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NASA Is Finally Sending a Hotel Magnate's Inflatable Habitat to the ISS

WIRED

When humans leave Earth for good, they're going to need somewhere to stay. Something like a big bouncy castle for kids, but built to house astronauts and solar system colonists and tourists looking for an out-of-this-world vacation. It sounds like a sci-fi fever dream, but it's becoming reality. On Friday, SpaceX will launch a so-called "expandable"--a prototype called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module--to the International Space Station. It will remain there, attached to the Tranquility module, for two years.


Drone company demos how blood air-drops will work in Rwanda

U.S. News

Drone delivery might be years away in the U.S., but it's becoming a reality in Rwanda this summer. A San Francisco-based drone delivery company says it'll start making its first deliveries of blood and medicine in Rwanda in July. Zipline International Inc., backed by tech heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures, demonstrated its technology for journalists last week in an open field in the San Francisco Bay area. In a demo broadcast on Periscope on Friday, a staffer launched a fixed-wing plane weighing just 22 pounds off a launcher that used compressed air. Electric-powered propellers took it the rest of the way, on a flight that could extend to 75 miles round trip, using military-grade GPS and software to navigate.


Chainsaw attached to drone and flown around in terrifying video footage

The Independent - Tech

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 Future of Wildlife Conservation Is … an Electronic Vulture Egg

WIRED

The vultures of Britain's International Centre for Birds of Prey don't know it, but they're dupes. Every day, the giant birds carefully tend to their eggs, rotating them periodically so they incubate just right. But…take a closer look at that nest. Not every egg in there is made of calcium carbonate, and they don't always contain baby birds. No, at this conservation center, some of those eggs are actually 3-D printed.


The Army Wants You to Make Its Soldiers Pocket-Sized Drones

WIRED

Drones first glided into the public imagination in the early 2000s when the US Air Force and the CIA started using school bus-sized Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and airstrikes in the Middle East. These days, the US Army wants something a bit smaller: Pocket-sized drones that soldiers can use in battle zones to see around corners, over hills, or behind trees to aoid ambushes and other surprises. Ideally, soldiers will be able to launch such a nano-drone quickly, the Army says. "It will send real-time video back to the operator to give them real-time situational awareness of what's in the immediate vicinity," says says Phil Cheatham, the deputy branch chief for electronics at the Army's Maneuvers Center for Excellence (MCOE). The Army wants something affordable that can be ordered in bulk to provide a drone to each squad. The Army already uses satellite imagery and larger drones to provide broader battlefield intelligence, Cheatham says.


Botego - Virtual Intelligent Agents - Facebook bots

#artificialintelligence

Botego develops software solutions based on its proprietary language processing technology. We're an R&D partner in various EU funded projects with offices in New York City, Dubai and Istanbul. Our mission is to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction by automating various processes. Our vision is to make world a better place by creating seamless interaction experience for brands and individuals.


Drone plane startup nabs funds from Paul Allen, Jerry Yang

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

The Zip aircraft is made by Bay Area startup Zipline, which will begin drone delivery of blood and medicine to remote Rwandan clinics later this year. SAN FRANCISCO-- How's this for a flight plan to get a drone delivery service financially aloft? Carry cargo that's of live-saving importance, fly long-range fixed-wing aircraft in uncongested skies, and score a government as your first client. That's the atypical approach being taken by Zipline, a Bay Area startup that has raised 18 million in funding from the likes of Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and others. Companies such as Amazon and DHL are testing four-propeller helicopter (or quadcopter) drones for consumer goods deliveries in first world countries as lawmakers debate regulations governing such craft.


Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit

#artificialintelligence

Confirm your place early to avoid disappointment. All tickets are VAT included. Under VAT Excise regulations, attendees from all countries are required to pay VAT on all events taking place within the United Kingdom. For enquiries on ticket eligibility and paying via invoice please contact: hello@re-work.co Student/Academic passes are only available to those in full-time positions.


The AI political algorithm - digital's quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

#artificialintelligence

It's been fascinating to watch the storm over Microsoft's AI Twitter chat bot, Tay, which learned extreme racism, homophobia, and drug culture from internet trolls and was hastily taken offline. As one commentator put, it went from saying "humans are super cool", to extolling Nazi values in less than 24 hours – a useful analog of extremism's connection with ignorance in a meme-propelled culture. But were trolls solely to blame? As journalist Paul Mason noted in his Guardian blog, Tay was essentially feeding off the deep undercurrents of prejudice and hate speech that lurk near the surface of many social platforms. Or at least they do in the West.


6 AI Startups to Watch

#artificialintelligence

They don't feel pity or remorse or fear, and they will absolutely not stop, ever. Which is fine if they are, say, helping you manage your finances rather than hunting you down to bring about the end of humanity. Real life artificial intelligence isn't the same murderous thing it is in science fiction (yet), but rather is a bundle of complex code and algorithms, carrying out tasks in a seemingly intelligent way. 'Deep learning' expands on this, allowing an AI to learn and adapt, making itself not only more useful and less susceptible to mistakes, but also more human-friendly. And it can be a very helpful tool.