Sure, dolphins use sonar, whiz through the ocean at incredible speeds, and battle sharks. Last week, a study published in Russia's St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics claimed to have recorded two dolphins doing just that. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, exchanged a series of vocal pulses that resembled "a conversation between two people," wrote the study's author, Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station. What's more, Yana and Yasha were exceedingly polite, listening to one another at turns without interrupting. "As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language," Ryabov wrote.

Kalingrad is a Russian seaport named for a Soviet revolutionary. It sits near the Baltic Sea, between Poland and Lithuania, and it's a place where pre-Putin Russian leaders would occasionally threaten to install nuclear missiles. But in the 18th century, it was a city called Königsberg in the German kingdom of Prussia. And it was a math problem. Königsberg stretched across both banks of the river Pregel, and it included two islands in the middle of the river.

The Times Bayer bets the farm in 66 billion Monsanto deal: An American pioneer of genetically modified seeds has struck a 66 billion takeover deal with Bayer, the German chemicals giant, in the latest round of megadeal consolidations in agricultural production. Lawyers set to pass M&A paperwork to machines: Luminance, a start-up backed by Mike Lynch, the British technology investor, is aiming to reduce the time taken on due diligence that accompanies multimillion-pound M&A deals from weeks to days or even hours using a new form of artificial intelligence. Public sector job numbers plunge to record low: Employment in the public sector has fallen to a record low as private sector jobs surge ahead despite Brexit, official figures have shown. Mortgage lending falls in wake of Brexit vote: The number of mortgages advanced for house purchases fell in the first month after Britain's decision to leave the European Union. Miner in'bribery scandal' intends to quit AIM: An Africa-focused mining company that has been caught up in a bribery scandal is planning to delist its shares.

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.

It might not be obvious to a human, but an artificial intelligence programme sees distinct similarities in, say, the composition of the subjects, or colour of their outfits. Called Recognition, the AI programme compares current photojournalism provided by Reuters with works from the Tate's collection to find its best match. It pairs the images based on image recognition techniques that analyse objects, faces, composition, and context gleaned from metadata. The AI matches a photo of eunuchs putting on makeup in Mumbai (Image: REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) with Sir Peter Lely's Two Ladies of the Lake Family c.1660 (Image: Tate) "We wanted to understand how we could bring artificial intelligence into a museum, and how rational and objective thinking could be applied to a subjective thing like art," said Angelo Semeraro of Italian research centre Fabrica. He and teammates Coralie Gourguechon, Monica Lanaro, and Isaac Valentin created the project to enter (and win) the Tate's 2016 IK Prize for digital innovation, which is run in partnership with Microsoft.

A new signal has been found deep in space that could come from aliens. The community of astronomers and scientists who scan the skies with telescopes in an attempt to find extraterrestrial life is abuzz with excitement over a "strong signal" detected deep in space that could come from an alien civilisation. But some scientists have cautioned people not to get quite so excited – at least yet. The evidence remains preliminary and more work will need to be done to establish whether it is not just a mistake, let alone wheat it's actually a message from aliens. The message appeared to have come from a nearby star, HD164595, in the constellation Hercules.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your thick-necked Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Here we report the untethered operation of a robot composed solely of soft materials. The robot is controlled with microfluidic logic that autonomously regulates fluid flow and, hence, catalytic decomposition of an on-board monopropellant fuel supply.