As the sun set on a warm November afternoon, a quartet of five-foot-tall, 300-pound shiny white robots patrolled in front of Building 1 on Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. Looking like a crew of slick Daleks imbued with the grace of Fred Astaire, they whirred quietly across the concrete in different directions, stopping and turning in place so as to avoid running into trash cans, walls, and other obstacles.

A new way to access Facebook securely and anonymously via the “dark Web” could provide a model for other sites.

Autodesk developed the computer-aided design software, called Dreamcatcher, over the past seven years. Among several approaches, it uses algorithms that mimic the process of evolution to produce new designs after starting with a list of parameters chosen by the user.

As industrial robots become more capable, they could start helping out around the home.

BBVA’s Data Processing Center (DPC) in Tres Cantos (Madrid) has been awarded the Tier IV Gold Certification of Operational Sustainability from the Uptime Institute. This is its highest rating in operational sustainability, which makes BBVA the first bank with such advanced installations in Europe.

If large numbers of commercial drones are to take to the skies, they’ll need an air traffic control system.