The recent eruption of Erta Ale volcano in northeastern Ethiopia highlights the speed and impact of space artificial intelligence (A.I.). One of our planet's few exposed lava lakes is changing, and artificial intelligence is helping NASA understand how. On January 21, a fissure opened at the top of Ethiopia's Erta Ale volcano --one of the few in the world with an active lava lake in its caldera. Volcanologists sent out requests for NASA's Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) spacecraft to image the eruption, which was large enough to begin reshaping the volcano's summit. As it turned out, that spacecraft was already busy collecting data of the lava lake.

NHGRI medical geneticist Paul Kruszka explains that "Human malformation syndromes appear different in different parts of the world. Even experienced clinicians have difficulty diagnosing genetic syndromes in non-European populations." That's where facial recognition comes in. The NHGRI team studied the photographs of 101 participants with the rare disease from Africa, Asia and Latin America. They then developed a facial recognition tech that was able to correctly diagnose the condition 96.6 percent of the time during their trial runs.

Thanks to Vodafone, the Taurus-Littrow Valley will get its first mobile phone base station next year. It hasn't needed one up to now, as the last visitors drove through in 1972, the year before the mobile phone was invented. Next year, though, it will get the very latest in 4G LTE coverage, when it receives a visit from two very special self-driving vehicles. Taurus-Littrow is the landing site of Apollo 17, where humans last walked on the moon. Next year, an international group based in Berlin plans to send a mission carrying two lunar rovers to explore the site.

Legal research company Casetext has raised $12 million in a new round of funding. The money will be used to expand its software platform that offers insights into cases cited in legal documents and further develop CARA (Case Analysis Research Assistant), an AI-powered assistant for lawyers. Using natural language understanding, Casetext scans the text of legal briefs to locate and analyze case citations. The company also offers access to 10 million court cases and statutes annotated by a community of litigators. The $12 million funding round was led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, 8VC, and Red Sea Ventures.

The UK will ban people from flying into the country with large electronic devices by Saturday. The Department for Transport said that it will implement the ban on laptops and tablets from a range of countries this week. Any large gadgets flying from a range of affected countries will have to be put into the luggage hold, and can't be taken onto the plane. Airlines are being told to implement the rules "over the coming days and no later than 25 March", a DfT spokesperson said. Passengers "should go to the airport with the expectation that the measures are already in effect", she said.

In the 1980s, a bioengineer named Norm Heglund was doing field work in Kenya, hoping to uncover the secrets of locomotion. Heglund and his team spent their days shooting wild animals with tranquilizer darts in Kenya's national parks then dragging them back to a research station, run by the East Africa Veterinary Research Organization, in nearby Muguga for testing. Every day, the wives of local colleagues stopped by the lab to chit chat. They carried impossibly huge bundles of food, clothing, or other supplies perfectly balanced on top of their heads. During one lunch break, a few weeks into his stay, he realized something.

Apple has released the iPhone in red, a brand new colour for its handsets. The special edition phone will help benefit (PRODUCT)RED, the AIDS charity. Apple has worked with the charity a number of times in the past, creating red products and supporting it in a range of different ways. It was unveiled alongside an update version of the smaller iPad Pro, and the removal of the old iPad Air. That tablet features a brighter display and improved performance, as well as being sold at an even cheaper price.

There's little doubt that the tech industry, like many industries, has unequal representation when it comes to gender. This has enormous impact across a range of areas, deeply affecting people's lives based on unconscious assumptions society should have moved away from. Melinda Gates noted at this year's Code Conference: "When I graduated 34% of undergraduates in computer science were women… we're now down to 17%." While the tech industry is building 3D printers and electric cars, it still hasn't built bridges for equal representation. As experts have noted, it's too easy to blame an absence of women or women having no interest in tech.

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves--constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made. This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it's been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind.

The African smartphone market is gaining rapid traction. According to predictions, smartphones sold this year will outnumber feature phone sales, and mobile penetration is far higher than line-based internet access. Currently, most people in Africa use text messages to send money with a service called M-Pesa from the largest tech start-up in Kenya. Now, chatbots could potentially replace text-based transactions altogether. Budapest-based Hungarian start-up UXstudio has created a chatbot called Nuru.