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

Did you know there is a 25% chance your cause of death will be due to environmental pollution? According the World Health Organization, some 12.6 million people--or nearly 1 in 4 worldwide--died in 2012 due to living or working in unhealthy conditions. In addition, environmental degradation seriously affects overall quality of life and the balance of Earth's ecosystems through loss of forests, open spaces, marine environments and biodiversity. While technological growth and industrialization historically contributed to such problems, the latest technologies--from robotics to artificial intelligence to biotechnology--will also help create healthier and greener industries benefiting both people and planet. While affordable electric and hybrid cars will help reduce pollution and use of fossil fuels, self-driving cars will make our whole transportation and logistics systems more efficient. Cars, trucks, ships, drones and jets that drive or pilot themselves and wirelessly communicate with each other can coordinate and optimize delivery of people and goods in ways requiring less energy.

Twelve years ago, Robert McEliece, a mathematician and engineer at Caltech, won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest honor in the field of information theory. During his acceptance lecture, at an international symposium in Chicago, he discussed the prize's namesake, who died in 2001. Claude Shannon: Born on the planet Earth (Sol III) in the year 1916 A.D. Generally regarded as the father of the information age, he formulated the notion of channel capacity in 1948 A.D. Within several decades, mathematicians and engineers had devised practical ways to communicate reliably at data rates within one per cent of the Shannon limit. As is sometimes the case with encyclopedias, the crisply worded entry didn't quite do justice to its subject's legacy. That humdrum phrase--"channel capacity"--refers to the maximum rate at which data can travel through a given medium without losing integrity.

Microsoft has declared that its Azure ML service for predictive analytics with machine learning has achieved certification for security and privacy standards including ISO 27001 and the EU Model Clauses, a move designed to reassure potential enterprise users that their data will be safe. Machine learning is a growing tool of interest for analysing large datasets and gleaning useful insights, and Microsoft launched its cloud-based Azure ML service a couple of years ago to take advantage of this. However, concerns over moving sensitive data to public cloud services could prove a barrier to adoption of services such as Azure ML, and Microsoft aims to address this by gaining certification under several security and privacy standards, comprising the US HIPAA, ISO 27001, ISO 27018 and the EU Model Clauses relating to transfer of personal data to countries outside Europe. "Enterprise customers often require that cloud services comply with specific security certifications. Compliance certifications provide assurance to customers that the security of these services has been verified by independent auditors," said Microsoft's principal programme manager for Azure, Krishna Anumalasetty.

If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs robots take over release or unveil – or even create – demand for new human jobs?

A traffic jam, by definition, is caused by all of us. The root cause may be an accident, or construction, or the crush of mid-sized SUVs leaving a Billy Joel concert, but if you're part of the traffic flow, you're part of the problem. But for some kinds of traffic jams -- those that appear for no obvious reason -- there's a not-obvious solution. A single driver, armed with a rudimentary knowledge of fluid dynamics, can dissipate or prevent a miles-long jam. With the same methods, drivers working cooperatively (and aided by some here-and-now technology) could significantly and continuously reduce traffic backups on highways.

In its time the Google Doodle has celebrated mathematicians such as John Venn, George Boole and Hertha Marks Ayrton - as well codebreaker Alan Turing, the 100th anniversary of whose birth was 23 June 2012. Now it is the turn of Claude Shannon, who worked with Turing on Allied codebreaking during the Second World War - not at Bletchley Park, but in Washington, where Turing had been seconded in 1943 to bring the US up to speed with British cryptanalytic developments. Shannon was four years younger, 26 to Turing's 30. Although Shannon's war-time work was crucial to the Allied effort, he did devote some of his energies to more frivolous projects. In the 1070s, Shannon built the world's first juggling robot, using an Erector Set (the equivalent of a Mecanno set).

Google has been given access to huge swatches of confidential patient information in the UK, raising fears yet again over how NHS managers view and handle data under their control. In an agreement uncovered by the New Scientist, Google and its DeepMind artificial intelligence wing have been granted access to current and historic patient data at three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, covering 1.6 million individuals. That would include any chronic illness people may be suffering from and the circumstances over why they were admitted – for example, if they have suffered a drug overdose. The agreement provides Google with access to data going back five years and is far more expansive than expected. Google and DeepMind previously said they were working with the NHS on a product called "Streams" that would "present timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury." The agreement however provides access to all patient data, covering issues far beyond just kidney functioning.

WHEN Daniel Politeski, an engineer from Vancouver, Canada, approached the check-in desk at the Henn-na Hotel, near Nagasaki, Japan, two staffers were waiting to serve him: Should he approach the young woman in a cream business suit or her colleague, who bore a close resemblance to a Tyrannosaurus Rex? He went with the T-Rex, not just because interacting with a dinosaur seemed novel, or because he liked its bow tie, but because it was the one that spoke English. The young woman took no offense at being bypassed; she, like her reptilian co-worker, was a robot. At the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner in Virginia, which houses a sort of a R&D division for the Hilton hotel group and always has about 30 experiments under way, guests can interact with Connie. Named for Conrad Hilton, the chain's founder, this 2-foot-tall robotic concierge is stationed at the reception desk.

Novelty detection in news events has long been a difficult problem. A number of models performed well on specific data streams but certain issues are far from being solved, particularly in large data streams from the WWW where unpredictability of new terms requires adaptation in the vector space model. We present a novel event detection system based on the Incremental Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting incorporated with Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). Our system could efficiently and effectively adapt to the changes within the data streams of any new terms with continual updates to the vector space model. Regarding miss probability, our proposed novelty detection framework outperforms a recognised baseline system by approximately 16% when evaluating a benchmark dataset from Google News.