Last Saturday, in a sold-out stadium in Zurich, Switzerland, the world's first cyborg Olympics showed the world a new science-fiction version of sports. At the Cybathlon, people with disabilities used robotic technology to turn themselves into cyborg athletes. They competed for gold and glory in six different events. Rather than celebrating pure human brawn, the Cybathlon rejoiced in the combined power of muscle and machine. The competitors, who were called "pilots," were people with missing limbs or some form of paralysis; on their own they could never have moved through the races successfully.

Tesla's "Autopilot" feature (a driver assistance tool rather than something that truly lets the car drive itself) has come under fire in recent months. Earlier this year, a car using Autopilot was involved in a fatal accident, causing a host of investigations into the safety of Tesla's feature. Among the institutions concerned with the feature is the country of Germany -- last week, Germany's transportation ministry said the Model S Autopilot was a "considerable traffic hazard." Now, Reuters reports that the country is reaching out directly to Tesla drivers, asking them to use caution. The letter sent out reminds owners that Autopilot is strictly a driver assistance feature and still requires the driver's full, undivided attention.

With the advances of modern data storage technology, chips the size of your fingernail are capable of storing an entire library's worth of knowledge, so one thing you might think computers do better than people is remember things. But according to Google Inc.'s DeepMind team, the artificial intelligence research group that developed AlphaGo, that is not entirely true. In a new paper published in the journal Nature, DeepMind has outlined a process where it trained a neural network to have human-like memory, giving it not only the ability to store data, but also to recall that information and use it to solve novel problems. "Neural networks excel at pattern recognition and quick, reactive decision-making, but we are only just beginning to build neural networks that can think slowly – that is, deliberate or reason using knowledge," the DeepMind team wrote in a recent blog post. "For example, how could a neural network store memories for facts like the connections in a transport network and then logically reason about its pieces of knowledge to answer questions?" DeepMind calls its new method differentiable neural computers, and the team demonstrated its capabilities using the London Underground, one of the largest public transit systems in the world.

Despite computers performing increasingly impressive feats, when it comes to recognising real world objects, they have fallen short. But the machines are learning that just like the robots of sci-fi blockbusters, being able to tell one thing from another is a key skill. A team of UK researchers has created software which has taught itself to recognise objects around it, with impressive accuracy. UK researchers have created software, called RadarCat, which can teach itself to recognise objects around it with impressive accuracy . Called the RadarCat, short for radar categorisation for input and interaction, the software scans the world around it uses radar to scan the world around it.

The Royal Navy is testing just how much robot craft can do by themselves in military exercises off the British coast. Operation Unmanned Warrior 16 is a chance for allied nations and the defense industry to show off their latest maritime autonomous systems, as part of a broader military exercise called Joint Warrior. "Fire and forget" torpedoes capable of homing in on the noise emitted by a target -- then sinking it -- have been around since World War II, but the systems involved in this exercise are less offensive. More than 50 craft are taking part this week, including uncrewed helicopters and underwater vehicles, and an autonomous rigid inflatable boat (RIB). They will perform tasks such as surveillance, intelligence-gathering and mine countermeasures.

Artificial-intelligence (AI) systems known as neural networks can recognize images, translate languages and even master the ancient game of Go. But their limited ability to represent complex relationships between data or variables has prevented them from conquering tasks that require logic and reasoning. In a paper published in Nature on October 12, the Google-owned company DeepMind in London reveals that it has taken a step towards overcoming this hurdle by creating a neural network with an external memory. The combination allows the neural network not only to learn, but to use memory to store and recall facts to make inferences like a conventional algorithm. This in turn enables it to tackle problems such as navigating the London Underground without any prior knowledge and solving logic puzzles.

Google is planning to release its own smartwatch to take on the Apple Watch soon, according to leaks. The company will make two of its own watches, according to new leaks. They're expected to be released at the beginning of 2017. The leak follows Google's launch of the Pixel and Pixel XL phones. Those are the first that Google made itself – and as such bake in an artificially intelligent assistant that isn't available to any other Android users.

The German government is warning the nation's Tesla owners about the dangers of putting too much trust in their cars' Autopilot system. Reuters reports that the German Transport Ministry has taken the step of sending a letter to all of them as a reminder that they are ultimately responsible for the operation of their vehicles, and that Autopilot is merely an assist system. The feature, which can autonomously maintain the car's speed, brake for obstacles, steer within a lane and even change lanes on command, became a point of controversy after a driver in Florida suffered a fatal crash while using it. An internal report from the German Transport Ministry called it a "considerable traffic hazard," according to Der Spiegel. Since launching it last year, Tesla has modified the way Autopilot operates, in part to prevent its misuse, by restricting how long and at what speeds drivers are able to remove their hands from the wheel.

Microsoft is all in with Cloud Computing and that was never more evident than at its annual Ignite Conference that was held in Atlanta. While Azure was not the only story, it was the lead one. This blog recaps some of the key things we observed at Ignite. Microsoft is all in with cloud computing. One of the big things we noticed at Microsoft is that its swagger is back.

Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence lab does more than just develop computer programs capable of beating the world's best human players in the ancient game of Go. The DeepMind unit has also been working on the next generation of deep learning software that combines the ability to recognize data patterns with the memory required to decipher more complex relationships within the data. Deep learning is the latest buzz word for artificial intelligence algorithms called neural networks that can learn over time by filtering huge amounts of relevant data through many "deep" layers. The brain-inspired neural network layers consist of nodes (also known as neurons). Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have been training neural networks to learn how to better handle tasks such as recognizing images of dogs or making better Chinese-to-English translations. These AI capabilities have already benefited millions of people using Google Translate and other online services.