The scene around the flooded Whitehill Yeo pit in Devon, UK, resembles a lunar landscape. Until it was abandoned just a few years ago, an endless stream of diesel trucks carried china clay out of the mine seven days a week. But don't be fooled by the silence: this is very much an active site. It's just that all the excavation is happening deep beneath the placid waters. This is a test bed, the first, for a new type of mining by underwater robots.

Starting next year, New Yorkers could join Silicon Valley workers and residents of cities like Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and Boston as players in a grand, growing, autonomous car experiment. General Motors, through its self-driving startup Cruise Automation, plans to put a fleet of autonomous Chevrolet Bolts onto the streets of lower Manhattan in early 2018. The company is already testing in San Francisco, and once it finalizes its application to run in New York (the governor loves the idea), expects to learn valuable lessons from the city's colorful chaos. Those will be important lessons, to be sure. But the move across the country raises a novel question.

The U.S. has stepped up its military involvement in the Horn of Africa nation since President Donald Trump approved expanded military operations against the group early this year. The U.S. has carried out at least 19 drone strikes in Somalia since January, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks U.S. drone strikes in a number of countries.

The Sonos One wireless speaker, priced at $199, will be available Oct. 24. It will support multiple voice services, launching with Amazon Alexa, but will add Siri using AirPlay 2, and Google Assistant, in 2018. Sonos is upping the volume in the smart speaker race. Already well-known for its great sounding wireless home speakers, Sonos is bringing to market the first whole home speaker system with built-in voice control using Amazon's digital voice-commanded assistant Alexa. The new speaker, the $199 Sonos One, due out Tuesday, raises the bar for good-sounding smart speakers.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Small UAS Rule (also known as Part 107) has provisions to obtaining waivers to the usual requirements for flying drones in the United States. For example, you're not generally allowed to fly drones at night, although the FAA has granted quite a few waivers allowing flight after dark. But another rule is that you can't fly drones over people who are not part of your operations, and until about a week ago, the FAA hadn't waived that rule for anybody. Now it has, for CNN. The FAA is allowing the cable news network to use a drone to obtain video over uninvolved people, even crowds assembled at places like sporting events.

At first blush, Scot Barton might not seem like an AI pioneer. He isn't building self-driving cars or teaching computers to thrash humans at computer games. But within his role at Farmers Insurance, he is blazing a trail for the technology. Barton leads a team that analyzes data to answer questions about customer behavior and the design of different policies. His group is now using all sorts of cutting-edge machine-learning techniques, from deep neural networks to decision trees.

According to the researchers, there are 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations in Go -- more than the number of atoms in the known universe. According to the researchers, there are 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations in Go -- more than the number of atoms in the known universe. A year after a computer beat a human world champion in the ancient strategy game of Go, researchers say they have constructed an even stronger version of the program -- one that can teach itself without the benefit of human knowledge. The program, known as AlphaGo Zero, became a Go master in just three days by playing 4.9 million games against itself in quick succession. "In a short space of time, AlphaGo Zero has understood all of the Go knowledge that has been accumulated by humans over thousands of years of playing," lead researcher David Silver of Google's DeepMind lab said in remarks on YouTube.

Robots have become central to the cleaning-up operation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, six years after the tsunami that triggered the nuclear meltdown.

US scientists are using artificial intelligence to predict whether breast lesions identified from a biopsy will turn out to cancerous. The machine learning system has been tested on 335 high-risk lesions, and correctly diagnosed 97% as malignant. It reduced the number of unnecessary surgeries by more than 30%, the scientists said. One breast cancer specialist said that the research was "useful". The machine learning system was trained on information about such lesions, the system looks for patterns among a range of data points, such as demographics, family history, biopsies and pathology reports.