On the west coast of Australia, Amanda Hodgson is launching drones out towards the Indian Ocean so that they can photograph the water from above. The photos are a way of locating dugongs, or sea cows, in the bay near Perth--part of an effort to prevent the extinction of these endangered marine mammals. The trouble is that Hodgson and her team don't have the time needed to examine all those aerial photos. There are too many of them--about 45,000--and spotting the dugongs is far too difficult for the untrained eye. Deep learning is remaking Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 found an oil barrel and cable debris but no sign of the missing jet, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said Wednesday. The agency, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777-200, released sonar images of the man-made objects that are currently being examined by a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). "The underwater search continues with an AUV searching areas of challenging terrain and an ROV examining a range of sonar contacts which have been previously identified. Over the past week, ROV missions have revealed those contacts to be geological or man-made objects," ATSB said. "Dive 17 identified a contact cluster as geological comprising basaltic rock outcrops on a slope."

Weather conditions this week will impact the progress of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), said Wednesday. The underwater operation to locate the missing plane had already been pushed to end in January 2017 in accordance with the weather forecast. ATSB, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777-200, said in its operational update that weather conditions are unsuitable for both Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) operations periodically during the week. This week, search vessel Fugro Equator continued underwater search operations in the north of the search area, which is in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, using AUV. During the past week, Fugro Equator has undertaken five missions, each one taking an average of 21 hours.

The Dong Hai Jiu 101 is back in action. The vessel, which is one of two searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean, ended its months-long break from the hunt this week. It also returned with some new equipment, according to an operational update released Wednesday by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. The Dong Hai Jiu 101 finally left port on Oct. 20 after being delayed for months by bad weather. By Monday, it was back in the search area with a remotely operated vehicle on board.

Investigators hunting for debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are about to be joined by a mechanical teammate. In the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's weekly operational update on the MH370 search released Wednesday, officials revealed they were installing a robot on one of the two vessels scanning the ocean floor for wreckage. The Associated Press called it a "drone." The Dong Hai Jiu 101 was in Fremantle this week being set up with the Remora III, a remotely operated vehicle with video cameras and high-tech sensors. Its mission is to "reacquire and investigate, through video imaging, a range of sonar contacts which have been identified during previous deep tow operations," according to the bureau.

A Somali police officer says a car bomb blew up at the entrance of a restaurant in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, killing two people. Mohamed Hussein said the blast Saturday occurred at the Blue Sky restaurant close to the presidential palace. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but the Islamic extremist group of Shabab often carries out such attacks. Shabab, Al Qaeda's East African affiliate, is fighting to impose a strict version of Islam in this Horn of Africa nation. Despite losing a lot of ground in recent years, the extremist group continues to carry out lethal attacks in many parts of the country, especially in the capital.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have announced they are going to heal the world and make it a better place. Except we all know those two dance like your dad. Looking like two humanoids from a snazzy Artificial Intelligence launch, Zuckerberg and Chan announced their plan to'cure, prevent or manage all human disease by the end of the century'. Looking like two humanoids from an AI launch, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife announced last Tuesday their 3billion plan to'cure, prevent or manage all human disease by the end of the century' They may need to cure my scepticism first. I wouldn't trust a guy with 365 identical grey t-shirts to cure a hangover.

This robot dives to depths humans dare not attempt - and it can bring people along for the ride without them getting wet. The Stanford-built OceanOne is filled with compressible oil to offset the crushing pressures experienced when 100 metres underwater, and AI-assisted navigation steers it clear of obstacles. Its operators remain on land, observing on screen everything the robot captures, using joysticks to drive it and guiding its hands through a feedback mechanism that relays tactile sensations. "It's impossible to let a robot act alone in such an environment: it will fail," says Professor Oussama Khatib, OceanOne's creator. "The only way you can guarantee success is connecting a worker through a haptic device to the robot.

It's smart torpedoes that wait, like mines, until special sounds wake them up and tell them to attack. Last summer, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board commissioned a study to examine angles on a particular challenge for DoD, with participants drawn from consulting, defense and technical industries, as well as the military and academia. In possibly the worst John Lennon cover ever made, participants were asked to "Imagine if….We could covertly deploy networks of smart mines and UUVs [Unmanned Underwater Vehicles] to blockade and deny the sea surface, differentiating between fishing vessels and fighting ships… …and not put U.S. Service personnel or high-value assets at risk." The scenario, and several others like it, were at the core of the study on autonomy, specifically autonomous machines and computers and systems, and what they mean for the Pentagon and the wars of the future. This matters a great deal, because what the Pentagon thinks of autonomy will shape the weapons it orders and the way it fights wars, and, likely, the way that laws of war are written.