Octopus-like robots are plucking strawberries in Spain, in the US machines are vacuuming apples off the trees, and in the UK they are feeding and milking cows. Robots are taking over fields around the world, and last week food and rural affairs secretary Andrea Leadsom suggested they could help replace the thousands of EU workers who currently help put food on British tables. And it is not just Brexit that is forcing the agricultural industry to embrace the next phase of mechanisation. Farmers are already having to rethink their operations in the face of higher minimum pay – mainly a result of the national living wage for over-25s, which came into effect last year. Robotic milking machines, in which cows queue up to milk themselves, are now mainstream, while systems tat automatically feed or track the health of livestock are on the rise.

After a delayed launch and one aborted delivery attempt, SpaceX's caution paid off Thursday when its Dragon capsule stuffed full of food, equipment, and experiments successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS). Now on its 10th re-supply mission, the private space company has become an essential part of the supply lines supporting an increasingly intricate space operation. After a GPS error scuttled its first docking attempt Wednesday, the Dragon capsule smoothly slipped close enough to the ISS for the space station's robotic arm to snag the craft early Thursday morning, along with the 5,500 pounds of goodies on board. "Looks like we've got a great capture," radioed space station commander Shane Kimbrough. In addition to a much needed food refresh, the capsule also contains more than 250 science experiments.

Security, data privacy, reliability and regulatory compliance are critical factors when evaluating whether to move business applications from in-house client hosted environments to a cloud platform. In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Vandana Viswanathan, Associate Director at Cognizant, provided an orientation to the five stages required to implement a cloud hosted solution validation strategy. Speaker Bio Vandana Viswanathan is a solutions-driven information technology leader with over 15 years of experience providing consultative management in regulatory compliance, program & quality management, SDLC/QA transformation, testing account management and client relationship management services for clients across the globe. She acts as a trusted advisor for top 10 global industry Life Sciences clients. She has a high performance track record in implementing GAMP5, GDP, CMMI Level 5, HIPAA, SOX, ISO, BS7799, ITIL, 21 CFR Part 11 for Fortune 500 companies.

China has now overtaken Japan for having more robots than anywhere else in the world. The Chinese government is concerned about an ageing population and the rising cost of human labour making Chinese products less competitive. It is giving over $100 Billion in subsidies for companies to replace more human workers with robots. It's hoped that the workers that will no longer work in the factories will move to the growing service sector, in part to help look after the ageing population. Countries In the west have already lost large numbers of manufacturing jobs to china but we shouldn't get too smug about our white-collar jobs in high tech, administration, clerical and production being safe from A.I. systems in the future.

The award-winning show inspired by a singular graphic memoir. Plus: SCI-Arc in Mexico City, Oscar-nominated films that emerged from important plays, and a longtime curator leaves the downtown gallery he helped establish. I'm Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer for the Los Angeles, and I'm in your inbox with a weekly digest of everything culture: On March 7, Los Angeles will head to the polls to vote on a development measure that could affect the profile of the city. Measure S (formerly known as the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative) seeks to put a two-year moratorium on development projects that require an amendment to the city's general plan, among other factors. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne parses the measure and its backers, whose roots lie in anti-growth initiatives from the 1980s -- and whose vision of Los Angeles seems to lie squarely in the 1960s.

The ocean is essential to the livelihoods and food security of billions of people around the globe. Shipping, tourism, transport, fisheries, oil and gas, renewable energy all depend on the sea. Two years ago, economists put a dollar value on what our oceans are worth and came up with $24 trillion. If it were a country, the sea would be the seventh-largest economy on the planet. "When you look at the blue economy, it has an asset value of $24 trillion and that's delivering something between $4-500bn each year in terms of the dividend to humanity," says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute.

Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson's contention really is. Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology--from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services--are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine. That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who's worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee's claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence, according to Brynjolfsson, is a chart that only an economist could love.

The fast development of robotics has raised public concern about robots replacing workers not only on factory floors but also in offices, and causing a global unemployment crisis. To an extent, people's concern seems justified. For example, Apple Inc's largest original equipment manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group has started using robots in large numbers, resulting in many workers losing their jobs. An equally fearsome threat is the wide application of artificial intelligence, because it can render many professionals, including financial analysts, jobless. Japan-based Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Company, for instance, laid off 30 percent of its employees in the claims settlement department in January, as those posts were to be taken over by machines with artificial intelligence.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, writer Douglas Adams describes a "small, yellow, leech-like creature" called the Babel fish which "feeds on brain-wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language". Botanists have not discovered anything like the Babel fish, but the science fiction of universal translation is rapidly becoming reality thanks to technological advances. Most exciting for Hitchhiker fans is the Pilot earbud, backed by $3.5 million in crowdfunding raised by a startup called Waverly Labs. The company's chief executive Andrew Ochoa says: "We were really inspired with wearable technology and began working on the idea of a smart earpiece that could solve a global challenge. We were a small team back then, but we all came from different backgrounds and spoke different languages, and that's how we came up with the idea."

You don't have to be a data scientist to be fascinated by the world of machine learning, but a few travel guides might help you navigate the vast universe that also includes big data, artificial intelligence, and deep learning, along with a large dose of statistics and analytics. In this article, I'll look at three of the most popular machine learning libraries for Python. Released nearly a decade ago and primarily developed by a machine learning group at Université de Montréal, Theano is one of the most-used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers in the machine learning community. A 2016 paper, Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions, provides a thorough overview of the library. "Several software packages have been developed to build on the strengths of Theano, with a higher-level user interface, more suitable for certain goals," the paper explains.