Western cosmetics brands are tapping new sources of inspiration from Asia: Bamboo grass, mushrooms and snails to name a few.

The machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might. A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation.

A 14 armed automated harvester recently wheeled through rows of strawberry plants in Oxnard, California, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry’s most pressing problems, a shortfall of farm hands.