Apple is working to make its iPhone and other gadgets smarter, responding to competitors' recent moves by building more artificial intelligence into its Siri digital assistant, photos, maps and other online services. The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers using the fingerprint authorization on their iPhone or Apple Watch. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham and Jon Swartz offer their take on Apple's WWDC developer conference, and how it stacked up to recent Facebook and Google sessions for developers. SAN FRANCISCO -- We've been here before, crammed in a luxurious theater, music pulsating, fellow reporters tweeting, anxiously awaiting Apple's vision to match the razzle-dazzle from recent Facebook and Google events. At WWDC, Apple's annual conference for software developers, there was a fleeting flash today of what it has in story for the "it" technology of the moment: artificial intelligence. For several minutes during a two-hour presentation, Apple offered a glimpse into its immediate plans for Siri, the voice-activated agent that stands to get more relevant with better AI. Siri will be able to scan Apple TV for genre-specific movies, Apple execs said. It will book rides on Uber and Lyft, and will make payments via Square Cash and others.

As per usual, Apple's annual developer's conference followed on the heels of Google's, with the tech giants trumpeting their latest updates for both consumers and coders one after the other. On Monday, CEO Tim Cook's team repeated some of the same tropes and themes as their rivals, from making several Gold State Warriors references to announcing crowd-pleasing features that attempt to minimize taps and maximize our ability to be expressive through our texting machines. But if Google's big point was emphasizing how human-like its technology has become, Apple's was emphasizing how much the company cares about humanity itself -- even if many of the biggest cheers came in response to updates about things like triple-sized emoji. Apple can seem like a exclusive tower made of silicon and secrets, and the company knows that is part of its appeal. Thousands of developers were kept in masses behind guardrails leading up to the keynote.

Apple also introduced a new design language throughout iOS apps including Music, Photos, and News, which unifies some of the options and controls across the apps. Another major development from the developer perspective is the opening of many APIs for control of an incorporation into technologies such as Siri, Photos, Maps, Phone, and Messages. Apple's 3D Touch technology will be greatly expanded, ironically introduced to solve a problem Apple introduced with the iPhone 6s ... the dramatically faster Touch ID means that users often unlock the iPhone too quickly to read notifications. In iOS 10, notifications can respond to 3D Touch to respond to notifications entirely from the lockscreen. The lockscreen also gains a dedicated music-control pane, as well as new slide controls (left to access camera, right to access widgets).

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

Bolstered by a bevy of marketing partners and the exhibition muscle of its parent company's cinema chain, Legendary Entertainment's "Warcraft" smashed its way into the box-office record books last week in China, earning 156 million in its first five days in theaters. The long-awaited fantasy film based on Blizzard Entertainment's popular "Warcraft" video game series occupied nearly two-thirds of all screens on the mainland upon its opening Wednesday, with 120,000 screenings alone on its first day in theaters – a record, according to Dalian Wanda, which purchased Legendary this year. The opening-week performance of "Warcraft" already has outstripped the entire China runs of other major Hollywood films released this year including "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and "Kung Fu Panda 3." And the movie's China receipts have been some six times greater than its domestic earnings. Near the end of "Warcraft" -- an elaborate, exhausting cinematic collision of humans and Orcs, live actors and digital extras, geek enthusiasms and multiplex dollars -- the director Duncan Jones grants us a breather from all the thundering mayhem. Near the end of "Warcraft" -- an elaborate, exhausting cinematic collision of humans and Orcs, live actors and digital extras, geek enthusiasms and multiplex dollars -- the director Duncan Jones grants us a breather from all the thundering mayhem.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place in San Francisco, where Tim Cook and other executives are expected to reveal changes to Apple operating systems, give Siri a bigger role, and make the App Store more compelling for developers. We'll be live-blogging here, as our reporters at the Bill Graham Auditorium, follow the coverage. Thanks the audience and Apple community and ends WWDC. App varies from teaching young people simple code to introducing more complicated coding features. "Swift Playground will revolutionize the way people learn to code," Cook said.

Once a year, when Slava Epstein was growing up in Moscow, his mother took him to the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, a showcase for the wonders of Soviet life. The expo featured many things--from industrial harvesters to Uzbek wine--but Epstein, who began going in the nineteen-sixties, when he was eight or nine, was interested primarily in one: the Cosmos Pavilion, a building the size of a hangar, with a ceiling shaped like a giant inverted parabola. Space fever was running high in the city. Since 1961, when Yuri Gagarin orbited the globe, unmanned vessels had been launched toward Mars and Venus. Beside the expo's entrance, the towering Monument to the Conquerors of Space depicted a probe swooping up to the heavens. The Pavilion displayed futuristic technology--Vostok rockets and Soyuz orbiters--but Epstein was less interested in the glories of advanced thruster design than in the glories of space. He wanted to devote himself to astronomy. When a textbook that he found on the topic began with algebraic formulas, he prodded his older brother to explain them. During high school, he enrolled in classes in physics and math at Moscow State University. His parents disapproved of his desired career: because he is half Jewish, Epstein would face harsh Soviet quotas limiting Jews in the study of physics, a field deemed relevant to national security. But after his first lecture the professor invited him for a walk, and affirmed what they had been saying all along. "Don't do it," he warned. Soviet Russia may have been a fatalist's paradise, but from a young age Epstein felt that he was hardwired for optimism. He convinced himself that what is truly important in science is the ability to connect ideas, no matter the field, and so he took up biology. Rather than telescopes, he would use microscopes, which he began taking with him on trips to the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, to study protozoa along the shore--research that could be conducted with minimal state interference. Over time, he grew interested in even smaller, more ancient forms of life: bacteria. Studying microbes inevitably causes a reordering of one's perceptions: for more than two billion years, they were the only life on this planet, and they remain in many ways its dominant life form. To a remarkable extent, the microbial cosmos was less explored than the actual cosmos: precisely how the organisms evolve, replicate, fight, and communicate remains unclear. Nearly all of microbiology, Epstein eventually learned, was built on the study of a tiny fraction of microbial life, perhaps less than one per cent, because most bacteria could not be grown in a laboratory culture, the primary means of analyzing them. By the time he matured as a scientist, many researchers had given up trying to cultivate new species, writing off the majority as "dark matter"--a term used in astronomy for an inscrutable substance that may make up most of the universe but cannot be seen.

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

Technically, the E3 kicks off Tuesday, June 14, but we all know that much of the show's biggest news out will be announced before the show floor opens, at the parade of publisher "keynote" press conferences in the days prior to the show. With more and more publishers broadcasting live-streams, there will be more live content coming out of this year's show than ever before. We've rounded up some of the biggest broadcasts, including all of the press conferences, so you can follow along the news as it happens, hassle-free. As you may or may not have heard, EA backed out of E3 this year. Instead, it hosted its own fan event, EA Play, adjacent to the show.