NASA has spotted a second perfectly rectangular iceberg in the Antarctic. The second rectangular berg, known as a'tabular' iceberg, was spotted off the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, near the Larsen C ice shelf and close to the first one. It is part of a large'field of bergs NASA experts may have recently broken off the shelf, and say the sharp angles and flat surfaces are evidence the break occurred very recently. Just past the original rectangular iceberg, which is visible from behind the outboard engine, IceBridge saw another relatively rectangular berg and the A68 iceberg in the distance. Tabular icebergs split off the edges of ice shelves in the same way a fingernail that grows too long ends up cracking off.

Climate change has a direct impact on the agrarian societies, the frequency of natural disasters and the overall ecology of the planet. Using artificial intelligence, countries like Norway and India have made significant development in increasing their crop yields (30% increase in groundnut yields) and production of flexible and autonomous renewable energy grids and circuits. AI has also helped scientists map cyclones, atmospheric rivers, and weather fronts with 89 to 99 percent accuracy. These things were often hard to identify and predict beforehand, until now. Today, issues like water conservation, agriculture, biodiversity, and climate change are increasingly getting addressed by AI-powered terrestrial machines and geospatial satellites.

The ability to conduct logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligent behavior, and thus an important problem along the way to human-level artificial intelligence. Traditionally, symbolic methods from the field of knowledge representation and reasoning have been used to equip agents with capabilities that resemble human logical reasoning qualities. More recently, however, there has been an increasing interest in using machine learning rather than logic-based formalisms to tackle these tasks. In this paper, we employ state-of-the-art methods for training deep neural networks to devise a novel model that is able to learn how to effectively perform basic ontology reasoning. This is an important and at the same time very natural reasoning problem, which is why the presented approach is applicable to a plethora of important real-world problems. We present the outcomes of several experiments, which show that our model learned to perform precise reasoning on diverse and challenging tasks. Furthermore, it turned out that the suggested approach suffers much less from different obstacles that prohibit symbolic reasoning, and, at the same time, is surprisingly plausible from a biological point of view.

Humans' time may have run out and artificial intelligence could be about to take our place on Earth, according to James Lovelock. The leading environmental thinker, who became famous for Gaia theory and is soon to turn 100, said that the Earth was in dire trouble and could soon experience intense climate-related disasters. But he still believes himself to be an optimist and thinks that new kinds of life, in the form of AI, will be ready to take over from humans. Amid a flood in Islampur, Jamalpur, Bangladesh, a woman on a raft searches for somewhere dry to take shelter. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea level rise, which is expected to make tens of millions of people homeless by 2050.

Why are so many AI researchers so worried about lethal autonomous weapons? What makes autonomous weapons so much worse than any other weapons we have today? And why is it so hard for countries to come to a consensus about autonomous weapons? Not surprisingly, the short answer is: it's complicated. In this month's podcast, Ariel spoke with experts from a variety of perspectives on the current status of LAWS, where we are headed, and the feasibility of banning these weapons. Guests include ex-Pentagon advisor Paul Scharre (3:40), artificial intelligence professor Toby Walsh (40:51), Article 36 founder Richard Moyes (53:30), Campaign to Stop Killer Robots founders Mary Wareham and Bonnie Docherty (1:03:38), and ethicist and co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, Peter Asaro (1:32:39). You can listen to the podcast above, and read the full transcript below. You can check out previous podcasts on SoundCloud, iTunes, GooglePlay, and Stitcher. If you work with ...

These are among the most perilous of environments on planet Earth, places where few humans dare tread. They ain't got nothin', though, on waters of our planet's polar regions, where frigid temperatures and considerable pressures would snuff a puny human like you in a heartbeat. This is the stuff their tough-as-hell bodies were made for. But it comes at a price: Getting the bot back to its icebreaking boat alive can be more challenging than communicating with a Mars rover millions of miles away. Seabed doesn't swim like your typical autonomous underwater vehicle.

This Saturday, the Robot Film Festival is taking place in Portland, Ore. This is the 8th year of the festival, and after bouncing around between San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles, the festival has (at least temporarily) settled on the greatest city on Earth (and coincidentally my hometown), Portland. The theme this year is "Vintage Arcade Revival," celebrating the culture and technology of the 1980s. Or at least, celebrating what passed for culture and technology back then. I'll be giving a short introductory talk to help kick off the film festival, about the progress we've seen in social home robots from the 1980s to today.

SYDNEY – Australia will invest 7 billion Australian dollars ($5.2 billion) to develop and buy high-tech U.S. drones for joint military operations and to monitor waters including the South China Sea, it said Tuesday. Canberra has been embarking on its largest peacetime naval investment through a massive shipbuilding strategy that includes new submarines, offshore patrol vessels and frigates to shore up its defense capabilities. As part of this, the government will spend AU$1.4 billion to buy the first of six MQ-4C Triton maritime surveillance drones, with the aircraft to enter service from mid-2023, complementing seven P-8A Poseidon planes currently in use. "Together these aircraft will significantly enhance our anti-submarine warfare and maritime strike capability, as well as our search and rescue capability," Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in a statement. "This investment will protect our borders and make our region more secure."

When University of Delaware molecular biologist Adam Marsh was studying the DNA of worms living in Antarctica's frigid seas to understand how the organisms managed to survive--and thrive--in the extremely harsh polar environment, he never imagined his work might one day have a human connection. But it turns out that the genome of these Antarctic worms is very similar to ours in terms of the number and types of genes present. And the pioneering technique Marsh developed to analyze their genetic activity is proving valuable for human health care research. Marsh and a business partner established a biotechnology company to make that technique available for such study. Specifically, Marsh's method uses next-generation genetic sequencing data to measure how cells control the way genes are turned on or off, a process known as DNA methylation.

The mystery of a strange Martian rock formation that has baffled scientists for decades has now been solved. Since its discovery in the 1960s, researchres have been trying to work out exactly what causes the undulating hills and sharp ridges of the Medusae Fossae formation. The formation covers an area of about 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles) around the Martian equator and is described by Nasa as an'enigmatic pile of eroding sediments'. In the absence of any scientific explanation, conspiracy theorists have said that at least some of the exotic shapes found in the area belong to a'crashed UFO'. But a new study claims the rocks in this area of Mars are in fact the remains of volcanic eruptions that would have changed the climate of the red planet 3 billion years ago.