SINGAPORE--Singapore became the first country in the world to launch a self-driving taxi service on Thursday, beating ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. by mere days to public road tests of a technology that could revolutionize the transport industry. The trial, although small, illustrates how intense the global race to develop autonomous driving vehicles has become. The field has traditionally been dominated by U.S. tech giants like Uber and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -0.32 % 's Google. Singapore's nuTonomy, founded by two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Thursday it began testing a free taxi-hailing service in a small business district in Singapore called one-north, a campus-like space dominated by tech firms and biotechnology companies. Other tech companies including Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. BIDU 0.60 % have been testing self-driving cars on the roads for years, but this is the first time the vehicles have been open to public use.

NAGOYA – Toyota Motor Corp.'s famed quality control is being adopted by companies outside the auto sector and is now spreading into medical care. Nagoya University Hospital in Aichi Prefecture, where Toyota is headquartered, has started a program in collaboration with the Toyota group that aims to improve workflow and to reduce the number of mistakes by pharmacists. Called ASUISHI and subsidized by the government, the program is targeted at doctors across the nation and aimed at boosting safety and quality in medical care and treatment. Toyota's quality control methods include thorough reviews of its production systems and work environment in the event of mistakes to identify the root cause. Corrective measures are then added to standard procedures to avoid recurrences.

An autonomous vehicle is parked for its test drive in Singapore Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2016. The world's first self-driving taxis, operated by nuTonomy, an autonomous vehicle software startup, will be picking up passengers in Singapore starting Thursday, Aug. 25. The service will start small - six cars now, growing to a dozen by the end of the year. The ultimate goal, say nuTonomy officials, is to have a fully self-driving taxi fleet in Singapore by 2018, which will help sharply cut the number of cars on Singapore's congested roads.

Top auto-parts suppliers Delphi Automotive DLPH 1.16 % PLC and Mobileye MBLY -3.60 % NV are joining forces to develop a fully autonomous driving system that car makers could begin placing in their vehicles beginning in 2019. The two hope the development partnership will produce off-the-shelf systems for everything from small cars to sport utilities and pickup trucks--and help them carve out a central role in the race to supply technology for driverless vehicles. The tie-up, which was disclosed on Tuesday, comes as big auto makers and tech companies are moving independently on autonomous-vehicle developments. Delphi, a former General Motors Co. GM -0.38 % spinoff, and Mobileye, of Jerusalem, now supply auto makers with the sensors and software that are the building blocks of autonomous-vehicle development programs. Shares of both have struggled recently as car sales plateau and customers put pieces in place to eventually develop their own gear.

The acquisition this month by ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing Technology of Uber Technologies' China operation was a reminder of how strong Chinese tech companies have become domestically at outmaneuvering foreign rivals.

China has revealed the first pictures of the rover it is going to send to mars in 2020. The newly-unveiled little robot will explore the planet for three months, according to state media, and it is the latest part of China's ambitious and expensive space programme. China became the third country to put a man in space, after the US and Russia, in 2003. Since then it has been aiming at other achievements in its space programme. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

Since I was a young girl studying computer science and engineering in India, I've always been interested in exploring how science and technology can help solve real-world problems. In my IBM Research career that spans 20 years and counting, I've indulged my passion for problem-solving by building technologies that help businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes overcome their challenges. I try to instill this fascination for problem-solving in my 10-year-old daughter, who recently attended a robotics summer camp. When she came home frustrated from the camp one day, she asked me, "Why should I care about artificial intelligence? What does A.I. have to do with me?"

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Computers have already beaten us at chess, Jeopardy and Go, the ancient board game from Asia. And now, in the raging war with machines, human beings have lost yet another battle -- over typing. Turns out voice recognition software has improved to the point where it is significantly faster and more accurate at producing text on a mobile device than we are at typing on its keyboard. The study ran tests in English and Mandarin Chinese. Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng says this should not feel like defeat. "Humanity was never designed to communicate by using our fingers to poke at a tiny little keyboard on a mobile phone.