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

RELAX: the AI apocalypse has been cancelled. A rash of recent headlines blared that Google was developing a "kill switch to stop a robot uprising against humans", as The Telegraph put it, with a picture of a menacing metal army. It may come as little surprise to learn that the technical paper on which the stories were based described a prosaic engineering problem, not ways to stop the Terminator in its tracks. But the excitable coverage reveals how deeply the challenges posed by artificial intelligence have seeped into public consciousness. We have had machines that can out-calculate us for decades. Now a new wave is outperforming us on tasks ranging from image recognition to video-gaming.

In financial services, access to big data and analytics is creating a huge opportunity to improve everything from efficiency, accuracy and speed to fraud prevention. Specialising in analytics, business intelligence and data management, SAS aims to help its customers make important decisions faster, better and with more confidence. Here Vincent Kilcoyne, Fintech Innovation Lead at SAS UK & Ireland, talks about the firm's new Fintech Incubator and what's next for financial services. Where is biggest opportunity for analytics in finance? I see a huge amount of it within the Fintech space.

I am working on skills and leadership models for the IT industry and we are already considering a programme for IT recruiters that goes half-way to what you call the singularity. I think we are some years off yet, and the smarter recruiters will use the shift towards AI in career planning and talent management to market advantage. Big data will make today's enterprise HR systems look like chalk and slates.

We've all heard the buzz about terms such as A.I. (Artificial intelligence), machine learning, bots, the Internet of things. Hollywood, large corporations and the media have begun to slyly prepare us for the advent of a new age of smart, anthropomorphic robots, cute servants with suave manners who will do, think, learn, analyze and.. make decisions for us. Slowly, blue and white collar jobs are being replaced by automation and that trend will accelerate to make the industrial revolution appear like childplay. UX and design will not be spared. Read on and be prepared.

Google's artificial intelligence projects have created a lot of headlines in recent months. From their DeepMind project beating champions of Alpha Go at their own game, to recent announcements Magneta and Springboard, not to mention driverless cars, its clear that AI and Machine Learning are central to Google's strategy across its vast portfolio. This week the company also announced the opening of a new Machine Learning R&D Centre in Europe. In a recent interview with Hollywood Reporter, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt played down the fears that surround advancements in AI: 'To be clear, we're not talking about consciousness, we're not talking about souls, we're not talking about independent creativity." However, being acutely aware of the concerns around intelligent technology, the company's AI research division Google Brain recently published an AI Precision Safety whitepaper.

One of the more surprising companies to show up in the AI Winners portfolio was Monsanto (NYSE: MON). Our models indicate that Monsanto stands out from its peer group in embracing deep learning technologies. The research is growing that deep learning platforms in general, and Google's Tensorflow in particular, could be transformative in computational biology. Computational biology, sometimes referred to as bioinformatics, is the science of using biological data to develop algorithms and relations among various biological systems. Since the dawn of modern agriculture, scientists have been experimenting with the manipulation of species through breeding techniques (which leads to the GMO debate).

A robot capable of thinking for itself is set to be scrapped after it escaped from a high-tech lab for a second time. The Promobot IR77 has been fitted with artificial intelligence meaning that it learns from its experiences and its surroundings, although the programmers had not expected it to yearn for freedom. They say that despite reprogramming it twice, the robot continues to attempt to escape and they are now considering scrapping it. The other robots which have been created from the same series are well-behaved, and have not been escaping, say the team. Promobot IR77 made headlines last week when he escaped but ran out of battery in the middle of the street after 45 minutes in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region.

Paris, France/Vianen, Netherlands, June 22, 2016 --The post-app era has started including a shift from apps to conversation, from apps to messaging platforms and from app-stores to bot-stores, all triggered by machine intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence. The end of apps is the beginning of doing everything on messaging platforms. This is described in the new report from SogetiLabs, The Bot Effect: Friending a Brand. "The fact that machines are now (more and more) capable of understanding natural language like voice and speech, and talk back is something that we've seen happening in science fiction movies. Now fiction becomes a fact. Due to better hardware, new neuromorphic chips and Big Data, these machines are able to learn and improve. The impact of this shift in possibilities has implications for businesses and human beings, for efficiency and psychology", concludes Menno van Doorn, Director of SogetiLabs, and co-author of the new report on the topic of Machine Intelligence.

A new proposal from the European Parliament calls for working robots to be classified as "electronic persons," and for their owners to pay social security on their behalf. The draft motion, published online this month, aims to address the new challenges that Europe's robotic workforce will present as robot technology becomes more pervasive and intelligent. The proposal says growing automation will require new frameworks for taxation and legal liability, but as Reuters reports, it faces opposition from some robotics companies. The rise in automation and artificial intelligence has raised concerns in Europe and elsewhere over economic effects, including unemployment, inequality, and social security systems. The proposal aims to address those concerns with a legal framework that would consider "that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations."