A year ago, Bertrand Vallage took a submarine to the bottom of the French Mediterranean to fix instruments his team had installed there for a physics experiment. Some cables had fallen loose from their connections, and Vallage and his submarine crew were there to plug them back in so the experiment could get back to work detecting tiny particles called neutrinos. In principle, they could reconnect each cable in five minutes using two clumsy metal arms connected to the submarine. But as they maneuvered the joysticks that controlled the arms, they kept dropping the cables, kicking up dust from the seabed. Each time, they had to bring the cable inside the submarine and clean it, over and over again.

A device that can read people's minds by detecting their brainwaves has been developed in a breakthrough that could eventually enable people with "locked-in syndrome" to communicate. The system was only partially effective with a 90 per cent success rate when trying to recognise numbers from zero to nine and a 61 per cent rate for single syllables in Japanese, the researchers said. But, nonetheless, a statement about the research issued by the Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan said it showed that an effective device to read people's thoughts and relay them to others was possible in the "near future". They even suggested an "easily operated" device with a smartphone app could be ready in just five years. An electroencephalogram (EEG) was used to monitor people's brain waves while they spoke.

In February of 1880, the whaling ship Hope sailed north from Peterhead, Scotland, and headed for the Arctic. Her crew included a highly regarded captain, an illiterate but gifted first mate, and the usual roster of harpooners, sailors, and able-bodied seamen--but not the intended ship's surgeon. That gentleman having been unexpectedly called away on family matters, a last-minute substitute was found, in the form of a middling third-year medical student making his maiden voyage: a young man by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle was twenty when he left Peterhead and twenty-one when he returned. On Saturday, May 22nd, in the meticulous diary he kept during that journey, he wrote, "A heavy swell all day. I came of age today. Rather a funny sort of place to do it in, only 600 miles or so from the North Pole." Funny indeed, for a man who would come to be associated with distinctly un-Arctic environments: the gas-lit glow of Victorian London, the famous chambers at 221B Baker Street, and--further afield, but not much--the gabled manors and foggy moors where Sherlock Holmes tracked bloody footprints and dogs failed to bark in the night. Shortly after returning from the north, and long before writing any of the stories that made him famous, Conan Doyle told two tales about the Arctic--one fictional, the other putatively true. The first, in 1883, was "The Captain of the Pole-Star," one of his earliest published short stories. In it, a young medical student serving as the surgeon on a whaling ship watches, first in disbelief and then in dread, as his captain goes mad. Although winter is closing in, the captain sails northward into the Arctic until his ship is stuck fast.

One of the amazing (and scary) things about artificial intelligence programs is that in learning to mimic their human masters so perfectly, these wonders of computer software hold up a mirror to patterns of behavior we engage in every day but may not even notice. Beyond their extraordinary usefulness in industry, medicine and communications, these "learning" programs can lay bare the mental shortcuts we humans use to make sense of our world. Indeed, new research with artificial intelligence programs highlights the ethnic and gender biases of English speakers. In a first-of-its-kind effort, a group of Princeton University computer scientists set a widely used artificial intelligence program to the task of learning English by performing a massive "crawl" of the World Wide Web. After gobbling up some 840 billion words, the software developed a vocabulary of 2.2 million distinct words, and the fluency to use them in ways that were grammatically correct.

Artificially intelligent robots and devices are being taught to be racist, sexist and otherwise prejudiced by learning from humans, according to new research. A massive study of millions of words online looked at how closely different terms were to each other in the text – the same way that automatic translators use "machine learning" to establish what language means. The researchers found male names were more closely associated with career-related terms than female ones, which were more closely associated with words related to the family. This link was stronger than the non-controversial findings that musical instruments and flowers were pleasant and weapons and insects were unpleasant. Female names were also strongly associated with artistic terms, while male names were found to be closer to maths and science ones.

Once the preserve of videographers with big production budgets, drones have now dropped in price by up to 30%, and not a day go by without a new drone being announced. Just recently DJI announced the latest addition to its Phantom range, the DJI Phantom 4. So 4K video shooting and high definition aerial photography can now be all yours for around £500. So here's a look at just what you can do with a drone… not all of them are entirely serious. The trouble with starting out on your own as a freelance photographer or videographer is that you're entering an incredibly crowded market. There are a lot of good people out there, using a lot of good kit, and it's tough to stand out.

This 2015 file photo shows U.S. soldiers from Dragon Troop of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment discuss their mission during their first training exercise of the new year near operating base Gamberi in the Laghman province of Afghanistan. WASHINGTON – The Trump administration opened a new military front Thursday when it ordered dozens of cruise missiles against a Syrian air base, adding to a growing list of recent U.S. military forays. A look at where the United States has fought in the 21st century. After al-Qaida attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. led an invasion of Afghanistan that ousted the Taliban. Though the U.S. and NATO formally ended their combat mission in Afghanistan at the end of 2014, the war -- now in its 16th year -- drags on.

Scientists might soon take the most important portrait in the history of the universe: a picture of the centre of our galaxy. Observatories all around the world are being linked up and turned towards one specific part of the universe, getting an image of a black hole that is thought to be swirling there. That work has just begun and will run into next week, and might shed light on the darkest and most mysterious part of physics. 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. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons.

This blog post is based on a white paper authored by Maurizio Felici. Logistic regression is a popular machine learning algorithm used for binary classification. Logistic regression labels a sample with one of two possible classes, given a set of predictors in the sample. Optionally, the output can be the probability that a sample belongs to a given class. For example, suppose a researcher is interested in the factors that determine if a student will be accepted or rejected to graduate school.

SpaceX has made history by successfully launching and landing a used rocket for the first time. The California-based company launched one of its 229-foot-tall two-stage Falcon 9 rockets at 23.27 BST last night, with the aim of recovering its first-stage booster. While rocket sent a telecommunications satellite into orbit, the first-stage booster detached itself from its payload minutes after launch, righting itself and safely landing on a drone ship floating on the Atlantic Ocean. The first-stage booster, described by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as the "most expensive part of the rocket", had previously been launched on 8 April last year. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.