Smartwatches like the Apple Watch may have failed to generate the seismic shift seen with the arrival of the iPhone, but musician and entrepreneur will.i.am The self-confessed geek has launched his own watch-based gadget that can make calls and send texts without needing to be connected to a phone. The device, dubbed'dial', is now available to pre-order in the UK via Three, with prices starting at 22 a month. Will.i.am has launched a watch dubbed dial (shown above) that can make calls and send texts without a connected phone being nearby The Black Eyed Peas frontman first revealed his watch, at a London launch in February, having talked about an earlier version that failed to come to fruition. It is 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS enabled.

Reptile sleep patterns might not actually be all that different from our own. Sleep patterns thought to be used only by mammals and birds have now been discovered in a non-avian reptile, the Australian bearded dragon. Finding those patterns, slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in a reptile could dramatically revise scientists' models of how those sleep patterns evolved. In fact, they may have evolved over 300 million years ago. "The status quo, until our study, was that these features of sleep only exist in mammals and in birds," Gilles Laurent, director for the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany and an author of the new paper announcing the findings in the journal Science on Thursday, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview.

How does the image-recognition technology in a self-driving car respond to a blurred shape suddenly appearing on the road? Researchers from KU Leuven, Belgium, have shown that machines can learn to respond to unfamiliar objects like human beings would. Imagine heading home in your self-driving car. The rain is falling in torrents and visibility is poor. All of a sudden, a blurred shape appears on the road.

The story of self-taught mathematical wizard Srinavasa Ramanujan -- who in 1913 traveled from colonial India to the halls of Cambridge in Britain, shattering stereotypes with his theoretical ingenuity before dying tragically young at 32 -- has already inspired a number of books, plays and films. The latest cinematic treatment, writer-director Matthew Brown's "The Man Who Knew Infinity," is a reverent portrait starring ever-earnest Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as his supportive professor, G.H. Hardy. But the movie, a real-life "Good Will Hunting" of sorts, suffers from being nothing like the cultural outlier Ramanujan was: It's one more respectable British biopic following a formula. Early scenes in Madras show the twentysomething wunderkind as a shipping clerk with a young wife (Devika Bhise), filling books and writing equations in chalk on temple floors but with nobody to impress. When Trinity College shows interest, Ramanujan makes the journey, only to be met with skepticism and institutional prejudice outside the deep bond formed with the admiring, disciplined Hardy, who pushes for proofs that will show his inspirations to be merit worthy.

This exercise represents an intended worst-case scenario for machine learning, as my aim was to test the results on a scarce dataset (n 52). In the Catalan linguistic area in Spain there is no census data about native speakers. Indeed, there is no real useful data about Catalan language from a data science perspective. I focus my attention in this case because until 1950, virtually 100% of the population of the Catalan linguistic area was Catalan native speaker, but from 1950 until now, population has doubled by immigration, that in addition to demographic and political reasons, resulted in Catalan as a minority language in most of its former linguistic area. Currently, we don't have extensive quantitative data to know the real situation or evolution of Catalan language in its territory.

Amazon Inc. (AMZN) is on a roll. The world's biggest online retailer blew away analyst expecations Thursday with a 513 million profit, its fourth straight profitable quarter, sending its stock up nearly 12 percent after hours on the Nasdaq. The profit number for the first quarter of 2016 swung from a net loss of 57 million in the same quarter last year and nearly doubled an estimate of 272.6 million, according to analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. The e-commerce giant posted 29.13 billion in revenue, up by 28 percent from 22.7 billion a year ago, driven by growth in its product sales and cloud computing businesses. Those figures beat analyst expectations of 27.9 billion in revenue.

Beyond being the founder of Sci-Hub, the world's largest pirate site for academic papers, and risking arrest as a result, Alexandra Elbakyan is a typical science graduate student: idealistic, hard-working, and relatively poor. After becoming hooked on science at an early age, she discovered a knack for computer hacking when she went to university in Kazakhstan, where she was born. After a stint in Germany working on brain-computer interfaces, she returned home, where frustrations with journal paywalls led her to create Sci-Hub. She is now enrolled in a history of science master's program.

French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials on Thursday in the French city of Marseille following a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

As anyone who can operate a personal computer knows, the way to make the machine perform some desired task is to open the appropriate program stored in the computer's memory. Life was not always so simple. The earliest large-scale electronic digital computers, the British Colossus (1944) and the American ENIAC (1945), did not store programs in memory. To set up these computers for a fresh task, it was necessary to modify some of the machine's wiring, re-routing cables by hand and setting switches. The basic principle of the modern computer--the idea of controlling the machine's operations by means of a program of coded instructions stored in the computer's memory--was conceived by Alan Turing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai touts the company's AI efforts. It's a given that the most important thing to Google -- the company/verb/website that's synonymous with finding things using the Internet -- is its search business. Now, as the company lays out its master plan for the future, Google is making sure that business is injected with a healthy dose of artificial intelligence. At least that's the big takeaway from Google's annual letter, published Thursday, and penned for the first time by CEO Sundar Pichai rather than Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Instead of users having to type words into a search box on a computer or phone, Google wants to fetch info and do stuff for you without you having to ask.