Google DeepMind has appointed Ben Laurie as its new head of security. Laurie announced on his Twitter page on Thursday he has joined the artificial intelligence research company -- bought by Google for a reported 400 million in 2014 -- as head of security and transparency. Laurie is the founding director of the Apache Software Foundation, a director at the Open Rights Group, and a veteran Google software engineer. He describes himself on his LinkedIn profile as an: "Extremely proficient programmer (over 30 years experience) and system designer. Security, cryptography, privacy and civil liberties are my passions." The Cambridge University graduate wrote on Twitter that he is "excited" and "proud" to be taking on the new role.

"Make an appointment for 4pm today with Gary," I say to my assistant as I hang up from a promising phone call with a potential client. There was a time when you had to be high up in an organisation to have an assistant. My assistant is an artificially intelligent piece of software that lives in my smart phone. It makes me wonder if technologies like these could help a business grow. A report called The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to automation was published in 2013 by researchers from Oxford University. It was used last year by the BBC to create the interactive web page, Will a robot take your job?.

On a post-apocalyptic 2077 Earth, Tech 49 named'Jack' (played by Tom Cruise) works with drones to protect the fusion generators fueling colonists relocating to Saturn's moon. Hostile aliens capture, reprogram and arm one of the drones with a nuclear weapon. "You can't blame yourself… Drones are unreliable… Sometimes things go wrong." Sixty-two years earlier (in 2015), Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai (below) inherited the home planet of the Alphabet universe from Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Per Pichai, the post-mobile Google is "normalizing" home and car computer interactivity.

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

The most sophisticated, widely adopted, and important tool for looking at living brain activity actually does no such thing. Called functional magnetic resonance imaging, what it really does is scan for the magnetic signatures of oxygen-rich blood. Blood indicates that the brain is doing something, but it's not a direct measure of brain activity. Which is to say, there's room for error. That's why neuroscientists use special statistics to filter out noise in their fMRIs, verifying that the shaded blobs they see pulsing across their computer screens actually relate to blood flowing through the brain.

The first Long March 7 flight took off from Wenchang, Hainan Island on June 25, 2016; to test new technologies in orbit that included space debris removal, satellite refueling and China's next generation manned spacecraft. On June 25, 2016, the Long March 7 rocket, China's largest space launch vehicle to date, blasted off from Wenchang, Hainan to a successful maiden flight. With a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) payload of 13.5 tons, the CZ-7 is China's new medium space launch rocket (the heavy Long March 5 will have its first flight later this year as well). In addition to that nice milestone for China's space program, the CZ-7 carried three important payloads in its cargo. The Tianyuan 1 satellite refueling system was carried in the upper stage of the first LM-7 rocket, and tested successfully days after the June 25th launch.

What started out as a rather simple, open-ended sandbox and survival game has turned into something more than what creater Markus "Notch" Persson probably imagined. Although Minecraft remains a virtual world where people can let their creativity run wild, it has also become a tool that can be used for the common good. In addition to using Minecraft for educational purposes, Microsoft has also turned it into a research tool. Project Malmo, formerly called Project AIX, uses Minecraft's open world for artificial intelligence research and is now available as open source for everyone to use. Despite recent advancements in the field of artificial intelligence, some experts might argue that we are far from the ideal, and dreaded, self-learning AI.

The idea of having sex with a robot might seem more like something out of a science fiction film, but one in five of us are now open to the idea, according to new research. A recent survey found 21 per cent of British people would have sex with a droid, and one in third would go on a date. It comes as a leading expert on future technology claims human-on-robot sex will be more common than human-on-human sex by 2050. The survey was done VoucherCodesPro who asked 2,816 sexually active Brits aged 18 to describe which activities they would then carry out with a cyborg. Researchers asked those participants who said they would have sex with a robot why they would do it.

We're excited to announce that Evercontact has created the first app with crowdsourced contact updates, Evercontact . Evercontact users now benefit from immediate updates whenever a new public email signature is detected for one of their contacts, without having to wait for an email from them directly. Picture this: Ellen is not one of your contacts, but you and Ellen are both in touch with Ben. Ben gets a new phone number, changes his email signature and emails Ellen right away. Evercontact will now update your address book even if you haven't yet received a mail from Ben yourself.

There is general agreement that AI is already having a huge impact on our work and leisure lives, as well as society as a whole -- and the effects are escalating rapidly. More open to debate is exactly what to expect and when. Long-term projections for many economists and robotics designers go only as far as the next five, or maybe 20 years, when driverless cars, elder-case assistants and automated factories will be the norm. Robin Hanson takes another tack. The associate professor of economics at George Mason University is also a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.