Dr Kate Darling, a leading specialist in robot ethics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies the psychology of how humans interact with robots and believes it's important to consider such issues. On a recent visit to Australia she noted: "Robotics is really important right now. Robots are moving from behind the scenes in factories in cages and to new areas of the world, to transportation systems and hospitals and households, and starting to interact with people in a way we haven't seen before. "There are a lot of uses that concern me and other people working in robot ethics. It might be cool to have a robot vacuum cleaner but it might be collecting a lot of data about your home as they get smarter."

After generations of peering into a microscope to examine cells, scientists could simply stroll straight through one. Calling his project the "stuff of science fiction," director of the 3D Visualisation Aesthetics Lab at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), John McGhee is letting people come face-to-face with a breast cancer cell. SEE ALSO: 'No Man's Sky' hack lets you travel the universe in VR Using data pulled from a high-resolution electron-microscope at the University of Queensland, the expert in CGI has recreated the cancer cell in virtual reality. McGhee told Mashable Australia his team uses Unity, the development platform for video games, to build a 3D mesh of the cell adding texture, colour, light and any effects. Putting on a HTC Vive VR headset, scientists can essentially step into the petri dish and observe nanoparticle drugs being absorbed.

Woodside is Australia's largest independent oil and gas company. For more than 60 years it's been a critical thread in the nation's fabric: if its gas doesn't arrive promptly in Perth to fuel power generation the city goes dark in two days. The company no longer relies purely on gas and oil for its success, however; it relies on data. According to Woodside senior vice-president and chief technology officer Shaun Gregory: "Our people understand that data is king, that knowledge is king." However; it used to be a burden, he says.

Private sector lender Kotak Mahindra Bank has started an'Innovation Lab' in Bengaluru to tap into the best technology that impacts its operations, and is open to investing in startups, a senior company official has said. "We started an'Innovation Lab' recently which is right now a dedicated space from where we are partnering with startups in the fintech space to test concepts and launch them into commercial products," Kotak Bank's Chief Digital Officer Deepak Sharma told PTI. The fourth largest private sector bank has put together a seven-member core team, which is working with an equal number of startups in the artificial intelligence, analytics, biometric or iris scanning and machine learning space. A bulk of the startups are Bengaluru-based, while two are from the US and Australia, Sharma said. Domestic lenders, especially those in the private sector, have been increasing their engagement with the fledgling fintech startup community to tap into the technologies of the future which will help them stay relevant.

Art lovers usually have to rely on headsets or humans to guide them around galleries. But visitors to the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth can now take a tour in the company of a little robot called Aggie. Like many galleries, it is dealing with a lack of money and falling visitor numbers. So, the curators are taking a less conventional route to attract more visitors. "We thought it would be really fun for family audiences to have something which was almost like a child-like guide, but a robot, who could excite them and also create new worlds around them," Chris Taverns, from the Art Gallery of Western Australia, told Al Jazeera.

Aliens may look like giant jellyfish with orange bottoms, a leading space scientist has claimed. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a satellite expert and government adviser, said it is likely that there is extra-terrestrial life - it is just more alien than you'd imagine. Rather than being the little green men so beloved of Hollywood directors, they may look like football-field sized jellyfish, complete with onion-shaped appendages and an orange underbelly or bottom. Generated from silicon, rather than the carbon that is the basis of life as we know it, the creatures are able to live off light absorbed through their'skin' and chemicals sucked in through their giant mouths. In physical terms, for example, wings and eyes have independently emerged among animals through evolution at several different times over, and birds in ecologically isolated New Zealand have evolved behaviours typically seen in mammals elsewhere.

The Australian plate is the fastest continental plate on the planet, moving northwards and slightly to the east by about 2.7 inches (7cm) each year. Because of this movement, the continent has shifted by five feet (4.9 metres) over the past 22 years, making the country's co-ordinates slighty out of sync. To fix this, Australia is going to adjust its official latitude and longitude, putting the majority of the country back into alignment with the world's GPS systems. The Australian plate is the fastest continental plate on the planet, moving northwards and slightly to the east by about 2.7 inches (7cm) each year. Because of this movement, the continent has shifted by five feet (4.9 metres) over the past 22 years The movement of the Earth's tectonic plates makes land slide and causes a build up of tension.

The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters--elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he's been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines--archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science--to construct a profile of religious practices. Whitehouse's fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s.

We survey existing rules of thumb, propose novel methods, and comprehensively evaluate a number of solutions to the problem of calculating the cost to serve each location in a single-vehicle transport setting. Cost to serve analysis has applications both strategically and operationally in transportation settings. The problem is formally modeled as the traveling salesperson game (TSG), a cooperative transferable utility game in which agents correspond to locations in a traveling salesperson problem (TSP). The total cost to serve all locations in the TSP is the length of an optimal tour. An allocation divides the total cost among individual locations, thus providing the cost to serve each of them. As one of the most important normative division schemes in cooperative games, the Shapley value gives a principled and fair allocation for a broad variety of games including the TSG. We consider a number of direct and sampling-based procedures for calculating the Shapley value, and prove that approximating the Shapley value of the TSG within a constant factor is NP-hard. Treating the Shapley value as an ideal baseline allocation, we survey six proxies for it that are each relatively easy to compute. Some of these proxies are rules of thumb and some are procedures international delivery companies use(d) as cost allocation methods. We perform an experimental evaluation using synthetic Euclidean games as well as games derived from real-world tours calculated for scenarios involving fast-moving goods; where deliveries are made on a road network every day. We explore several computationally tractable allocation techniques that are good proxies for the Shapley value in problem instances of a size and complexity that is commercially relevant.

The Queensland government has announced a AU 1 million investment in remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) technology, expected to benefit the LNG, agriculture, mining, energy, telecommunications, search and rescue, and environmental management industries. In addition to the cash injection, the state government has partnered with aerospace giant The Boeing Company, in conjunction with Boeing subsidiary Insitu Pacific, Shell's QGC project, and Telstra to further the drone research. Local small to medium-sized businesses specialising in related technology such as aerial photography, surveying, product development, and training for drone operators will also be consulted as part of the venture. "The project aims to capitalise on the capabilities inherent in drones to carry out remote-monitoring and inspection of key infrastructure and data analysis to allow for better decision-making," Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said in a statement. In addition to creating 500 new jobs, Palaszczuk said she expects the technologies to be developed will include an improved airspace situational awareness prototype system that will enable the safe operation of RPAs over a broad area, as well as tools for enhanced data analytics.