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

With the rise of drones and steadily increasing density of air-traffic, fears of collisions between both manned and unmanned craft have become far more urgent in recent years. But according to researchers, autopilot systems could learn a trick or two from nature to become much safer. In a new study, researchers in Australia investigated the ways in which pairs of budgerigars avoid collisions when flying head-on, revealing the birds always veer right to prevent a crash. In a new study, researchers in Australia investigated the ways in which pairs of budgerigars avoid collisions when flying head-on, revealing the birds always veer right to prevent a crash. In the study, the researchers observed 102 flights of 10 male budgies - but not one collision occurred.

One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley's top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, "This is Silicon Valley, right here." All the founders were graduates of Y Combinator, the startup "accelerator" that Graham co-founded: a three-month boot camp, run twice a year, in how to become a "unicorn"--Valleyspeak for a billion-dollar company. Thirteen thousand fledgling software companies applied to Y Combinator this year, and two hundred and forty were accepted, making it more than twice as hard to get into as Stanford University. After graduating thirteen hundred startups, YC now boasts the power--and the peculiarities--of an island nation. At the noisy end of the room, Graham was cheerfully encouraging improbable schemes. At the quiet end, Sam Altman was absorbed in private calculations. When founders came over to ...

LONDON (Alliance News) - Artificial intelligence and natural language technology firm Arria NLG PLC on Monday said it has raised GBP2.7 million through the issue of convertible loan notes. The notes will be convertible into Arria NLG shares at 40.00 pence per share and will mature in October 2019. They will carry an interest rate of the UK base rate, currently 0.25%, plus 5.0%. In addition, subscribers for the notes will get two unlisted warrants for each USD1.00 they invest in the notes. These will be exercisable up to June 2019 at 12.00p per share.

"Robo advisors" are a hot topic in the financial advisory business these days. These software applications use advanced analytics to provide investors with "objective" advice that is based purely on data and trends. What's more, they can be programmed to automatically allocate, deploy and rebalance investments. Robo advisors are a form of artificial intelligence and, thus, have numerous advantages over human advisors. For one thing, they always give the same advice regardless of which customer they are dealing with – so there is a consistency factor that is attractive from a consumer and regulatory standpoint.

Humans have been here before--at least three times before, in fact. At first, it was steam and water power; then came electricity and mass production; and then IT and computerization. Each time, Joseph Schumpeter's "gale of creative destruction" blustered as rapid advances in technology destroyed some jobs, paved the way for new lines of work, and ultimately provided enhanced productivity and lifestyles for the majority. Researchers predict that over the next decade or so, emerging technological breakthroughs will once again fundamentally alter jobs and manufacturing processes around the world--but this time, the consequences could be drastically different. There is little debate that robots are coming for our jobs.

With up to 16 NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs, P2 instances are the most powerful GPU instances available in the cloud. "The massive parallel floating point performance of Amazon EC2 P2 instances, combined with up to 64 vCPUs and 732 GB host memory, will enable customers to realize results faster and process larger datasets than was previously possible." P2 instances allow customers to build and deploy compute-intensive applications using the CUDA parallel computing platform or the OpenCL framework without up-front capital investments. To offer the best performance for these high performance computing applications, the largest P2 instance offers 16 GPUs with a combined 192 Gigabytes (GB) of video memory, 40,000 parallel processing cores, 70 teraflops of single precision floating point performance, over 23 teraflops of double precision floating point performance, and GPUDirect technology for higher bandwidth and lower latency peer-to-peer communication between GPUs. P2 instances also feature up to 732 GB of host memory, up to 64 vCPUs using custom Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processors, dedicated network capacity for I/O operation, and enhanced networking through the Amazon EC2 Elastic Network Adaptor.

This paper proposes a general adaptive procedure for budget-limited predictor design in high dimensions called two-stage Sampling, Prediction and Adaptive Regression via Correlation Screening (SPARCS). SPARCS can be applied to high dimensional prediction problems in experimental science, medicine, finance, and engineering, as illustrated by the following. Suppose one wishes to run a sequence of experiments to learn a sparse multivariate predictor of a dependent variable $Y$ (disease prognosis for instance) based on a $p$ dimensional set of independent variables $\mathbf X=[X_1,\ldots, X_p]^T$ (assayed biomarkers). Assume that the cost of acquiring the full set of variables $\mathbf X$ increases linearly in its dimension. SPARCS breaks the data collection into two stages in order to achieve an optimal tradeoff between sampling cost and predictor performance. In the first stage we collect a few ($n$) expensive samples $\{y_i,\mathbf x_i\}_{i=1}^n$, at the full dimension $p\gg n$ of $\mathbf X$, winnowing the number of variables down to a smaller dimension $l < p$ using a type of cross-correlation or regression coefficient screening. In the second stage we collect a larger number $(t-n)$ of cheaper samples of the $l$ variables that passed the screening of the first stage. At the second stage, a low dimensional predictor is constructed by solving the standard regression problem using all $t$ samples of the selected variables. SPARCS is an adaptive online algorithm that implements false positive control on the selected variables, is well suited to small sample sizes, and is scalable to high dimensions. We establish asymptotic bounds for the Familywise Error Rate (FWER), specify high dimensional convergence rates for support recovery, and establish optimal sample allocation rules to the first and second stages.

New York City has created a 5-million fund for women working in the fields of film and theater, becoming the first municipality in the U.S. to finance such an initiative. The fund, announced Thursday by the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, will provide grants to support film and theater projects by and about women. New York also will hold workshops and a film-financing conference designed to connect women with money for their projects; conduct a screenwriting competition that culminates in a series to air on New York's Channel 25; broadcast an additional block of programming on Channel 25 devoted to women; and fund research about gender in the field of film directing. "We believe we're the first municipality in the country to take on this issue," MOME Commissioner Julie Menin said. "We think by creating these economic pathways of opportunity, that is one of the best ways we can contribute."

I doubt that any phenomenon, real or imagined, has inspired more perplexing, convoluted, and ultimately futile philosophical analysis than time travel has. In his classic textbook, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, John Hospers tackles the question: "Is it logically possible to go back in time--say, to 3000 B.C., and help the Egyptians build the pyramids? We must be very careful about this one." It's easy to say--we habitually use the same words to talk about time as we do when talking about space--and it's easy to imagine. "In fact, H. G. Wells did imagine it in The Time Machine (1895), and every reader imagines it with him." Hospers was a bit of a kook, actually, who achieved the unusual distinction for a philosopher of having received one electoral vote for President of the United States. But his textbook, first published in 1953, remained standard through four editions and 40 years. His answer to the rhetorical question is an emphatic no. Time travel à la Wells is not just impossible, it is logically impossible. It is a contradiction in terms. In an argument that runs for four dense pages, Hospers proves this by power of reason. "How can we be in the 20th century A.D. and the 30th century B.C. at the same time? Here already is one contradiction … It is not logically possible to be in one century of time and in another century of time at the same time."