He then demonstrated an impressive image recognition technology for the blind that can “see” what’s going on in a picture and explain it out loud. From programs that help the visually impaired and safety features in cars that detect large animals to auto-organizing untagged photo collections and extracting business insights from socially shared pictures, the benefits of image recognition, or computer vision, are only just beginning to make their way into the world — but they’re doing so with increasing frequency and depth.

Whether they’re working at the frontiers of computer science or on the unforgiving battlegrounds of enterprise competitiveness, we know there are already some truly incredible women doing remarkable things in tech. But it’s no secret either that there remains a striking imbalance in terms of gender diversity ratios across the industry as a whole. So, while hopefully highlighting some of the great work they’ve been doing, here’s a look at a handful of top tips from some of the women I’ve been lucky enough to communicate with recently about their experiences in the technology sector.

For decades, universities have been at the forefront of making innovations in computer science. Many of these breakthroughs have significantly changed the world we live in, revolutionizing humanistic and scientific fields such as medicine, natural resources, financial and economic systems, defense, and entertainment, just to name the few. These innovations have also increased connectivity in what has become a vital component of the globalized world. With these historic milestones in modern human civilization, it is safe to say that the world of computer science would not be what it is today without the input of students and faculty at universities around the world.

With an ever-increasing volume of electronic data being collected by the healthcare system, researchers are exploring the use of machine learning--a subfield of artificial intelligence--to improve medical care and patient outcomes. An overview of machine learning and some of the ways it could contribute to advancements in plastic surgery are presented in a special topic article in the May issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

This election cycle, the tech elite are almost exclusively backing liberals: Tesla’s Elon Musk donated to Hillary Clinton, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave handsomely to the San Francisco Democratic Party organization, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates gave to three Democratic congressmen. Though often seen as a libertarian stronghold, no household Silicon Valley names publicly donated to the small government torchbearers, Rand Paul or Ted Cruz. Far from being the exception, recent data shows that the nation’s tech titans don’t have much faith that the Republican party has good long-term economic policies for emerging industries. More and more, the richest Americans are donating more to Democrats than Republicans.

Despite valiant efforts to recruit more women, the gender gap in the fields collectively known as STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math — is not getting any better. The gaps in computer science and engineering are the largest of any major STEM discipline. Nationally, less than 20% of bachelor’s degrees in these fields go to women. Women are missing out on great jobs, and society is missing out on the innovations women could be making in new technology. Good work is being done to solve this problem in college and the workplace. But we need to start earlier and set a strong foundation.

Boredom manifests itself in more than yawns and glazed eyes. Subtle body cues called noninstrumental movements—squirming, scratching, shifting—also give away a person's mental state. Like teachers and other public speakers, machines can now also pick up on these telltale signs of restlessness. A new study reveals that when computer users tune in to on-screen material, their fidgeting lessens—and algorithms can use that information to discern attentiveness in real time.

Prior to changing my major to computer science, I was studying molecular biology and I hated it. I was studying it for all the wrong reasons and the more I kept trying at it the more both it and I fell apart. I was seriously considering dropping out of college all together until one day during one of my labs my partner said something to me that I will never forget and it started a chain reaction of events that led me directly to computer science.