If you had to invent the perfect place to roll out self-driving buses, Japan would be it. The country boasts an immaculate and extensive road network. Much of the aging population relies on public transport, especially in the countryside, to get around. And that customer base is shrinking; fewer passengers equals less fares. As a result, only a third of the country's bus companies are profitable, forcing regional governments to step in to support them.

Researchers propose an emotion test for artificially intelligent systems. Furby and Clippy were early forms; driverless cars and Facebook's chatbots pick up the mantle today. But if AI is to continue its evolution, it'll have to get more convincingly human. Right now, its capacity for emotional depth is seriously lacking. At a cognitive architectures conference in New York last week, Alexei Samsonovich, a professor in the Cybernetics Department at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, proposed a multi-part test.

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

If you're experiencing a mental health issue, one of the people you probably least want to speak to about it is your employer. Disclosing depression or anxiety has long been seen as the last workplace taboo, for fear of repercussions. This is despite the existence of the Equality Act 2010, which protects employees with physical and mental disabilities from discrimination. But just over a third of workers with a mental health condition discuss it with their employer, according to a survey of 1,388 employees carried out by Willis PMI Group, one of the UK's largest providers of employee healthcare and risk management services. The research found that 30% of respondents were concerned that they wouldn't receive adequate support, 28% believed their employer wouldn't understand, and 23% feared that disclosing it would lead to management thinking less of them.

Zegami is a visual data exploration tool for viewing large collections of images and other visual data. By presenting vast quantities of images within a single field of view, Zegami allows users to quickly see correlations, outliers and relationships by leveraging the innate pattern recognition capabilities of the human brain. This combined with image processing and advanced machine learning techniques like Deep Learning presents a formidable combination of the best aspects of man and machine. In addition, by including associated metadata (structured and unstructured) users can search, sort and filter the images to find exactly what is required. In the above example researchers at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford were able to quickly observe the effects of various concentrations of a particular drug against a control group.

Michio Kaku, a noted theoretical physicist and futurist, predicts, "The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform." Robots have recently entered the legal workplace, performing several tasks once assigned to newly minted law grads. What does this mean for current and future lawyers? Simple answer: robots will not replace lawyers but they will work with them. Technology has already produced a new class of support professionals that work with lawyers -- just as techs work with doctors in healthcare delivery. Lawyers, like physicians and other professionals supported by technology, will be freed to leverage their time and expertise to interpret data, render professional judgment, and perform functions that require their professional training.

Identity fraud, in which a slice of your identity ranging from new credit cards to entire bank accounts is taken over by criminals, rose by 49 per cent in 2015 on the previous year. That totalled almost 170,000 cases, according to data collected by Cifas, the financial industry's non-profit fraud advisory service. The reason for the rise is that more and more we use the internet for financial transactions, but have very few ways to verify our identity without cumbersome systems involving human interaction, which are also vulnerable to fraud. Cifas' 2015 Fraudscape report shows that 86 per cent of identity fraud happened online, with bank accounts and credit or debit cards most targeted, closely followed by loans and communications, typically mobile phone accounts. Traditionally, companies dealing with such problems have acted after the fact, trying to unravel complex or opportunistic frauds by working back through audit trails.

Let's say you couldn't remember the capital of Belgium. You could ask the computer what it is by saying'I want Paris, but subtract France and add Belgium.' The computer would return Brussels. Now imagine you could do that with employees. What if you could say'I want someone like my best engineer, but with more experience in management?'

If you had to invent the perfect place to roll out self-driving buses, Japan would be it. The country boasts an immaculate and extensive road network. Much of the aging population relies on public transport to get around, especially in the countryside. And that customer base is shrinking, bringing in less fares. As a result, only a third of the country's bus companies are profitable, forcing regional governments to step in to support them.

An unstoppable wave of automation is transforming the workplace. While many low-skill jobs are being eliminated, positions demanding higher skills are being created. Most jobs in existence today will add and lose specific functions in the future as robots and other forms of technology take on routine tasks and free humans to focus more on creative and analytic efforts, according to experts. It will be a messy transition. It will be particularly painful for workers who lose their jobs and for employers that fail to recognize where automation fits into their operations.