For the past year, Tara Hutchinson has been trying to figure out what will happen to a tall building made from thin steel beams when "the big one" hits. To do that, she has erected a six-story tower that rises like a lime-green finger from atop a shrub-covered hill on the outskirts of San Diego, California. Hundreds of strain gauges and accelerometers fill the building, so sensitive they can detect wind gusts pressing against the walls. Now, Hutchinson just needs an earthquake. In most of the world, this would be a problem.

A team of scientists has developed a model that can predict bat species most likely to transmit Ebola and other filoviruses. Findings highlight new potential hosts and geographic hotspots worthy of surveillance. So reports a new paper in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Filoviruses have devastating effects on people and primates, as evidenced by the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For nearly 40 years, preventing spillover events has been hampered by an inability to pinpoint which wildlife species harbor and spread the viruses.

Cisco is just wrapping up its annual CiscoLive customer event. This year's proceedings took over Las Vegas, occupying the Bellagio, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, and MGM Grand hotel. At least for this week, Cisco was bigger in Vegas than Wayne Newton, Steve Wynn and even Carrot Top. While digital transformation served as the main theme at CiscoLive, cybersecurity had a strong supporting role throughout the event. For example, of all of the technology and business initiatives at Cisco, CEO Chuck Robbins highlighted cybersecurity in his keynote presentation by bringing the GM of Cisco's cybersecurity business unit (David Goeckeler) on stage to describe his division's progress.

In the last 15 years, eBay grew from a simple website for online auctions to a full-scale e-commerce enterprise that processes petabytes of data to create a better shopping experience. When the user searches for a product, how do we find the best results for the user? One factor used in product ranking is user click-through rates or Product sell-through rate. In addition, user behavioural data gives the link from a query, to a product page view, and all the way to the purchase event. Through large-scale data analysis of query logs, we can create graphs between queries and products, and between different products.

The challenge asks computers to make sense out of specific sentences with grammar that humans can understand, but that may be obtuse to machines. For instance, in the sentence "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence," computers aren't able to parse who the word "they" is actually talking about. In contrast, human readers can understand it because of context clues. That's exactly the type of thinking researchers are looking to improve, namely with deep learning. The contest featured a grand prize of 25,000 for entrants who could achive 90 percent accuracy with similar sentences, and the best came from Quan Liu, a researcher from the University of Science and Technology of China as well as Nicos Issak, a researcher from the Open University of Cypress.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

We hear plenty of stories about AI being used in medicine, whether it's discovering new drugs or helping diagnose diseases based on symptoms which may be imperceptible to even expert physicians. One area we've not previously heard about machines working in, however, is in the role of "resource nurse" in a hospital. A nurse in this position in the labor and delivery ward is responsible for making decisions about the rooms patients should be assigned to, or which physician should perform a C-section. That's work that researchers in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) attempted to replicate recently -- with a Nao robot trained to learn how these scheduling choices are made and make similar decisions on its own. "What we were able to show is that a system with only a few dozen training examples from people performing a task very well was able to make decisions which appear to be reasonable," Professor Julie Shah, of of the authors of the study, told Digital Trends.

Apple fixed this error shortly after its virtual assistant was first released in 2011. But a new contest shows that computers still lack the common sense required to avoid such embarrassing mix-ups. The results of the contest were presented at an academic conference in New York this week, and they provide some measure of how much work needs to be done to make computers truly intelligent. The Winograd Schema Challenge asks computers to make sense of sentences that are ambiguous but usually simple for humans to parse. Disambiguating Winograd Schema sentences requires some common-sense understanding.

Space telescopes like Hubble has given astronomers a unique glimpse at the universe unhindered by the thick atmosphere of our planet that can blur our view. But hauling a huge telescope into space can be difficult, which makes it hard to build the bigger space telescopes needed to peer into the furthest reaches of space. This problem could be solved by a new telescope-constructing robot capable of assembling a space telescope while orbiting around Earth. Each folded'mode' would be stored in a cargo unit until it was ready to be attached to the central'hub' by the robot Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) came up with the new concept, which uses a modular structure so each part of the telescope could be carried separately. When the Hubble Space Telescope first went into space in 1990, it promised to provide spectacular views and an unprecedented insight into the cosmos.

In one month from now, the second edition of the Data Science Game, an international competition of data science for students, will start (more info here). Students in last year of Masters or PhDs from all around the world will be challenged through an online competion (June 17 to July 10) and a final hackathon (september 10-11). The first 20 teams of the online phase will come to Paris to demonstrate their skills and abilities to solve a data science challenge and meet professional data scientists coming from leading companies in Data Science (Microsoft, CapGemini, Axa Data Innovation Lab, etc.). We think our participants would love to learn from your data challenge experience since you were the former top ranked kaggler. But first of all, can you quickly introduce yourself?