It is used to disguise a person's identity, cover explicit areas of an image or to render vehicle number plates unreadable. But deliberate pixilation of photographs could soon be rendered useless by artificial intelligence that can peer through the blurring to see what is hidden beneath. Software engineers have used machine learning to teach a piece of software to adapt image recognition techniques to recognise objects, faces and words in obscured images. Artificial intelligence could be used to defeat attempts to protect people's identity (stock image) or hide certain information in videos and photographs posted online. The software could mean that people who appear on Google Street View, for example, could be identified despite attempts by the search company to hide their identity with image blurring. It is a bizarre disappearing act that only the most affluent seem to be able to afford.

Wells Fargo -- The bank will eliminate product sales goals for retail bankers and strengthen oversight, controls, and training. Wells Fargo will be the subject of a Senate Banking Committee hearing into its sales practices, after the bank settled a case with regulators by paying a 185 million penalty. The panel wants to question CEO John Stumpf about the practices that led to the case. UnitedHealth Group -- The health insurer's Optum unit and Quest Diagnostics formed a partnership aimed at reducing billing complexity, as well as providing more transparency into health care costs. Separately, UnitedHealth was rated as a "top pick" at Jefferies because of attractive valuation and a best-in-class management team.

Nasa has sent a spacecraft chasing after an unexplored asteroid, in the hope that it might one day keep us from being destroyed. The Osiris-Rex robotic hunter has blasted off to the asteroid Bennu. When it gets there it will scoop up bits of ancient space rock – which could eventually tell us not just about where we came from but whether there is life elsewhere as well. But before it helps us find aliens, the craft might help us save ourselves. 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.

This robot dives to depths humans dare not attempt - and it can bring people along for the ride without them getting wet. The Stanford-built OceanOne is filled with compressible oil to offset the crushing pressures experienced when 100 metres underwater, and AI-assisted navigation steers it clear of obstacles. Its operators remain on land, observing on screen everything the robot captures, using joysticks to drive it and guiding its hands through a feedback mechanism that relays tactile sensations. "It's impossible to let a robot act alone in such an environment: it will fail," says Professor Oussama Khatib, OceanOne's creator. "The only way you can guarantee success is connecting a worker through a haptic device to the robot.

The sun was sparkling on the Mediterranean Sea on the afternoon when a graduate student from my lab tossed our prize robot into the water for the first time. I watched nervously as our electronic creation sank beneath the waves. But the bot didn't falter: When we gave it the command to swim, it filled its expandable mantle with water, then jetted out the fluid to shoot forward. When we ordered it to crawl, it stiffened its eight floppy arms in sequence to push itself along the sandy bottom and over scattered rocks. And when we instructed it to explore a tight space beneath the dock, the robot inserted its soft body into the narrow gap without difficulty.

The private spaceflight company landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the sixth time in the last eight months early Sunday morning, pulling off the feat during the successful launch of the JCSAT-16 commercial communications satellite. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, carrying JCSAT-16 toward a distant geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). Less than 9 minutes later, the rocket's first stage came back for a pinpoint landing on the deck of a robotic ship called Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast. A textbook touchdown had been anything but guaranteed. "Given this mission's GTO destination, the first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging," SpaceX representatives wrote in a pre-launch JCSAT-16 press kit.

Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully landed a reusable Falcon 9 rocket on a floating drone ship at sea on Sunday morning. The company's eighth launch this year was part of its ongoing effort to re-use costly rocket parts instead of discarding them into the ocean. It is the fourth time SpaceX has vertically landed a Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform at sea. The company has also landed another rocket safely on land. The rocket launched under a dark night sky from Cape Canaveral, Florida in the early hours of Sunday morning.

SpaceX launched JCSAT-16 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and landed the first stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday, July 28, 2016 with a secret payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral and landed it about eight minutes later. United Launch Alliance launched an Atlas V rocket at 10:30 a.m. SpaceX launched a pair of communications satellites from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, but it was unknown if the first stage landed successfully.

The private spaceflight company landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the sixth time in the last eight months early Sunday morning (Aug. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:26 a.m. EDT (0526 GMT) Sunday, carrying JCSAT-16 toward a distant geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). Less than 9 minutes later, the rocket's first stage came back for a pinpoint landing on the deck of a robotic ship called Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast. A textbook touchdown had been anything but guaranteed. "Given this mission's GTO destination, the first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging," SpaceX representatives wrote in a pre-launch JCSAT-16 press kit.

Daniel Bartlett thinks nothing of driving halfway across the UK to visit places that aren't really there. A couple of months ago, he made a 500-kilometre round-trip from London to defend an alien portal at the lifeboat station on Cromer Pier, on the east coast of England. In between scoffing a portion of chips and an ice cream, he coordinated with around 50 people at other key coastal positions from Scotland across to the Netherlands. Over the course of an afternoon, they took control of the North Sea, turning it from blue to green. Barlett has been playing Ingress for two and a half years.