The sea has been called the final frontier, as its unexplored depths hold mysteries that humans have not been able to reach – until now. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. And the maiden voyage of this droid proved bountiful as it pulled treasure from the'La Lune', King Louis XIV's vessel which has been sitting 328 feet below the surface since 1664. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of miles deeper than any human ever has Louis XIV's ship La Lune was wrecked off Toulon in November 1664.

This gif shows a spinning 3D view of one person's cerebral cortex. The color of each voxel indicates its semantic selectivity, or which category of words it is selective for. For example, green voxels are mostly selective for visual and tactile concepts, while red voxels are mostly selective social concepts. White lines show the outlines of known functional brain regions. It's like Google Maps for your cerebral cortex: A new interactive atlas, developed with the help of such unlikely tools as public radio podcasts and Wikipedia, purports to show which bits of your brain help you understand which types of concepts.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin typically write a public letter every year to reflect on the company's accomplishments and goals. This year, however, Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai penned the annual note for the first time. Pichai was made CEO of Google after a recent reorganization made the company a subsidiary of umbrella organization Alphabet. Pichai's note delves into Google's accomplishments around search, YouTube, artificial intelligence, and more. He writes that Google will continue to push heavily into the development of artificial intelligence as a means of improving and advancing its most important products.

The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China's Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust -- the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process -- clogs the air. Guangdong is the growth engine of China's manufacturing industry, generating 615bn in exports last year -- more than a quarter of the country's total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ( 600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans. Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers.

If you were in the audience for Oussama Khatib's IROS keynote in Hamburg last year, you may remember him talking about this crazy thing: We, of course, cornered Oussama immediately afterwards, because humanoid robotic submarine what?! It turned out that OceanOne, as it was called, was involved in a top secret (or something) project in collaboration with the French, which has (now that it's over and wasn't a disaster) been un-topsecretified so we can finally, finally tell you about it. Originally, OceanOne was not an archaeological robot--it was conceptualized by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia as a way of monitoring deep coral reefs in the Red Sea. Christian Voolstra, assistant professor of marine science at KAUST's Red Sea Research Center, explained where the idea came from in an interview last year: Currently people use a so-called ROV (remote operated vehicle), which is a little submarine with two robotic arms and very limited dexterity. Using the ROV to examine delicate coral colonies proved to be troublesome.

The Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei said that he will release a documentary film next year on the refugee crisis. Ai, often described as China's most high-profile artist, was speaking at a news conference in Bern to mark the opening of the "Chinese Whispers" exhibition, featuring around 150 works of contemporary Chinese artists - including Ai Weiwei artwork "Fragments"- at the Zentrum Paul Klee museum in Bern. Ai said he has spent a lot of time in refugee camps in recent months and witnessed a "very difficult situation" and decided to share his experience by making a film. "It's a documentary film, we have been shooting over 600 hours, and I've did hundred of interviews, there is all kind of people: politicians, refugees or priests or NGOs…all kind of people involved in this crisis," Weiwei told reporters. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei looks on as he visits a migrant's makeshift camp on the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, Greece, March 9, 2016.

Oussama Khatib held his breath as he swam through the wreck of La Lune, 100 meters below the Mediterranean. The flagship of King Louis XIV sank here in 1664, 20 miles off the southern coast of France, and no human had touched the ruins – or the countless treasures and artifacts the ship once carried – in the centuries since. With guidance from a team of skilled deep-sea archaeologists who had studied the site, Khatib, a professor of computer science at Stanford, spotted a grapefruit-size vase. He hovered precisely over the vase, reached out, felt its contours and weight, and stuck a finger inside to get a good grip. He swam over to a recovery basket, gently laid down the vase and shut the lid.

Image processing is a mathematically intensive operation & one of the biggest areas of research for a big data field. Image processing analytics has applications from processing a X-Ray to identifying stationary objects in a self driving car. We have collected a list of Python libraries which can help you in image processing. PIL (Python Imaging Library) supports opening, manipulating and saving the images in many file formats. It supports various image manipulations like filtering, enhancing, masking, handling transparency, additions and the like.

Stanford's five-foot "virtual diver" was originally built for studying coral reefs in the Red Sea where a delicate touch is necessary, but the depths go well beyond the range of meat-based divers. The "tail" section contains the merbot's onboard batteries, computers and array of eight thrusters, but it is the front half that looks distinctly humanoid with two eyes for stereoscopic vision and two nimble, articulated arms. Those arms are what make OceanOne ideal for fragile reef environments or priceless shipwrecks like La Lune, which sank off the coast of France over 350 years ago and hasn't been touched until now. Force sensors in each wrist transmit haptic feedback to the pilot, allowing them to feel the object's weight while staying high and dry on a dive ship. The robot's "brain" works with the tactile sensors to ensure the hands don't crush fragile objects, while the navigation system can automatically keep the body steady in turbulent seas.

It's that time of year: The most prepared of you are carboloading after weeks of training for Marathon Monday, while the least prepared are scrambling to finish your taxes. Either way, surely you'll need some breaks in the pasta and accounting. Should you take your kids to Disney's live-action/CGI remake of its beloved 1967 film "The Jungle Book"? Absolutely, says Ty Burr, who gives three stars to this movie placing "talking animals of almost tactile musculature and movement" in a lush jungle landscape; it holds up right until its overly frenetic final scenes. The jungle beasts are voiced by the likes of Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, and Scarlett Johanssen, and newcomer Neel Sethi is charming as Mowgli.