Green light is given to the 2020 Mars ExoMars mission - but will Europe ever manage to land on the red planet? Not just for lonely men: Sex robots will let couples have... From a dazzling supermoon to a stunning meteor shower: Here... Are these the legs of Queen Nefertari? You could book a holiday on the MOON by 2026: Private firm... Not just for lonely men: Sex robots will let couples have... From a dazzling supermoon to a stunning meteor shower: Here... Are these the legs of Queen Nefertari? You could book a holiday on the MOON by 2026: Private firm...

DON'T make fun weekend plans: Researchers say too much planning will kill your enjoyment A researcher from The Ohio State University found that it is common for people to lose excitement over plans they scheduled in advance. Not just for lonely men: Sex robots will let couples have... From a dazzling supermoon to a stunning meteor shower: Here... Are these the legs of Queen Nefertari? Mystery mummified... Britain's ancient multicultural heritage revealed: Roman... Not just for lonely men: Sex robots will let couples have... From a dazzling supermoon to a stunning meteor shower: Here... Are these the legs of Queen Nefertari? Mystery mummified... Britain's ancient multicultural heritage revealed: Roman... Across 13 studies, researchers found that the simple act of scheduling makes otherwise fun tasks feel more like work.

Not just for lonely men: Sex robots will let couples have... You could book a holiday on the MOON by 2026: Private firm... From a dazzling supermoon to a stunning meteor shower: Here... Britain's ancient multicultural heritage revealed: Roman... Not just for lonely men: Sex robots will let couples have... You could book a holiday on the MOON by 2026: Private firm... From a dazzling supermoon to a stunning meteor shower: Here... Britain's ancient multicultural heritage revealed: Roman... The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been hailed as the'most expensive weapon in history.'

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Back in June, IHMC posted a video of ATLAS walking on the edges of rotated cinder block all placed in a line. This latest video shows the robot walking on the edges of cinder blocks that have also been rotated in the horizontal plane, giving the robot's feet less surface area to work with: There's one more dimension to add before ATLAS will be walking on randomly positioned cinder blocks, and we're expecting to see the real robot handling point contacts soon as well.

Analyses performed using Spark of brain activity in a larval zebrafish: embedding dynamics of whole-brain activity into lower-dimensional trajectories. This open source computing framework unifies streaming, batch, and interactive big data workloads to unlock new applications. The growth of data volumes in industry and research poses tremendous opportunities, as well as tremendous computational challenges. As data sizes have outpaced the capabilities of single machines, users have needed new systems to scale out computations to multiple nodes. As a result, there has been an explosion of new cluster programming models targeting diverse computing workloads.1,4,7,10 At first, these models were relatively specialized, with new models developed for new workloads; for example, MapReduce4 supported batch processing, but Google also developed Dremel13 for interactive SQL queries and Pregel11 for iterative graph algorithms. In the open source Apache Hadoop stack, systems like Storm1 and Impala9 are also specialized. Even in the relational database world, the trend has been to move away from "one-size-fits-all" systems.18 Unfortunately, most big data applications need to combine many different processing types. The very nature of "big data" is that it is diverse and messy; a typical pipeline will need MapReduce-like code for data loading, SQL-like queries, and iterative machine learning. Specialized engines can thus create both complexity and inefficiency; users must stitch together disparate systems, and some applications simply cannot be expressed efficiently in any engine. In 2009, our group at the University of California, Berkeley, started the Apache Spark project to design a unified engine for distributed data processing.

Neural networks, machine-learning systems, predictive analytics, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and other components of what's broadly defined as'artificial intelligence' (AI) are currently undergoing a boom: research is progressing apace, media attention is at an all-time high, and organisations are increasingly implementing AI solutions in pursuit of automation-driven efficiencies. The first thing to establish is what we're not talking about, which is human-level AI -- often termed'strong AI' or'artificial general intelligence' (AGI). A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom reported a 50 percent chance that AGI would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90 percent by 2075; so-called'superintelligence' -- which Bostrom defines as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest" -- was expected some 30 years after the achievement of AGI (Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 33). This stuff will happen, and it certainly needs careful consideration, but it's not happening right now. What is happening right now, at an increasing pace, is the application of AI algorithms to all manner of processes that can significantly affect peoples' lives -- at work, at home and as they travel around. Although hype around these technologies is approaching the'peak of expectation' (sensu Gartner), there's a potential fly in the AI ointment: the workings of many of these algorithms are not open to scrutiny -- either because they are the proprietary assets of an organisation or because they are opaque by their very nature.

Artificial intelligence and increasing automation is going to decimate middle class jobs, worsening inequality and risking significant political upheaval, Stephen Hawking has warned. In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines. Technology has already gutted many traditional manufacturing and working class jobs -- but now it may be poised to wreak similar havoc with the middle classes.

As in the global survey, we are concerned with platform business models and the design choices that allow these business models to grow. We find the term platform, which is well-established in economic and management literature, offers a more useful and accurate term than some of the terms that have been used such as "share economy companies," "internet companies" or, even more broadly, "tech companies." Network effects are a key characteristic that distinguish platforms from other business models. As more users engage with a platform, the more attractive the platform becomes to potential new users. When more users attract more users, a dynamic is created that in turn triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of growth.

WhatsApp is about to stop working on millions of phones. Older devices are going to have their support cut off so that they'll no longer be able to use the free chat app. Phones including the iPhone 3GS and Android handsets are about to stop being supported by WhatsApp's engineers. And when that happens, owners will no longer be able to send or receive messages. WhatsApp first announced the change early this year.

Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the "retinue," a constellation of influential and supportive people whom one imagines in an enveloping cloud as one meditates. I took the concept one step further and decided to create an actual photo montage that I could hang on the wall above my desk: my childhood piano teacher, my high school English teacher, my rabbi, mentors in science, writers who encouraged me--in all, 20 people who had profoundly influenced me. Some members of my retinue were still living, some not. In some cases I could find the photographs myself. In others, I had to contact the mentors. When I finally tracked down William Gerace, who introduced me to physics nearly 50 years ago, he was puzzled as to why I should desire such a montage. We had not spoken for decades. Reluctantly, he sent me an old, out-of-focus photo of himself, dating back to the days when I knew him. Now, Gerace is a professor of science education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, after a 30-year career as a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, during which time he made the transition from theoretical nuclear physicist to leader in science education and co-founder of the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. When I knew him, in the late 1960s, he was a lowly instructor in physics at Princeton, where he had recently received his Ph.D. I was an undergraduate. The photo shows a man in his late 20s, about 5 feet 6, slight in build, dark hair beginning to thin, dressed in a button-down shirt and blue sweater, and a Mona Lisa smile. Each new mathematical technique Bill taught us was offered with the enthusiasm of a 12-year-old boy showing his friend a strange new butterfly. I first met Bill Gerace during a physics lab my sophomore year.