A photo snapped by Opportunity Friday (April 1) shows the six-wheeled robot's tracks in the foreground and a Martian twister off in the distance, perhaps giving viewers the impression that the rover is in full retreat from a tornado. But Opportunity is not making a run for it. For one thing, the twister is a dust devil, not a true tornado of the type that can wreak havoc here on Earth. And with a top speed of just 0.1 mph (0.16 km/h) -- and a minimum 8-minute round-trip communication delay between Opportunity and its handlers -- fleeing is never really an option for the rover. So, the newly released image is just a nice, and fortuitously captured, tableau of the Red Planet's 14-mile-wide (22 km) Endeavour Crater.

CHIPMAKER Intel has scooped up Yogitech, an Internet of Things (IoT) startup that focuses on boosting the security credentials of chips used in robots, self-driving cars and other autonomous devices. Yogitech was founded in Italy in 2000, and works on "functional security" for semiconductors, an unexciting yet core part of the IoT as it ensures that connected devices are secure and functioning correctly. This is particularly important in areas such as autonomous and connected cars, as robust systems where electronics can harvest data on driving performance are needed to keep the systems working accurately and in real time. Having this functionality assured creates faith in the use of IoT devices that require people to surrender some aspect of control or rely on a network of smart devices to work together without significant management needs. Yogitech's focus in the IoT arena has been on advanced driver assistance systems, and robotic and autonomous machines for industrial and automotive use where functional safety is vital.

Learning machines are capable of working ever more autonomously on ever more complex tasks. In this article, I explore whether it would it be smart for humankind to develop an'intelligent gun'. There are an estimated 875 million civilian, law-enforcement, and military firearms in the world, of which 650 million are in the hands of civilians, either legally or illegally[1]. Given the plethora of high-profile gun attacks in recent months and years – particularly in the US but also in France, Norway, Pakistan and Tunisia to name but a few – it is disturbingly easy to imagine gunmen on the loose in a school or at a public event, shooting indiscriminately and leaving casualties in their wake. Imagine how different things could be if a gun had artificial intelligence built in to it, turning it into an intelligent gun.

A team of technologists working with Microsoft and others have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Dutch master Rembrandt. The portrait was created after existing works by the artist were analysed by a computer. A new work was then designed to look as much like a Rembrandt as possible - while remaining an original portrait. It was then 3D-printed to give it the same texture as an oil painting. "We really wanted to understand what makes a face look like a Rembrandt," Emmanuel Flores, director of technology for the project, told the BBC.

IBM wants to combine blockchain's distributed ledger technology with its artificial intelligence arm to make the billions of smart devices connected to the internet safer, and by doing so it would allow virtual time travel by letting regulators rewind to the point when the problem occurred and see just what happened. According to a report by CoinDesk, IBM is still in the very early stages of developing this project that brings together the company's Internet of Things Foundation and Watson divisions to create the Watson Internet of Things group, which is attempting to marry those technologies with the emerging blockchain technology that underpins the bitcoin network. The project is being overseen by IBM's chief architect in charge of Internet of Things security Tim Hahn who told CoinDesk that the possibilities of the collaboration of artificial intelligence, IoT and blockchain were huge. "What we're doing with blockchain and devices is enabling the information those devices supply to effect the blockchain. You begin to approach the kind of things we see in movies."

A security expert caused a mild panic among iPhone users this week when he discovered a way to bypass the lockscreen with a simple Siri search. In a video, the bug seemingly let him unlock his iPhone 6S by searching for a contact on Twitter and then adding that contact to his address book. After Apple was made aware of the flaw, the firm has now confirmed the problem has been fixed and handsets should no longer be affected. A security expert caused a mild panic among iPhone users this week when he discovered a way to bypass the lockscreen with a simple Siri search. Spanish tech expert Jose Rodriguez was the first person to highlight the flaw and demonstrated the exploit in a YouTube video published under the name Videosdebarraquito.

The folks over at x.ai – creators of Amy, the artificial intelligence answer to scheduling meetings – have had a shot at showing exactly what it looks like inside their bot's brain, using AI, of course. The team used a powerful deep-learning model, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), to trawl 500,000 words in its database, looking at their sequence in a sentence to understand what they mean, then predicting how to categorize them. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! Without a human ever telling the RNN the definitions of different word groups, it has managed to understand that Stanford is different from Instagram, and that Jesse, Luke and Jason are names. This data was cut to down to the 3,500 most frequently used words and has then been projected into a 2D shape in order to show the relationships the AI has made between different words.

Roy Harold Scherer Jr worked as a truck driver on the long haul to the top of his chosen profession. He later found film stardom under the name of Rock Hudson. Michael Dell, founder of US company Dell Computers, washed plates and was a waiter in Chinese and Mexican restaurants before he landed on a career in technology. Such humdrum tasks once allowed ambitious people to earn cash en route to the top. For others, they were full-time jobs.

Deepdetect is a young open source deep-learning server and API designed to help in bridging the gap toward machine learning as a commodity. It originates from a series of applications built for a handful of large corporations and small startups. It has support for Caffe, one of the most appreciated libraries for deep learning, and it easily connects to a range of sources and sinks. This enables deep learning to fit into existing stacks and applications with reduced effort. Machine learning is the next expected commodity on the developer's stack.

Have you ever begun a Google search, only to click on the words the box lays before you? Tagged a friend's face when Facebook prompted it? Have you spoken to your iPhone? The artificial intelligence technology behind these tools is neither self-aware nor homicidal. But they are driven by a computational technique called machine learning, which is, at its simplest, a way to teach machines to teach themselves.