As a person who despises the cold, there is nothing worse than being home on a frigid winter night and having your utility company turn off the gas for repairs. Thankfully, robots are here to save us from having to bundle up like the Michelin Man just to stay toasty in our own homes. ULC Robotics has developed a robot, called Cirris XR, that's able to work on live gas mains so utilities don't have to turn off service to do repairs. Using the robot can also increase efficiency and operator safety. According to the company, gas utilities using Cirris XR would be able to repair five or six joints a day versus the one or two joints a human could work on.

Bats rule the roost when it comes to caves, ducking and diving through their dank dwellings. And now new drone footage attempts to mimic a bat's point of view, taking viewers inside the eerie Devetashka cave in Bulgaria that was inhabited as far back as 70,000 years ago, but is now home to around 30,000 bats. Footage captured by the YouTube channel SkyTrip reveals a giant cavern with large holes punctuating the length of it. Ducking and diving: New drone footage attempts to mimic a bat's point of view, taking viewers inside the eerie Devetashka cave in Bulgaria Kanye ends NY show mid-set because of'family emergency' Man claims to be Bill Clinton's son'Pascal's a G!' Kim Kardashian speaks well of her bodyguard The lens then circles around to give a near-360-degree view of the 100ft-high craggy ceilings. Later the camera swoops down to foot level, narrowly missing some inky puddles as it grazes the floor.

James Lovelock's parting words last time we met were: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky, it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan." It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world's population would be wiped out.

A recent explosion of neuroscience techniques is driving substantial advances in our understanding of the brain. Combined with developments in engineering, machine learning and computing this flowering has helped us enhance our cognitive abilities and potential. In fact, new research into the extraordinary machine in our skulls is helping us keep pace with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Exciting new advances are everywhere, but worth putting front and centre are findings made in the relatively new area of social neuroscience. Research by Molly Crockett at Oxford University has demonstrated how we might influence the social brain and examine the effects of neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, and hormones, such as oxytocin, on social cognition and social interactions. This includes the most fundamental aspects of our daily lives: trust, punishment, moral judgement, conformity and empathy.

Tech behemoths Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon announced this week that they are teaming up to develop new standards for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Soon AI will change everything from warfare to our bodies. But we don't want to become slaves to the robots, so how do we stop the Terminators? A great deal of money going into AI is invested by defence companies. We need to put a complete ban on autonomous weapons, at least until we know for sure that they can apply the rules of war as well as humans.

Never mind cancer research or climate change: IBM is finally bringing its Watson AI technology to bear on one of the real challenges still facing human civilisation – regulatory compliance. Big Blue has announced plans to snarf up Promontory Financial Group, a risk management and regulatory compliance consultancy, and combine the firm's expertise with Watson's cognitive capabilities in order to address the growing burden of regulation and risk management requirements. Promontory has about 600 workers in 19 offices across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East, and these are set to form the stout-hearted core of a new Watson Financial Services portfolio within IBM's Industry Platforms business. If all goes well, the transaction is expected to close before the end of 2016, but financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. According to IBM, more than 20,000 new regulatory requirements were created last year alone, and the complete catalogue of regulations is projected to exceed 300 million pages by 2020.

Software giant Google is beginning an aggressive foray into hardware production with the launch Tuesday of a smartphone and other devices that will bring the company into direct competition with other leading tech firms, including its longtime partner Samsung. The launch signals a major shift for one of the world's most profitable companies as it seeks to adapt to a technology landscape increasingly dominated by mobile and other connected hardware. Google must find a way, analysts say, to keep acquiring user data for targeting ads as Web search -- traditionally done from laptop or desktop computers -- is supplanted by newer technologies. Google's new smartphone, the Pixel, will employ artificial-intelligence technology that users can converse with, allowing them to sidestep keyboards as they access online information and make purchases such as movie tickets, say people familiar with the company's plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal information ahead of its official release. The company also plans to release other new hardware, including a voice-based assistant for the home to rival Amazon's Echo and a virtual-reality headset to rival Facebook's Oculus.

Gaussian processes are powerful, yet analytically tractable models for supervised learning. A Gaussian process is characterized by a mean function and a covariance function (kernel), which are determined by a model selection criterion. The functions to be compared do not just differ in their parametrization but in their fundamental structure. It is often not clear which function structure to choose, for instance to decide between a squared exponential and a rational quadratic kernel. Based on the principle of approximation set coding, we develop a framework for model selection to rank kernels for Gaussian process regression. In our experiments approximation set coding shows promise to become a model selection criterion competitive with maximum evidence (also called marginal likelihood) and leave-one-out cross-validation.

Meanwhile, robotics (among other fields) can often only use a few dozen data points because acquiring them involves a process that is expensive or time-consuming. How can an algorithm learn with only a few data points? Watching a child learn reveals how well humans can learn: a child may only need a few examples of a concept to "learn it". By contrast, the impressive results achieved with modern machine learning (in particular, by deep learning) are made possible largely by the use of huge datasets. For instance, the ImageNet database used in image recognition contains about 1.2 million labelled examples; DeepMinds's AlphaGo used more than 38 million positions to train their algorithm to play Go; and the same company used more than 38 days of play to train a neural network to play Atari 2600 games, such as Space Invaders or Breakout.

NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) quarterly revenues have been surging at double-digit rates in the last three quarters and, looking at the guidance for the next quarter, it's clear that the company is expecting the growth rate to continue unabated in the near future. One of the key factors that has added fuel to their engines is NVIDIA's new growth drivers: the data center segment and auto segment. In the most recent quarter, NVIDIA's data center unit reported 151 million in sales, a growth of 109.72% The growth in data center revenues is much higher than other segments, and there are several reasons why this growth can, in fact, continue its breakneck pace for several more quarters. NVIDIA's expertise in the GPU segment has given it a range of must-have products for hyperscale data centers.