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

Love them or hate them, drones are increasing in popularity and there have already been incidents of propellers cutting and even blinding people. As a result, we are only just learning the true damage the propellers can cause. To study how the blades can tear through flesh, researchers have attached a drone to a catapult and fired it at a slab of pork in a bizarre slow-motion video. Researchers at a Danish University have rigged a purpose-built catapult to launch a hobby drone into the pork at high speed, recording the impact with a high-speed camera capturing 3,000 frames per second (pictured). Researchers at Aalborg University's Drone Research Lab rigged a purpose-built catapult to launch a hobby drone into the meat at high speed.

If you're planning on working in artificial intelligence (AI), you have to have a certain amount of bravery. Not the creeper-smashing, rose-toting iron golem sort of bravery one may encounter in Minecraft, but bravery nevertheless. As Katja Hoffmann, a researcher in the Machine Intelligence and Perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, notes, being part of the machine intelligence field means you have to develop an understanding of how learning works – and a big part of that is finding out what doesn't work. In other words, it requires a certain kind of bravery to accept that failure is an important step in the learning process. I had a chance to sit down with Katja to ask her what motivates her to do what she does, and also what advice she'd give to girls considering a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths).

A Swiss data analytics and cybersecurity company is beefing up its Boston-area presence after grabbing 40 million in venture capital, led by Highland Europe. Nexthink established a U.S. presence three weeks ago with the opening of a sales office in Cambridge, MA. The company employs about 10 people there to start, but it plans to grow to 120 local employees over the next 18 months, a spokeswoman says. Nexthink helps IT departments analyze and monitor their businesses' applications, devices, and other network activity in real time. The goal is to sniff out cyber attacks and minimize software disruptions for end users.

I never win raffles, but I finally did last week at the MIT Xconomy in Boston. My prize was a Roomba. These robotic vacuums have been around for years for personal use, but now hotels are using similar devices to not only automate the cleaning process but also most of the hotel functionality like check-in, check-out, food delivery, and the automatic folding of clothes. There's even a completely robot-powered automated hotel in Japan. As a service, automation is invaluable when done well.

The assumption that a college education should take four years is baked into American culture. Colleges in the colonial days were founded on the premise of a four-year degree, a concept imported from Europe. Harvard University experimented with a three-year degree when it was founded in 1636, but the test was short-lived, and the four-year degree has been the standard ever since. We expect students to enter college at 18 and leave when they turn 22, and we worry about those who take a more circuitous route to graduation. But we need to reconsider that long-established, one-size-fits all model.

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

A 30ft (9m) model of the Loch Ness Monster built for a Sherlock Holmes movie has been found almost 50 years after it sank in the loch. The beast was created for the Billy Wilder-directed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, starring Sir Robert Stephens and Sir Christopher Lee. It has been seen for the first time in images captured by an underwater robot. Loch Ness expert Adrian Shine said the shape, measurements and location pointed to the object being the prop. The robot, operated by Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime, is being used to investigate what lies in the depths of Loch Ness. VisitScotland and Mr Shine's The Loch Ness Project, which gathers scientific information on the loch's ecology and the potential for a monster, is supporting the survey.

CHINA has rich talent sources and great potential on AI or artificial intelligence thanks to strong mathematics and IT research as well as local firms' expansion into AI, said LinkedIn in a report yesterday after the AlphaGo's winning in a machine-vs-human Go match. There are totally 250,000 people work and research on AI globally, mainly in the United States, Europe, India and China, according to LinkedIn, the world's largest business social network. Besides the eye-catching AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence is already part of people's lives, from applications used in navigation, Siri and Google Translate to robots deployed in manufacturing and stock-advice software. AI technologies have been evolving steadily alongside the development of the Internet, big data, cloud computing and graphic chips. The United States has the most AI talents with the top employers Google, developer of AlphaGo, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Apple.

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