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.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – Newfound enthusiasm for the latest technologies, such as drones and smartphones, to improve the way aid is provided to people in disasters may be overblown, experts warn. The annual World Risk Report from the United Nations University (UNU) highlights the growing interest in new technologies to improve emergency response -- from drones that can survey crisis-hit areas to social media networks that allow survivors to communicate with the wider world. These can provide important information to the logisticians who organize aid delivery or health workers trying to track deadly diseases like Ebola in no-go areas, the report said. But Matthiasƒ Garschagen, a risk management expert with the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), said it could not substitute for the basic infrastructure some countries have lacked for decades. "Too many people see technology as the main panacea for solving all the problems you have after disasters strike," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Rubins and Williams plan to conduct a spacewalk on Friday, Aug. 19, 2016, to install a new docking port that will enable the future arrival of U.S. commercial crew spacecraft. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Astronauts ventured out Friday to install a ring on the International Space Station to receive astronauts in commercial spaceships expected to launch from Florida within the next 18 months. Expedition 48 commander Jeff Williams and flight engineer Kate Rubins hooked up the docking port in just a few hours. The port is slated for Boeing and SpaceX capsules now being developed under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Friday's success paved the way for future spaceships.

Alex Honnold has his own verb. "To honnold"--usually written as "honnolding"--is to stand in some high, precarious place with your back to the wall, looking straight into the abyss. The verb was inspired by photographs of Honnold in precisely that position on Thank God Ledge, located 1,800 feet off the deck in Yosemite National Park. Honnold side-shuffled across this narrow sill of stone, heels to the wall, toes touching the void, when, in 2008, he became the first rock climber ever to scale the sheer granite face of Half Dome alone and without a rope. Had he lost his balance, he would have fallen for 10 long seconds to his death on the ground far below. Honnold is history's greatest ever climber in the free solo style, meaning he ascends without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Above about 50 feet, any fall would likely be lethal, which means that, on epic days of soloing, he might spend 12 or more hours in the Death Zone. On the hardest parts of some climbing routes, his fingers will have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum. Just watching a video of Honnold climbing will trigger some degree of vertigo, heart palpitations, or nausea in most people, and that's if they can watch them at all. Even Honnold has said that his palms sweat when he watches himself on film. All of this has made Honnold the most famous climber in the world.

Images have emerged of a strange drone shaped like a real bird that was found crashed in Somalia, leading to claims it was being used to spy on targets. The metal bird, which is shaped to mimic a large bird of prey with'feathered' wings, is reported to have been recovered in an area of the capital, Mogadishu. According to local reports, the unmanned vehicle, which has two propellers attached to its wings, may be a surveillance craft used by the Somali intelligence agency, NISA. The drone is reported to have crashed in Mogadishu, Somalia earlier this week. Low quality images show it to resemble a large bird of prey.