That's the number of miles, on average, that it takes a human driver to kill someone in the United States. It's also the number of miles Tesla's semi-autonomous'Autopilot' feature had racked up by May this year. Assuming Autopilot is rolled out to Tesla's mass-market Model 3 in 2017, that number will rapidly climb into the billions. Mercedes are deploying similar systems in their new E-class, while Google's fully driverless cars have racked up another 1.6 million miles and counting . As the miles grow, the odds shrink.

The Egypt Air disaster may have dropped out of the news briefly, but the investigation continues apace to find out why flight MS804 crashed. French investigators think they have heard locator-beacon signals from at least one of the "black box" flight recorders, and now salvage experts are heading to the site to take a closer look. Hearing the beacons is one thing, but they won't know for sure what they have found until they send down a robotic submarine armed with bright lights and cameras. "Black boxes" are, in fact, bright orange and have reflective strips, so they show up pretty well when you shine lights on them. The robotic submarine is on a special salvage ship, called the John Lethbridge.

We are about to see a black hole for the first time ever, scientists hope. A team of scientists are hope to use a computer algorithm and a range of equipment to take the first ever picture of a black hole's event horizon next year. The picture will be taken by a project called Event Horizon Telescope – a network of nine radio telescopes placed all around the world. 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.

This summer, the picturesque Birchcliffe Centre, a converted baptist church in the West Yorkshire village of Hebden Bridge, hosted an unusual festival. Guests danced across the sunlit floor to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach; they drank mugs of tea and watched talks. Outside, there was an "art walk" where attendees trudged up and down the muddy slopes, breathing in the scent of early summer flowers. There were nice places to eat, the village was welcoming. Everyone felt safe and included.

Before leaving Helsinki, we arXived [from the Air France lounge!] the paper Jean-Michel presented on Monday at ABCruise in Helsinki. This paper summarises the experiments Louis conducted over the past months to assess the great performances of a random forest regression approach to ABC parameter inference. I think the major incentives in exploiting the (still mysterious) tool of random forests [against more traditional ABC approaches like Fearnhead and Prangle (2012) on summary selection] are that (i) forests do not require a preliminary selection of the summary statistics, since an arbitrary number of summaries can be used as input for the random forest, even when including a large number of useless white noise variables; (b) there is no longer a tolerance level involved in the process, since the many trees in the random forest define a natural if rudimentary distance that corresponds to being or not being in the same leaf as the observed vector of summary statistics?(y); To the point that deriving a different forest for each univariate transform of interest is truly a minor drag in the overall computing cost of the approach. An intriguing point we uncovered through Louis' experiments is that an unusual version of the variance estimator is preferable to the standard estimator: we indeed exposed better estimation performances when using a weighted version of the out-of-bag residuals (which are computed as the differences between the simulated value of the parameter transforms and their expectation obtained by removing the random trees involving this simulated value). Another intriguing feature [to me] is that the regression weights as proposed by Meinshausen (2006) are obtained as an average of the inverse of the number of terms in the leaf of interest.

Earlier this year, a small robotic helicopter flying through the Bavarian Alps made more than 100 deliveries between two villages that are within yodeling distance of each other but so far from anything else that they may as well be on Mars. The Paketkopter carried medicine and other small parcels through wind and snow without the slightest problem, even as Amazon and Google and UPS hone their autonomous tech and try not to hit anything. The little drone that could flew from one "Skyport" to another at 45 mph, turning into a half-hour slog by truck into an eight-minute hop. "We purposely chose the test area to pose a new and bigger challenge," says DHL spokesperson Dunja Kuhlmann. The German shipping company started experimenting with drones in 2013, sending small parcels across the Rhine on a quadcopter.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 2:51 p.m. EDT Wednesday, concluding a successful International Space Station resupply mission. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- A SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean just before 3 p.m. ET Wednesday to wrap up a month-long visit to the International Space Station, returning to Earth with more than 3,700 pounds of equipment and science research. "The Dragon spacecraft has served us well," British astronaut Tim Peake radioed to mission controllers in Houston after the Dragon floated from the outpost in darkness at 9:19 a.m., released by its robotic arm. "It's good to see it departing full of science, and we wish it a safe recovery back to planet Earth." Among the 1,300 pounds of experiment on board were more than 1,000 tubes of blood, urine and saliva collected from former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly before his year-long ISS mission ended in March.

The SpaceX Dragon capsule seen after its arrival at the International Space Station on April 10, 2016, two days after its launch from Cape Canaveral. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- An unmanned SpaceX Dragon capsule is on its way back to Earth, headed for a Pacific Ocean splashdown at 2:55 p.m. Eastern Time. The capsule carrying 3,700 pounds of equipment and experiments floated away from the International Space Station in darkness at 9:19 a.m., after being released by a 58-foot robotic arm controlled by British astronaut Tim Peake, while the spacecraft flew about 260 miles southwest of Adelaide, Australia. "The Dragon spacecraft has served us well," Peaked radioed to NASA mission controllers in Houston. "It's good to see it departing full of science, and we wish it a safe recovery back to planet Earth."

The refugee crisis is perhaps the single most challenging problem for Europe today. Hundreds of thousands of people have already traveled across dangerous sea passages from Turkish shores to Greek islands, resulting in thousands of dead and missing, despite the best rescue efforts from both sides. One of the main reasons is the total lack of any early warning-alerting system, which could provide some preparation time for the prompt and effective deployment of resources at the hot zones. This work is such an attempt for a systemic analysis of the refugee influx in Greece, aiming at (a) the statistical and signal-level characterization of the smuggling networks and (b) the formulation and preliminary assessment of such models for predictive purposes, i.e., as the basis of such an early warning-alerting protocol. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever attempt to design such a system, since this refugee crisis itself and its geographical properties are unique (intense event handling, little or no warning). The analysis employs a wide range of statistical, signal-based and matrix factorization (decomposition) techniques, including linear & linear-cosine regression, spectral analysis, ARMA, SVD, Probabilistic PCA, ICA, K-SVD for Dictionary Learning, as well as fractal dimension analysis. It is established that the behavioral patterns of the smuggling networks closely match (as expected) the regular burst and pause periods of store-and-forward networks in digital communications. There are also major periodic trends in the range of 6.2-6.5 days and strong correlations in lags of four or more days, with distinct preference in the Sunday-Monday 48-hour time frame. These results show that such models can be used successfully for short-term forecasting of the influx intensity, producing an invaluable operational asset for planners, decision-makers and first-responders.

SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket on Friday and, despite the odds, landed the first stage on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. A SpaceX Dragon cargo spaceship was grappled by the International Space Station's Canadarm2 on April 10, following an April 8 launch from Cape Canaveral. CAPE CANAVERAL -- The coming week is another big one for SpaceX, whose unmanned Dragon capsule is scheduled to depart the International Space Station and return to Earth on Wednesday morning. The station's 58-foot robotic arm is expected to release the Dragon and its 3,700 pounds of cargo at 9:18 a.m. Because of a failed launch last summer, this Dragon will be the first to return science experiments and hardware from the ISS in a year.