Well that must have been weird: A marine robot scouring Loch Ness in Scotland detected something at the bottom of the lake, something that looked exactly the Loch Ness Monster. And it was indeed Nessie. Except, as Reuters reports, it was a long-lost 30-foot replica built for a 1970 Sherlock Holmes movie that sank during filming. "We have found a monster, but not the one many people might have expected," Nessie expert Adrian Shine tells the BBC. There's still hope for believers, though: The underwater robot from Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime isn't finished mapping the lake, a project called Operation Groundtruth that will result in the first high-resolution survey of the body of water, reports Discovery. It should wrap up next week.

Let's say you're scrolling through your favorite social media app and you come across a series of pictures of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long white dress. An automated image captioning system might describe that scene as "a picture of a man and a woman," or maybe even "a bride and a groom." But a person might look at the pictures and think, "Wow, my friends got married! As image captioning tools get increasingly good at correctly recognizing the objects in an image, a group of researchers is taking the technology one step further. They are working on a system that can automatically describe a series of images in the same kind of way that a human would, by focusing not just on the items in the picture but also what's happening and how it might make a person feel. "Captioning is about taking concrete objects and putting them together in a literal description," said Margaret Mitchell, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the research project. "What I've been calling visual ...

A United Nations meeting this week in Geneva is debating the future of autonomous weapons--the controversial weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. Delegates from about 90 countries are discussing the far-reaching technical, legal, and ethical questions that these robotic weapons raise, and at the end of the week-long meeting they hope to agree on what to do next. For a group of arms control activists that has long been concerned about autonomous weapons, the next step countries should take is clear: they should ban these weapons. That's the goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that was formed in late 2012 and whose steering committee includes groups like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. On Monday Human Rights Watch released a memorandum to the delegates in Geneva calling for countries to "adopt an international, legally binding instrument that prohibits the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

Though foreign companies invested primarily in production/manufacturing operations in France, last year saw many groundbreaking transactions for U.S. businesses in the French tech sector. First, Facebook made the monumental decision to choose Paris as the location for its first artificial intelligence research center outside of the U.S. But that was, by far, not the only major U.S. investment in our country. Also choosing Paris, Alexion Pharmaceuticals will bring us its first research lab outside of the U.S., dubbing it the Alexion R&D Center, Paris. And Matter, an incubator for health and e-health startups, has partnered with Paris City Council's network of health-sector incubators in order to provide easier access to the European market for American health startups, to attract European companies to Matter's home city of Chicago, and to encourage even greater interaction and collaboration between health-sector startups from our two countries.

An underwater robot exploring Loch Ness has discovered a dark, monster-shaped mass in its depths. Disappointingly, tourism officials say the 30-foot (9-meter), object is not the fabled Loch Ness Monster, but a prop left over from a 1970 film. Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" puts the great detective on the trail of the monster -- which turns out to be a disguised submarine. A model of the submarine-monster sank during production to the bottom of the 750 foot (230 meter) -deep lake. Tourism body Visit Scotland is backing a survey of the Highlands lake by a marine robot to study its depths and see if there is any sign of the fabled monster, which helps attract hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to the region.

Extreme developments in the field of artificial intelligence have become an integral part of the technology industry. AI has helped the world reach a point where continuous improvements have resulted in making life easier for humans. "A chatbot is an artificially intelligent software program that uses natural language processing to simulate intelligent conversation with end users via auditory or textual methods".Chat Bots date as far back as 1960's and this was the time when the computer world idealized such machines which could be used to impersonate humans in real-time, sufficiently well that the reviewer was unable to distinguish, whether the conversation was between real humans themselves or between the program and a real human. Joseph Weizenbaum's, a professor at MIT developed a program named ELIZA, published in 1966. ELIZA operated in a unique way, as it focused on the recognition of cue words or phrases in the input.

"We cannot predict the future," says BMW Group design chief Adrian van Hooydonk, "but we can take a stance. That's what our company feels is very important, to try and shape the future before it shapes you." And the future, says van Hooydonk, is a lot closer than many think. He is convinced the next paradigm for the automobile and individual mobility will be shaped by technologies that will become commonplace in the next 10 years. So what does the BMW Vision Next 100, the first of four advanced concepts to be unveiled this year as BMW celebrates its centenary, reveal about a 100-year-old automaker's idea of the future?

A lot of people would struggle to get through their daily lives without the help of glasses, but for most, they help make everything they are looking at slightly clearer. But for one man, a new pair glasses is doing much more than that, allowing him to read for the first time in 20 years. Luke Hines was left blind in one eye and with only three per cent vision in the other after an operation to remove a childhood brain tumour in 1997. Luke Hines (pictured) was left blind in one eye and with only three per cent vision in the other after an operation to remove a childhood brain tumour in 1997. He was unable to attend school, has not found work because of his condition and has spent years feeling isolated.

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

Today there is an ongoing battle between man and machine. While genuine machine consciousness is still years into the future, we are beginning to see computers make choices that previously demanded a human's input. But we are not beaten yet - humans are still superior in some areas and researchers in Denmark have developed a scheme that is mapping the human brain to blur the lines between the two. While machine consciousness is still years into the future, we are beginning to see computers make choices that previously demanded a human's input. 'It may sound dramatic, but we are currently in a race with technology - and steadily being overtaken in many areas,' said Danish physicist Jacob Sherson.