Is Honda's walking robot Asimo marrying Pepper, the chattering robot from SoftBank? Automaker Honda Motor Co. and internet company SoftBank said Thursday they will work together on artificial intelligence to develop products with sensors and cameras that can converse with drivers. Asimo, first shown in 1996, walks, runs, dances and grips things. Pepper, which went on sale last year, doesn't have legs but is programmed to recognize mood swings in people it interacts with. Major automakers and technology companies are interested in robotics to improve driving safety and comfort.

A live action Pokemon movie is to begin production in 2017, Legendary Entertainment has confirmed. The film will focus on Detective Pikachu - a new character in the universe, introduced through a video game in Japan earlier this year. The news comes following the huge international success of the Pokemon Go game in recent weeks. Its popularity led to a 25% jump in shares for Nintendo - part owner of the brand. Pokemon was first released as a video game in 1996 and led to an animated TV series and film franchise, plus merchandise including trading cards - which became a craze in UK schools in the early 2000s. It is not the first film Legendary Entertainment has produced that is based on a video game - the company recently released Warcraft in cinemas, based on the successful role playing game World of Warcraft.

The human eye is capable of detecting the presence of a single photon, the smallest measurable unit of light, in the dark, researchers said. In a study first published in the journal Nature Communications Tuesday, scientists found that the human eye can sense individual particles, seemingly concluding the quest to test the limits of human vision. "If you imagine this, it is remarkable: a photon, the smallest physical entity with quantum properties of which light consists, is interacting with a biological system consisting of billions of cells, all in a warm and wet environment," Alipasha Vaziri, lead researcher from the Rockefeller University in New York, reportedly said. "The most amazing thing is that it's not like seeing light. It's almost a feeling, at the threshold of imagination," he told the Nature. The experiment was conducted with three subjects who sat in a dark room for nearly 40 minutes and were then told to look into an optical system.

Car maker Honda is teaming up with electronics giant Softbank to work on artificial intelligence (AI). The pair have confirmed they will develop an innovative range of products, which use sensors and cameras to improve the breadth and depth of communication possible between car and driver. Soft bank's pionerering Pepper robot was designed to live with humans and the company will now work with Honda through its robotics unit – Cocoro SB – to create products that give drivers a feeling of'friendship' with their cars. Honda is opening a new AI laboratory in Tokyo in September as it continues its investment in the future of robotics.

Google is putting DeepMind's machine learning to work on managing their sprawling data centers' energy usage, and it's is performing like a boss -- the company reports a 15% drop in consumption since the AI took over. Google is undeniably a huge part of western civilization. The company's data servers pretty much handle all of my mail at this point, along with YouTube, social media platforms and much more. But even so, it's easy to forget that the Google we know and interact with every day is just the tip of the iceberg; it relies on huge data servers to process, transfer and store information -- and all this hardware needs a lot of power. So much power, in fact, that the company decided to do something about it.

While the idea of Tesla car-sharing seems new, it is not the first time the company's cars, coupled with autonomous technology, have come up in discussions about the sharing economy. Back in 2015, Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Uber investor DFJ, told an audience that Uber's Travis Kalanick had indicated he would buy every Tesla car produced if they could be made autonomous by 2020. These were the days when it appeared a Uber and Tesla partnership could be on the horizon. Musk himself paused long enough on an earnings call to raise suspicions when discussing the possibility of such a partnership. These days, it seems that Uber has gone its own way in developing an autonomous car solution.

Researchers used a combination of three imaging techniques and a machine learning system to create this new map of the brain, which includes 180 distinct regions in each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex (the brain's outermost region). The different colors relate to how connected an area is to a specific sensory input: Red is hearing, green is touch, and blue is vision. Mixed colors represent areas where two senses overlap. A group of researchers have developed a new map of the cerebral cortex of the human brain, revealing 100 new distinct regions in each hemisphere. Representing the most detailed map of the brain yet, it's an achievement of a longstanding goal, and researchers say it will provide a crucial tool to understand how differences in even extremely small brain regions relate to behavior and disease.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at the Model X launch event in Fremont, Calif. SAN FRANCISCO – Watch out, fellow automakers: Elon Musk announced Wednesday evening that Tesla Motors, known for pricey electric sedans, hopes to expand into small SUVs, a pickup and even heavy-duty semis and buses in a bid to revolutionize transportation as we know it. That bombshell was just part of Musk's long-touted Tesla master plan, a follow-up to one issued when the company was just starting out, outlining a strategy that pivots the company from a builder of niche automobiles to a producer of a broad range of passenger and commercial vehicles that eschew fossil fuel. Also noted in the plan, which Musk published on the company's website, is the company's more well-known pursuit of the consumer solar business through its planned acquisition of SolarCity. Tesla will "create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage, expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments, develop a self-driving capability that is 10 (times) safer than manual via massive fleet learning, (and) enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it," reads Musk's "Master Plan, Part Deux."

One of the cybersecurity promises of machine learning (particularly "deep learning") is that it can accurately identify malware nobody has ever seen before because of what it's learned about malware it's seen in the past. Konstantin Berlin, senior research engineer at Invincea Labs, is trying to take the techology further, so that organizations can get more information about unfamiliar code than simply "it's benign" or "it's malicious." Berlin, who will be presenting his work next month at Black Hat, says security pros also want to know more about the malware family so they can plan their mitigation strategy accordingly. His technique, he says will do that, as well as improve malware triage and attribution by using new methods of recognizing similarities between malware samples. This can all be done in a customized way that enables each organization to choose what features and factors interest them most.

Chinese technology company Baidu today announced the launch of a few new services within its Baidu Open Cloud public cloud infrastructure portfolio. Baidu TianSuan (Smart Big Data) lets customers "collect, store, process and analyze big data," Baidu said in a statement. Baidu TianXiang (Smart Multimedia Cloud) includes face recognition and live video streaming, while Baidu TianGong (Intelligent IoT Service) is a full-stack platform for integrating cloud applications with internet-connected devices. The additions bring Baidu more in line with the world's leading cloud infrastructure providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Amazon and Microsoft have both introduced Internet of Things (IoT) services.