The LaGuardia Plaza Hotel is a four-minute drive from LaGuardia Airport, in Queens, and on a recent August afternoon nearly every car parked in the hotel's lot was black. One after the other, men in shirtsleeves pulled up in Chevy Suburbans and GMC Yukon XLs and gleaming Lexus RS 300s with leather-trimmed seats, got out, then made their way across the marble lobby and up a flight of stairs. A brightly smiling woman approached them as they congregated around a registration desk. She jotted the letters onto a yellow sticky note and worked her way down the line. "Do you have an appointment? The men were black-car drivers, currently working for the ride-summoning companies Uber or Lyft, or both, and they were there, in all likelihood, because another driver had told them that they could get more money, and better treatment, if they signed up to drive for a new rival, Juno. New York City--which has no shortage of ways to get around, from pedicabs to one of the largest public-transportation systems in the world--is just one stage upon which a handful of companies are fighting to dominate the future of personal transportation. Juno has decided that the most effective way to do that is by being extra-nice to the drivers. After the men registered, they were ushered into a waiting room, where draped café tables had been set up with brochures: "How to Be a 5 Star Juno Driver." The drivers were soon called by name--"Khaleed?" "Julio?"--and brought into another room, where a Juno manager, Lucas Smith, was waiting for them with a laptop and an overhead projector. "Drive Your Future," the slogan on the screen urged. A pink-skinned forty-year-old in jeans with a bushy red beard and an intense gaze, Smith joined Juno last January. Like several of his colleagues, he was recruited from Apple's retail division, where he conducted training sessions for Apple-store employees, based on Apple's carefully designed protocols. In fact, many details of the drivers' experience had been modelled on the interactions that customers have when they enter an Apple store, from the "concierges" who greeted them to the low driver-to-employee ratio. At first, Smith was put off by the whiff of exploitation that he detected around rising Silicon Valley enterprises such as Instacart, where people buy your groceries for you, and TaskRabbit, where freelancers can underbid one another to take on errands and other jobs. In middle school, Smith told me, he was assigned a book by Ayn Rand. "I remember finishing it, and realizing that I wanted to be the opposite of everything that was in that book," he said. "Everything about the celebration of selfishness was just anathema." So he was initially skeptical about Juno. "I'm a super-progressive, and I have incredibly mixed feelings about the'sharing economy' and companies like Uber," he said. "Rather than creating wealth, they felt extractive.

One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley's top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, "This is Silicon Valley, right here." All the founders were graduates of Y Combinator, the startup "accelerator" that Graham co-founded: a three-month boot camp, run twice a year, in how to become a "unicorn"--Valleyspeak for a billion-dollar company. Thirteen thousand fledgling software companies applied to Y Combinator this year, and two hundred and forty were accepted, making it more than twice as hard to get into as Stanford University. After graduating thirteen hundred startups, YC now boasts the power--and the peculiarities--of an island nation. At the noisy end of the room, Graham was cheerfully encouraging improbable schemes. At the quiet end, Sam Altman was absorbed in private calculations. When founders came over to ...

Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan will kick off South by South Lawn: A White House Festival of Ideas, Art and Action, which starts Monday morning with Govan's breakfast conversation with light-and-space artist James Turrell and architect David Adjaye. The event is a White House riff on the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals, where President Obama appeared this year in a keynote conversation. Govan's talk with Turrell and Adjaye, architect of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, will take place at the nearby Newseum. "I'm excited the arts are a lead in the White House's efforts to get us all to think big," Govan said by email. "James Turrell and David Adjaye are two big thinkers who have worked persistently to pursue their art and make meaningful contributions to our culture."

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Salesforce.com Inc. CRM 0.18 % 's annual Dreamforce customer conference, set to blanket downtown San Francisco next week, will be an unusual blend of business, technology, entertainment, philanthropy and personal empowerment. The conference, which is the world's largest tech get-together sponsored by a single company, will be an expression of the business-software provider's socially conscious corporate culture and the idiosyncratic character of its Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The event, which is expected to draw 170,000 attendees--17% more than last year--comes as Salesforce, whose public profile to date has been confined largely to salespeople and marketers, is stepping onto a larger stage. The company on Thursday vowed to block Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.35 % 's 26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.13 %, after failing in its own effort to buy the online network of 450 million mostly professional members. Meanwhile, Salesforce is considering a bid for the consumer-focused messaging service Twitter.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

An audacious jail breakout has been foiled after an'escape kit' including hacksaw blades and screwdrivers flown in by a drone was spotted by prison officers. A bundle dropped on top of a roof inside HMP Hewell in Worcestershire also contained cannabis, mobile phones, chargers, superglue and razor blades. The prison's governor alerted local police and ordered extensive searches of prisoners' cells. Extra guards from nearby jails were brought in to beef up security. An'escape kit' including hacksaw blades and screwdrivers was flown in by a drone at HMP Hewell in Worcestershire West Mercia police are also conducting more patrols to put off drone smugglers.

If you want to become popular quickly in a new group of friends, you might find the best way to do this is by being narcissistic. Narcissists can make friends faster than other people, according to a new study, but only temporarily. The lack of empathy eventually shines through and people begin to prefer those who are more in touch with their emotions and who care about their relationships. Researchers led by the University of Krakow in Poland tested groups of college students. The scientists arranged the students into 15 groups of 20 and studied how the popularity of individuals in the group changed with time.

In tens years, our roads could be covered in self-driving cars. Hundreds of companies are working towards the technology, intending to give us more time to dedicate our attention to other things. But a new study shows many motorists do not plan on investing in the technology, and would even prefer to travel in a flying car rather than a driverless vehicle. The survey found 57 per cent of UK drivers would opt for a hovering car over a self-driving car like Google's autonomous vehicle (pictured). The idea of a flying car was most popular with 18-24-year-olds, with 60.3 per cent saying that they would rather take to the skies than surrender control of the driving to an on-board computer.

Machines enrich and enhance our lives, whether it's the smartphones that allow us to stay connected or the supercomputers that solve our toughest computational problems. Imagine how much more productive and innovative our world will be when computers become infinitely more powerful. Indeed, the growing field of quantum computing may make our current technological capacities look feeble and primitive in comparison. It could even transform the workings of the human brain and revolutionize how we think in ways we can't begin to imagine. Today, computers operate at the most basic level by manipulating two states: a zero or a one.