IBM says it wants to make intelligent computers that can make decisions like humans. This week, it shipped the NS16e, its largest brain-inspired computer yet, and has big goals ahead. The company plans to create bigger versions of the NS16e -- which was purchased by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- to come closer to matching the scale of a human brain. "Perhaps one day we may see a single rack of neurosynaptic system with as many neurons and synapses as in a human brain," said Jun Sawada, a researcher at IBM, in a blog entry. The brain can be viewed as an extremely power-efficient biological computer.

Russian combat engineers arrived in Syria on a mine-clearing mission in the ancient town of Palmyra after it was recaptured from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) this week. On Thursday, the Defence Ministry said sapper units were airlifted to Syria with equipment including state-of-the art robotic devices to defuse mines at the 2,000-year-old archaeological site. Russian television stations showed Il-76 transport planes with the engineers landing before dawn at the Russian air base in Syria. Sunday's recapture of Palmyra by Syrian troops under the cover of Russian air strikes was an important victory over ISIL fighters, who controlled the area for 10 months. Lieutenant General Sergei Rudskoi of the military's General Staff said Russian advisers helped plan and direct the Syrian army's operation to recapture Palmyra.

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

Students who created a record-breaking remote-controlled multicopter drone say they hope to get permission to fly a person in its structure. The University of Oslo team built the large unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), dubbed the Megakopter, over an 18 month period. It contains 13 propellers and eight hexacopters powered by a total of 48 motors that reside on a frame built from aluminum and plywood. Students who created a record-breaking remote-controlled multicopter drone say they hope to get permission to fly a person in its structure. The drone cost more than 200,000 Norwegian kroners ( 21,600 or 15,000) to make and took two years.

Young scientists should be valued by their commitment to education, their dedication to fighting inequality in science, and their efforts to democratize science.

According to the United Nations (UN), more than 12 million people--including 5.6 million children--have fled Syria to escape the horrors of the country's ongoing civil war and invasion by ISIS. Worldwide, the UN reports an unprecedented 59.5 million people are displaced by crisis. The flow of refugees toward Europe from Syria and other war-torn nations has caused the continent's greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Finland-based Lucify, which creates interactive data visualizations to help organizations analyze and communicate important data, recently tackled the refugee migration to Europe. Using UN data from 2012 through December 2015, its interactive map offers a time-lapse view of refugee migration and country-by-country statistics.

Shares of International Business Machines (IBM) are up 3.50, or 2.4%, at 151.91, after Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty this morning reiterated an Overweight rating on the shares, and jacked her price target to 168 from 140, while she now thinks the most bullish scenario for the company could see the stock soar to 195. A lot of that depends on sentiment turning among skeptical investors, she notes: That upside scenario to 195 is predicated on the prospect that "investors begin to recognize IBM's competitive lead in Strategic Imperatives, particularly Watson." The main contention Huberty makes is that Watson, the company's artificial intelligence service, is going to double the number of customers it has this year, and that "after aggressive hiring and an estimated 5B in data acquisitions over just the past two quarters, IBM is beginning to show a path toward revenue monetization in Watson." Huberty doesn't project any financials for Watson, but she has been keeping a list of the customers that have signed up for the service, names such as Japan's SoftBank (9984JP) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which give her confidence the company can make real money off of many sectors of the economy such as healthcare: From a top-down perspective, we see Watson as similar (though even more disruptive) to ERP which initially helped address human inefficiencies in business much like Watson. ERP has grown into a 150B market including software, hardware, and services and we see that as a conservative estimate for cognitive computing with IBM Watson the likely share leader.

So he and his business partner, Dan Roth, decided to create a program that would help lawyers manage electronic documents for litigation. Their idea led them to purchase an e-discovery application. By 2000, Leib and his partner launched their own creation, Discovery Cracker. "We saw a gap in the marketplace," Leib says. Lawyers need tools to keep up with it." Instead of wading through piles of paper, lawyers now deal with terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of documents. E-discovery, legal research and document review are more sophisticated due to the abundance of data. So while working as chief strategy officer at kCura in Chicago, Leib saw a need again in the market. "For years, lawyers have been stuck with antiquated tools that focus primarily … on Boolean search. Better tools are needed to truly understand data." "What is the future of the industry?

In the growing race to emerge the leader in self-driving technology, Yamaha hopes the third time is the charm as it attempts to break into the car market and to incorporate self-driving technology into motorcycles. However, the firm's CEO acknowledges that it will most likely take close to a decade to bring the autonomous technology to two-wheelers on a commercial basis. Yamaha launched these efforts with moderate investments of near 20 million in Silicon Valley, where it established a company last summer, in order to discover the latest technologies in autonomous vehicles, robotics and drones. It invested 2 million in a US startup, Veniam, back in February, attracted by the startup's connected vehicle expertise. "It's not a sense of crisis, but I want to make sure we stay ahead of the race," CEO Hiroyuki Yanagi explained.

Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker's semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. 'It can't find the lane markings!' Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. 'You need to paint the bloody roads here!' Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say. Boston Consulting Group estimates that initial semi-autonomous features add 4,000 to a car's price.