Modern humans first left Africa 100,000 years ago in a series of slow-paced migration waves and arrived in southern Europe around 80,000-90,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed, according to a new study. The research suggests that humans spread out across the globe in four migration events driven by climate change, connected to variations in the Earth's orbit. The results challenge traditional models that suggest there was a single exodus out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum London told MailOnline the research is'the most comprehensive climate, vegetation and human-dispersal modelling study published so far'. 'While the earliest [migration] wave had only limited further penetration across the rest of Eurasia, they [the researchers] argue that modern humans could have arrived in small numbers in China and southern Europe by about 80,000 years,' he explained.

September 21, 2016 -- NEW YORK – LexisNexis Legal & Professional today announced its intent to acquire privately held Intelligize, Inc., provider of the industry standard for U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intelligence. The acquisition would expand the LexisNexis securities and M&A offering with new content, innovative tools and analytics while complementing the capabilities of the company's existing securities solution, Lexis Securities Mosaic . Closing of the transaction is subject to certain customary conditions. Based in Reston, VA, Intelligize provides a leading analytics solution enabling legal, academic and business professionals to efficiently mine data and insights from SEC filings, M&A contracts, transactional agreements and corporate governance documents. This enables customers to streamline compliance processes, benchmark peer disclosures, clearly identify market standards, draft documents based on SEC filed precedent and clear SEC reviews in an efficient manner.

Four years ago an article was written for the Harvard Business Review by both Tom Davenport and DJ Patil entitled "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st century." The article predicted that the demand for skilled people in this area was only set to rise and as a recruitment/staffing specialist within this space, I can only confirm that this has come to pass. With this evolution, I now see the waters have become even harder to navigate, with companies now looking to hire people proficient in an even greater number of disciplines. That is why I wanted to do this post. As with any shortage, you need to get creative but from my perspective, I am often a little surprised at how little flexibility there is when looking to employ people for specialist niche roles.

If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI. The Guardian, a British newspaper, warned recently that "we're like children playing with a bomb," and a recent Newsweek headline reads, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming, and It Could Wipe Us Out." Numerous such headlines, fueled by comments from the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are strongly influenced by the work of one man: professor Nick Bostrom, author of the philosophical treatise Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. Bostrom is an Oxford philosopher, but quantitative assessment of risks is the province of actuarial science. He may be dubbed the world's first prominent "actuarial philosopher," though the term seems an oxymoron given that philosophy is an arena for conceptual arguments, and risk assessment is a data-driven statistical exercise. So what do the data say? Bostrom aggregates the results of four different surveys of groups such as participants in a conference called "Philosophy and Theory of AI," held in 2011 in Thessaloniki, Greece, and members of the Greek Association for Artificial Intelligence (he does not provide response rates or the phrasing of questions, and he does not account for the reliance on data collected in Greece).

Their meaning has been lost in ancient history but the distinctive marks on rocks by our ancestors thousands of years ago provide a unique link to our prehistoric past. Now a new project has been launched in an attempt to finally unravel some of the mysteries of the prehistoric rock art carved into stones in Scotland. Experts are to create a new digital database using 3D scanning to record and study more than 2,000 carvings across the country. Cup and ring marks are a form of prehistoric art found widely through out the world. They consist of a round indentation – the cup – surrounded by a series of concentric circles that look like ripples on water.

HAL didn't want to open the pod bay doors in "2001: A Space Odyssey", but Google Allo is much more accommodating. Things didn't go so well when the humans of "2001: A Space Odyssey" tangled with the artificial intelligence HAL. Fortunately, Google's Allo is much friendlier. In the classic 1968 movie, astronaut Dave Bowman asked eerie supercomputer HAL to open the ship's pod bay doors and let him back inside. HAL infamously replied "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

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

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

Five years ago, music personalization at Spotify was a tiny team. The team read papers, developed models, wrote data pipelines and built services. Today personalization involves multiple teams in New York, Boston & Stockholm producing datasets, feature engineering and serving up products to users. Features like Discover Weekly and Release Radar are but the tip of a huge personalization iceberg. One thing we have noticed is the overhead of running services.

I listened to this podcast on my drive to Michigan last Friday. If you like to think about the future, and where the puck is going, put your headphones on and listen critically. What is revealed is the way machine learning can be used to create biased and unbiased conclusions. It's always been known that if you start with the wrong hypothesis when using statistical analysis, you will reach a bad conclusion. There is a humorous blog, Spurious Correlations, that turns statistics on its head.