In a recent study our firm, New Business Strategies, conducted on how companies purchase technology we found that Fortune 100 organizations place more importance on the quality of their vendor relationships than how well the product or service performs.

FORBES: Four Things Fortune 100 Buyers Wished You Did

"Each individual robot is pretty dumb, " said Simon Garnier from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, lead researcher on the study.

BBC: Robot ants: mini-machines mimic insect colony

The microbiome, made much easier to study by new DNA-sequencing technology (which lets you distinguish between bugs without having to grow them on Petri dishes), is thus a trendy area of science.

ECONOMIST: The human microbiome