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 ALARMING app that can scan a person's face and identify who they are and what they are into has become very popular in Russia. This is the opposite of great, and represents a threat to privacy that has staggered even The Guardian newspaper, which has reported that the FindFace app is very accurate and can even be used to recognise whole crowds. It is the sort of thing that we might have expected to report alongside words like'Snowden' and'National Security Agency', but actually it's a consumer thing that draws on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, to match mugs with, well, mugs. "In the short time since the launch, FindFace has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly three million searches," said a report in The Guardian. "Some have sounded the alarm about the potentially disturbing implications. Already the app has been used by a St Petersburg photographer to snap and identify people on the city's metro, as well as by online vigilantes to uncover the social media profiles of female porn actors and harass them."

Clutter is a special challenge for robots, but new Carnegie Mellon University software is helping robots cope, whether they're beating a path across the Moon or grabbing a milk jug from the back of the refrigerator. The software not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter, it surprisingly revealed the robot's creativity in solving problems. "It was exploiting sort of superhuman capabilities," Siddhartha Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics, said of his lab's two-armed mobile robot, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, or HERB. "The robot's wrist has a 270-degree range, which led to behaviors we didn't expect. In one case, the robot used the crook of its arm to cradle an object to be moved.

Neuroscientists at DeepMind, a Google-owned AI lab in London, have teamed up with academics at Oxford University and UCL to try and determine how the human brain navigates an underground train network. The group -- whose work was published in the journal Neuron this week -- asked humans to plan a journey in a virtual subway network. Participants were tasked with getting from A to B while MRI scans of their brain were taken. These scans showed which parts of the brain are involved in planning and making decisions. The group, which included Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, concluded that the brain splits the task of completing a journey into different jobs, with different parts of the brain handling different elements of the task.

"It is exciting to see the power of deep learning applied to potential aging biomarkers. The availability of such markers is an essential prerequisite for any future clinical trials to try to ameliorate the effects of human aging", said Charles Cantor, PhD, CSO of Agena, Inc, former director of the Human Genome Project (DOE). The availability of big data coupled with advances in highly-parallel high-performance computing led to a renaissance in artificial neural networks resulting in trained algorithms surpassing human performance in image and voice recognition, autonomous driving and many other tasks. However, the adoption of deep learning in biomedicine and especially in the pharmaceutical industry has been reasonably slow. In order to outperform more traditional machine learning methods, deep neural nets require large amounts of data and expertise with highly-parallel and high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) computing.

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. More and more companies are turning to artificial intelligence or AI to give better service to their customers. But, is AI also efficient in making hiring less biased? There is no doubt that looking for the most competitive, talented, skilled candidate from a pool of applicants is difficult. You have to consider their personal traits, educational background, experience and more.

Some secrets are buried too deep to get at. Ocean fronts deep below the surface, where distinct masses of water come together, are hard to study. But a marine robot and its submarine buddy might be about to change that. Thomas, an uncrewed boat designed and built near Portsmouth, UK, is embarking on a two-week mission to record data from such hard-to-reach waters. The main goal is to study oceanographic fronts, boundaries between two distinct water masses, which are common in the seas around the UK.

Before leaving Helsinki, we arXived [from the Air France lounge!] the paper Jean-Michel presented on Monday at ABCruise in Helsinki. This paper summarises the experiments Louis conducted over the past months to assess the great performances of a random forest regression approach to ABC parameter inference. I think the major incentives in exploiting the (still mysterious) tool of random forests [against more traditional ABC approaches like Fearnhead and Prangle (2012) on summary selection] are that (i) forests do not require a preliminary selection of the summary statistics, since an arbitrary number of summaries can be used as input for the random forest, even when including a large number of useless white noise variables; (b) there is no longer a tolerance level involved in the process, since the many trees in the random forest define a natural if rudimentary distance that corresponds to being or not being in the same leaf as the observed vector of summary statistics?(y); To the point that deriving a different forest for each univariate transform of interest is truly a minor drag in the overall computing cost of the approach. An intriguing point we uncovered through Louis' experiments is that an unusual version of the variance estimator is preferable to the standard estimator: we indeed exposed better estimation performances when using a weighted version of the out-of-bag residuals (which are computed as the differences between the simulated value of the parameter transforms and their expectation obtained by removing the random trees involving this simulated value). Another intriguing feature [to me] is that the regression weights as proposed by Meinshausen (2006) are obtained as an average of the inverse of the number of terms in the leaf of interest.

Unless you've been living under a rock (which will likely be affected by climate change soon, by the way), you know that between forest fires, illegal deforestation, poaching, and other crimes, an enormity of environmental issues puts our ecosystems in danger. According to the National Science Foundation, a century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed in the wild. Now, there are as few as 3,000 remaining. While human patrols can directly protect endangered animals, many protection agencies lack the resources necessary to cover the appropriate amount of ground, especially in large national parks where many of these illicit activities might occur. In 2011, Eve McDonald-Madden and her colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia lamented that a lack of money limits the impact that management strategies can have on preventing the extinction of a species.

For almost 20 years, Lionhead Studios was a beacon of the UK games industry. In a medium where big budgets tend to shrink ambitions, here was a group of experimenters, inventors, and craftspeople who always produced something curious, whether that was creative oddity The Movies or the hugely successful Fable series. Formed in Guildford in 1996, the studio was independent for a decade before Microsoft acquired it. Another decade later, on 31 April 2016, the lights were turned off for the final time. Lionhead made games with big choices, and it was ended by a cruel one. For much of its history, the studio was synonymous with Peter Molyneux, the idiosyncratic game designer who co-founded seminal Guildford studio Bullfrog in the 1990s. There, he oversaw a string of classic sim titles – Populous, Powermonger, Syndicate, Theme Park – before selling up to Electronic Arts in 1995.