Your smartphone is making you sick, how to live with robots, and more trending stories

During the week, the Daily Rundown brings you the day’s trending professional news. On the weekend, we try to keep you current on the big ideas that can help you see what’s coming. Read on and join the conversation.

One day robots may not just deliver our dinner — they may actually be our dinner. A team of researchers from the Switzerland-based research institute EPFL presented a prototype of an edible robot that can perform different functions after being ingested, reports The Verge. The prototype possesses soft ‘fingers’ (actuators) made of gelatin, glycerin, and water that could be used to function as prey to study wild animals or even be sent into human bodies to deliver medicine. They could serve as an emergency food source for non-edible robots in need of an energy boost. And, perhaps strangest of all, they could even pull an octopus and eat themselves. ? Share your thoughts: #EdibleBots

Hot Topic: Our smartphones, ourselves

Smartphones have quickly become our best friend, our therapist, our tour guide — and perhaps our tormenter. The average iPhone user unlocks her phone 80 times a day, according to Apple data. How healthy is this relationship? Here’s what people are saying. ? Join the conversation: #PhoneAddiction

• Your smartphone is damaging your performance, says The Wall Street Journal. A 2015 study suggests that merely being in close proximity to your phone has a detrimental effect on your ability to concentrate.
• It’s affecting your health, too. Several studies have connected smartphone use to sleep disruption, anxiety, depression, and increased stress.
• Even some of the folks who made this technology so addictive in the first place — including the creator of the Facebook ‘like’ — are beginning to wean themselves off of it, writes The Guardian.

Many of America’s sharpest minds are going west, according to Bloomberg’s Brain Concentration Index. The index, which tracks factors like new business formation, higher education levels, and the number of full-time STEM workers, named Boulder, Colo. the No. 1 destination. Three cities in Colorado made the list, bolstered by the transformation of the state’s “old cow and mining towns” into a thriving tech region. However, many of these “brain concentration” cities have neighbors that aren’t faring as well: Well-educated Ann Arbor, Mich. is prospering, but Muskegon 170 miles away is hurting. These cities are developing policies to entice workers and companies, through tax cuts or even paying students’ tuition, reports Bloomberg. ? Share your thoughts: #ColoradoTech

Amazon isn’t the biggest, fastest car on the highway. It’s become the highway itself. Amazon is such a powerful force in retail, it’s created new industries. Some 51% of sales on Amazon.com come from its millions of third-party sellers — and now those shops have spawned a brokerage industry and even an eBay-like auction platform to facilitate their sale. Brokers tell BuzzFeed that they can sell some of these small businesses for millions of dollars, up to 23 times the shops’ net profit. Hitching your wagon to Amazon is a risky endeavor, though: If it makes any changes to how it promotes your wares, your business could be in for a world of pain. ? Share your thoughts: #AmazonIndustries

Automation doesn’t have to be a death sentence for jobs. The rise of the robots has unquestionably contributed to job losses in US manufacturing — but a new report from Germany offers a glimmer of hope. The nation, which has significantly more robots than the US, has quadrupled its industrial robot population over the past two decades, but this hasn’t decreased the number of German jobs overall, university researchers found. Instead of making existing workers redundant, automation has reduced the number of entry-level manufacturing jobs. Younger German workers are heading down different career paths than they might have done before, while existing manufacturing workers are taking on new kinds of roles within the industry. ? Share your thoughts: #RobotJobsGermany

One last idea: Tokyo is the safest city in the world, according to a recent ranking from The Economist Intelligence Unit. Japan's capital also took top honors in a category where the EIU claims many cities are falling dangerously behind: digital security. The EIU offered a stark warning about the risks of rushing to make cities “smart” — connecting a city's critical infrastructure and emergency response systems to the internet — without taking measures to secure against hacks. ? #SafestCities

“If hackers were to shut down the power supply, an entire city would be left in chaos. This prospect is something city officials now need to plan against.”

What's your take? Join the conversation on today’s stories: #EdibleBots | #PhoneAddiction | #ColoradoTech | #AmazonIndustries | #RobotJobsGermany | #SafestCities

Come back tomorrow to start your day with a roundup of the professional news you need to know.

Scott Olster and Katie Carroll / Share this using #DailyRundown