UK engineers will design a robot that can retrieve rock samples on Mars so they can be sent to Earth for study. The European Space Agency is issuing contracts to industry to spec the technology needed for what will be a complex joint undertaking with the US. Aerospace giant Airbus will scope the concept for a surface "fetch rover" at its Stevenage centre north of London. Esa and the American space agency (Nasa) expect to send the sample-return equipment to the Red Planet in 2026. "It will be a relatively small rover - about 130kg; but the requirements are very demanding," said Ben Boyes who will lead the feasibility team at Airbus.

Yandex spokesman Ilya Grabovsky said Thursday that some Internet users contacted the company Wednesday to say that its public search engine was yielding what looked like personal Google files. Grabovsky said the company has alerted Google.

Baidu unveiled an artificial intelligence chip called Kunlun during its annual Baidu Create event on Tuesday. The company joins a raft of other Chinese firms in designing hardware tailored for machine-learning. Seven years: Kunlun is optimized for various AI tasks including voice recognition, natural language processing, image recognition, and autonomous driving. Baidu first started making customized AI processors using FPGAs (a kind of chip that can be reconfigured on the fly) in 2011. The new design is 30 times faster than the original FPGA-based processor, but the company says it's not ready to begin mass producing it yet.

It is the most exacting of surgical skills: tying a knot deep inside a patient's abdomen, pivoting long graspers through keyhole incisions with no direct view of the thread. Trainee surgeons typically require 60 to 80 hours of practice, but in a mock-up operating theatre outside Cambridge, a non-medic with just a few hours of experience is expertly wielding a hook-shaped needle – in this case stitching a square of pink sponge rather than an artery or appendix. The feat is performed with the assistance of Versius, the world's smallest surgical robot, which could be used in NHS operating theatres for the first time later this year if approved for clinical use. Versius is one of a handful of advanced surgical robots that are predicted to transform the way operations are performed by allowing tens or hundreds of thousands more surgeries each year to be carried out as keyhole procedures. "The vast majority of patients, despite all the advantages of minimal-access surgery, are still getting open surgery, because so few surgeons have the skills," said Mark Slack, head of gynaecology at Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, and co-founder of CMR Surgical, the company behind Versius.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. On June 11, a self-driving Cruise Chevrolet Bolt had just made a left onto San Francisco's Bryant Street, right near the General Motors-owned company's garage. Then, whoops: Another self-driving Cruise, this one being driven by a Cruise human employee, thumped into its rear bumper. According to a Department of Motor Vehicles report, the kind any autonomous vehicle tester must submit to the state of California after any incident, both vehicles escaped with only scuffs. "There were no injuries and the police were not called," Cruise reported. A single incident does not a metaphor about self-driving technology make, but Cruise has had flurries of bumping and rear-ending incidents in San Francisco, where it has tested its technology since 2016.

One of the best ways to diagnose a heart attack is to use an electrocardiograph to measure the electrical output from the heart. A standard ECG records the electrical signal from 12 different leads attached to different parts of the patient's body. These signals reveal the electrical behavior of the heart in various ways. Cardiologists have long known that the signals from some of these leads are more useful diagnostically than others when it comes to heart attacks. But interpreting the data is hard.

Many researchers have co-opted powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs, to run climate models and other scientific programs, while tech and financial giants use large banks of these processors to train machine-learning algorithms. They all have video-game players to thank for the emergence of these workhorse processors: It was gamers who stoked the original demand for chips that could do the massive amounts of parallel number crunching required to produce rich graphics quickly enough to keep up with fast-paced action. By 1995, movies like Pixar's Toy Story, the first full-length digitally animated movie, had demonstrated the potential of high-quality computer animation. But gamers drove the technology in a very specific direction. Pixar had created Toy Story's graphics by slowly rendering each frame individually and then stitching it all together.

NPR-Marist poll finds that almost half of online shoppers go to Amazon first when they look for an item. Other search engines know what customers look for but Amazon knows what they ultimately buy.

Kroger's efforts to play catch-up with Amazon in grocery delivery have taken it to the fringes of the "last mile" and a new partnership with an autonomous-driving startup that was hatched by guys who were involved in getting Google's driverless-car operation off the ground. It's the latest indication that the commercial logistics business is likely to have much more to do with shaping the early days of self-driven automotive transportation than the consumer side is. The Cincinnati-based supermarket chain, largest in the United States, said that it will begin piloting an "on-road, fully autonomous delivery experience" with Nuro, maker of the world's first unmanned road vehicle, in a city that the retailer hasn't yet announced, beginning this fall. The partnership will allow customers to place same-day delivery orders through Kroger's ClickList digital ordering system and Nuro's app. During the test, orders will be delivered by Nuro's fleet of autonomous vehicles, with human safety drivers to start out.

The US is going to start taking rogue drones out of the air… by launching its own drones to smash into them. Attacks using consumer drones are on the rise. In 2017, ISIS forces in Mosul attacked US-backed Iraqi troops with dozens of consumer drones dropping grenades, and earlier this year a swarm of small drones attacked a Russian airbase in Syria. Such attacks are difficult to counter with existing weapons.