A Japanese spacecraft has dropped two small rovers onto the surface of an asteroid zooming through space. If they land safely, the unmanned Hayabusa-2 would be the first spacecraft to ever successfully place robotic rovers onto a space rock. Japan's space agency (JAXA) hopes that the mission will provide clues about the origin of the solar system. The agency is expecting to receive data from the rovers at some point on Saturday confirming whether or not the mission has been a success. Hayabusa-2 first arrived near the asteroid, known as Ryugu and situated 280 million km (170 million miles) from Earth, in June.

The three college-age defendants behind the creation of the Mirai botnet--an online tool that wreaked destruction across the internet in the fall of 2016 with unprecedentedly powerful distributed denial of service attacks--will stand in an Alaska courtroom Tuesday and ask for a novel ruling from a federal judge: They hope to be sentenced to work for the FBI. Josiah White, Paras Jha, and Dalton Norman, who were all between 18 and 20 years old when they built and launched Mirai, pleaded guilty last December to creating the malware that hijacked hundreds of thousands of Internet of Things devices, uniting them as a digital army that began as a way to attack rival Minecraft video game hosts, and evolved into an online tsunami of nefarious traffic that knocked entire web hosting companies offline. At the time, the attacks raised fears amid the presidential election targeted online by Russia that an unknown adversary was preparing to lay waste to the internet. The original creators, panicking as they realized their invention was more powerful than they had imagined, released the code--a common tactic by hackers to ensure that if and when authorities catch them, they don't possess any code that isn't already publicly known that can help finger them as the inventors. That release in turn lead to attacks by others throughout the fall, including one that made much of the internet unusable for the East Coast of the United States on an October Friday.

The El Niño/La Niña pattern in the Pacific Ocean is notorious for its long-distance effects on weather as far away as Africa and the Midwestern United States. But climate experts also know of several other such patterns, known as "teleconnections," and believe that there are many more to be discovered. The new TRIPODS Climate project, a collaboration among the University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California-Irvine, will develop novel data science tools to sniff out these hidden patterns, improving weather forecasts and scientific understanding of global climate. Researchers will apply data science methods such as machine learning, network analysis and predictive modeling to the growing flood of climate data. "There are fundamental challenges pervasive in data science that are epitomized in the climate science setting, making this collaboration a nice opportunity for advances on a number of fronts," said Rebecca Willett, professor of computer science and statistics at UChicago.

Soul Machines has discussed services for the elderly with prospective clients but has not announced any partnerships on that subject to date, says chief business officer Greg Cross. Soul Machines envisions a future in which digital instructors educate students without access to quality human teachers, and in which famous deceased artists are digitally resurrected to discuss their works in museums. Robot companions for the infirm, then, are not too far a leap. Nor is the prospect of a future in which a family converses with the lively AI recreation of a person suffering from dementia, while a caregiver--robot or human--tends to their ailing body in another room. The potential for deception is already here. A few years ago, Brent Lawson, the president of 1 AM Dolls, a manufacturer of life-sized rubber sex dolls, was on the phone with a client who wanted a specific doll he'd seen on the company's website. The man was particularly concerned that the doll's hair was just so, and peppered Lawson with questions about the color and style, Lawson told Quartz.

Hurricane Harvey, shown in 2017. A new data project hopes to sniff out weather patterns. The El Nino and La Nina patterns in the Pacific Ocean are notorious for their long-distance effects on weather as far away as Africa and the Midwestern United States. But climate experts also know of several other such patterns, known as teleconnections, and believe that there are many more to be discovered. The new TRIPODS Climate project, a collaboration among the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Irvine, will develop novel data science tools to sniff out these hidden patterns, improving weather forecasts and scientific understanding of global climate.

A pioneering artificial intelligence has been used to spot dozens of mysterious signals coming from deep in space. The new AI spotted 72 previously undiscovered "fast radio bursts" emanating out of distant galaxies, according to Breakthrough Listen, a program searching for proof of life elsewhere in the universe. FRBs have long been thought to be one of the mysterious phenomena in the universe. They are intense blasts of radio emissions that can be detected on Earth and then switch off. 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. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

The Japanese space agency will land two robots on an asteroid next month – the latest step in historic plans to explore its surface and bring samples back to Earth. The mission to the 1km-wide space rock, known as Ryugu, could provide clues not only to the asteroid's formation but to the formation of our solar system. The Japanese space agency have now selected dates for the deployment of smaller crafts from Hayabusa-2 . 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. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

Scientists have developed a spear-wielding submersible robot to hunt invasive lionfish in the western Atlantic Ocean. The fish have become a major problem in the waters off the coastal US and Caribbean islands; originally from the South Pacific and Indian oceans, lionfish have no natural predators in the area and are now out-competing native species. Researchers are now hoping an autonomous robot can help solve the problem by weeding out the lionfish and harvesting them without causing further damage to struggling coral reefs. Scientists have developed a spear-wielding submersible robot to hunt invasive lionfish in the western Atlantic Ocean. 'There are economic and environmental benefits to this, and the fish are delicious,' says Brandon Kelly, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who developed the robot's computer vision system.

Since he was a child, Derek Paley has been captivated by how shoals of fish move fluidly as a cohesive group, almost as if a single organism. As the Willis H. Young Jr. Professor of Aerospace Engineering Education and director of the Collective Dynamics and Control Laboratory at the University of Maryland, Paley is applying his long-standing source of inspiration to the cooperative control of autonomous vehicles. Fish are particularly interesting for Paley because of their sensory system. He explains that fish have a lateral line system, which is a series of sensors located on their exterior, sometimes appearing on their side as a stripe. With their lateral line sense, fish can perceive the direction and speed of nearby water flow, as well as predators and other obstacles.

Common-sense and background knowledge is required to understand natural language, but in most neural natural language understanding (NLU) systems, this knowledge must be acquired from training corpora during learning, and then it is static at test time. We introduce a new architecture for the dynamic integration of explicit background knowledge in NLU models. A general-purpose reading module reads background knowledge in the form of free-text statements (together with task-specific text inputs) and yields refined word representations to a task-specific NLU architecture that reprocesses the task inputs with these representations. Experiments on document question answering (DQA) and recognizing textual entailment (RTE) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the approach. Analysis shows that our model learns to exploit knowledge in a semantically appropriate way.