Cylance, an Irvine, California-based cybersecurity startup that taps machine-learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to thwart malware, has raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors. The company was founded in 2012 by Stuart McClure, who sold an Internet security firm to McAfee for 86 million eight years ago and came on board as McAfee's chief technology officer (CTO). Prior to this round, Cylance had already raised about 77 million, including a 42 million round last July and 20 million the previous year. McClure has an interesting background -- his venture into the security realm was influenced by a deadly plane crash he was involved in back in 1989, one which resulted in the death of nine passengers. The event was apparently caused by a flaw in the Boeing 747's locking mechanism -- a known fault that the company ignored.

The newest weapon in the fight against wildlife poaching and illegal logging doesn't rely solely on boots or bullets, but on a computer software application driven by artificial intelligence. Called Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security, or PAWS, the app uses algorithms – similar to the mathematical models used to power computer games – to devise strategies for defeating those who seek to destroy nature. Thousands of animals are illegally slaughtered each year for their ivory, skin and bones for use in traditional medicines and feeding black market demand, while others meet their death at the hands of illicit trophy hunters, in what the World Wildlife Fund refers to as "a global poaching crisis." Last year alone, around 30,000 elephants and a record 1,338 rhinos were killed in Africa, while tens of thousands of other animals were poached and trafficked, "feeding an illegal wildlife trade that is increasingly being driven by international organized crime," the international conservation group said in a recent statement. Developed in 2013 and still in the test phase, the PAWS software analyzes data on terrain, topography, routes most frequently used by animals and paths traveled by poachers, said Milind Tambe, a computer scientist and professor of industrial systems engineering at USC who developed the technology with his doctoral students, including Fei Fang and Thanh Nguyen.

It was the day of the prom, and Chris Burwell needed a date. And so he did what any video game lover would do: He took a copy of Super Smash Bros. with him. It was a decision that happened "in the heat of the moment," he told New York magazine. He had his mother photograph him with the disc in its case, and then was concerned that when he arrived at the prom and was searched for contraband, it would be hard to explain why he was carrying the game. So he removed it from the case.

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

The Financial Times is reporting that Adidas is going to bring back production to its native Germany for the first time in 30 years. It's spent the last six months testing a robotic factory with automated production lines creating soles and uppers separately before stitching them together. Spurred on by the results, the company is working on a large facility near Ansbach which will begin making sneakers for sale at some point next year. Another facility will be built in the US, although both are expected to produce just a tiny fraction of the 301 million pairs the firm made last year. The paper explains that a robot production line takes about five hours to create each pair of sneakers from scratch. By comparison, it apparently takes "several weeks" to do the same job in an Asian factory with human workers.

One of the surprise products of last week's Computex IT show in Taiwan was the Zenbo robot from Asus. The cute, two-wheeled, home-help robot will read stories to kids, summon help for seniors in an emergency, and blast out songs while twirling around the floor to the music. But Asus is better known as a manufacturer of smartphones and laptop PCs. Home-help robots have been tried and failed before, so why did the company decide the time is right? IDG News Service spoke with Jonney Shih, chairman of Asus and the power behind much of the company's product planning and design, to find out more about Zenbo. Shih said he saw the robot as an evolution in computing -- something that followed on from the PC era, mobile computing, and the recent so-called Internet of Things.

But experts believe they could become our friends and even provide enjoyable company. Mr Kaname Hayashi, the'father' of Pepper, is developing a new machine, inspired by R2-D2, the friendly and resourceful droid featured in the Star Wars films. He believes it could provide company isolated people, such as the elderly. Mr Kaname Hayashi, the'father' of Pepper, is developing a new machine, inspired by R2-D2, the friendly and resourceful droid featured in the Star Wars films. For a long time, Japanese scientists have been trying to create eerily human-like machines with a'presence'.

On any given night, 7 billion people might look into the sky and see things from a slightly different perspective. It's one world map of the night sky that encapsulates the way we all see it--subjectively from around the globe--through software. Technically, the map doesn't have 7 billion views from across the globe. Instead, it features eight different climate regions, sort of like a weather map might. So it has the polar sky, the arid sky, and the tropical monsoon sky, interspersed across the continents.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the MIT Haystack Observatory have developed a new algorithm that could help astronomers produce the first image of a black hole. The algorithm would stitch together data collected from radio telescopes scattered around the globe, under the auspices of an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope. The project seeks, essentially, to turn the entire planet into a large radio telescope dish. "Radio wavelengths come with a lot of advantages," says Katie Bouman, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, who led the development of the new algorithm. "Just like how radio frequencies will go through walls, they pierce through galactic dust. We would never be able to see into the center of our galaxy in visible wavelengths because there's too much stuff in between."

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter--and more pervasive--by the day: Facebook recently announced that it's developing a way for its bots to not only read your private messages, but understand their meaning; Slack is on its way to having its chat feature answer questions about your job. And with that growing intelligence, of course, comes the growing fear that the machines will eventually rise up and end us all. That's why Google has outlined a plan for a kill switch that can stop algorithms before they get out of control--or at least, too out of control. If there's one company that should be concerned about its creations outsmarting humanity, it's Google. Known AI-phobic Elon Musk recently implied Google is the one company whose machines he fears might get too smart. The company's robot made headlines recently when it handily beat the world's best Go player in a head-to-head series.