The SpaceX Dragon capsule seen after its arrival at the International Space Station on April 10, 2016, two days after its launch from Cape Canaveral. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- An unmanned SpaceX Dragon capsule is on its way back to Earth, headed for a Pacific Ocean splashdown at 2:55 p.m. Eastern Time. The capsule carrying 3,700 pounds of equipment and experiments floated away from the International Space Station in darkness at 9:19 a.m., after being released by a 58-foot robotic arm controlled by British astronaut Tim Peake, while the spacecraft flew about 260 miles southwest of Adelaide, Australia. "The Dragon spacecraft has served us well," Peaked radioed to NASA mission controllers in Houston. "It's good to see it departing full of science, and we wish it a safe recovery back to planet Earth."

A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA's one-year space station resident. The Dragon left the International Space Station in the morning, bound for an afternoon splashdown in the Pacific, a few hundred miles off the Southern California coast. The station's big robot arm set the Dragon free over Australia. The commercial cargo craft has been packed with about 3,700 pounds of cargo, spacewalk gear and biological samples for analysis on Earth. They include blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission. Kelly returned to Earth in March and has since retired from NASA.

It was the first return load from the station in a year, following a SpaceX launch accident in June 2015 that destroyed another Dragon capsule. The company's Dragon capsules are currently the only ships that can return cargo from the station, a 100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. SpaceX resumed Dragon flights to the station last month. On Wednesday, ground controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston used the station's robot arm to pluck the unmanned capsule from its berthing port at 7:02 a.m. and position it for release into space. British astronaut Timothy Peake, working from inside the space station's cupola module, then commanded the crane to free its grip at 9:19 a.m. as the station sailed over Australia so Dragon could begin its ride back to Earth.

Over the past few years, IBM has been devoting a great deal of corporate energy into developing Watson, the company's Jeopardy-beating supercomputing platform. Watson represents a larger focus at IBM that integrates machine learning and data analytics technologies to bring cognitive computing capabilities to its customers. To find out about how the company perceives its own invention, we asked IBM Fellow Dr. Alessandro Curioni to characterize Watson and how it has evolved into new application domains. Curioni, will be speaking on the subject at the upcoming ISC High Performance conference. He is an IBM Fellow, Vice President Europe and Director IBM Research – Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland.

A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA's one-year spaceman. The Dragon left the International Space Station on Wednesday morning, bound for an afternoon splashdown in the Pacific. The station's big robot arm set the Dragon free over Australia. The capsule had been at the station since April 10, dropping off supplies as well as an experimental, inflatable room that will pop open in two weeks. Nearly 4,000 pounds of items are packed into the Dragon, including blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission.

There's plenty of lip service paid to the need to mobile-enable the enterprise, but actually making that happen is a little more complicated. That's where PowWow Mobile hopes to help. The startup on Wednesday launched SmartUX, a platform that taps machine learning to help companies turn their legacy Web and Windows apps into mobile-optimized ones without writing any code. Along the way, PowWow promises that it can save months of development time and more than 70 percent of development costs. The platform's core tool is SmartUX Studio.

The promise of virtual reality is that it can transport you to places you'd prefer not to go: the tops of the highest mountains, for instance, or the mosh pit of Norwegian party metal concert. Then there are the impossible places, like the roiling vents at the bottom of the deepest oceans, where crushing pressures and searing heat make an environment fit only for robots. In March, one of those robots, the straightforwardly-named Remotely Operated Vehicle for Ocean Sciences, spent a staggering 150 hours exploring an undersea volcano near Samoa. Not only were researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute able to capture VR video and upload it to YouTube so regular folk can explore the action themselves (check it out below), but they 3-D mapped a so-called black smoker vent so scientists around the world can study the phenomenon independently. But this wasn't all an exercise in delayed gratification.

As part of a recent campaign, we asked our crowd to classify 693802 property parcels in Adelaide, Australia, in parcels that contain a swimming pool ('yes') and parcels that do not ('no'). The campaign was sponsored by a private company that compiles public and private sector data for a variety of markets including education, public safety, government, telecommunications, and insurance. Sounds like a simple task for our crowd, right? A pool is pretty easy to see in our imagery. In order to reduce the average number of user votes required per parcel to classify all the parcels in the data set with sufficient confidence, we decided to deploy a supervised machine learning algorithm to help direct the crowd to the parcels where the presence of the pool was likely, and remove from consideration the parcels which most likely did not contain a pool.

Michael Fassbender is not a big video game guy – at least not anymore. In his younger days, the actor remembers coming home from a night job unloading boxes in a warehouse and playing one particular racing game. "I'd get obsessive about it and sit there for six hours straight," Fassbender said recently by phone from Australia, where he is currently shooting the next film in the "Alien" franchise. "I decided it wasn't the best thing for me to have around." When the French video game developer Ubisoft approached Fassbender a few years ago about signing on to a film adaptation of its popular game series "Assassin's Creed," he knew next to nothing about the game, which blends history, parkour-style action, sci-fi, conspiracy theories and, as the title suggests, a whole lot of stealthy killing.

New ships, new destinations, unusual activities and some extraordinary bargains are part of the cruising buzz for summer and fall. New thrill attractions: Thrills have become a cruise ship staple, and on the world's newest, largest ship, Royal Caribbean's 5,500-passenger Harmony of the Seas, the rush comes courtesy of the Ultimate Abyss. Beginning later this month, daring riders can zoom on mats from the top of the ship to the Boardwalk neighborhood about 100 feet below. Posh gets posher: Regent Seven Seas Cruises is billing its 750-passenger Seven Seas Explorer, launching in July, as the "world's most luxurious cruise ship." The top digs are a 3,785-square-foot suite, with a first-at-sea private spa (serviced by the ship's Canyon Ranch SpaClub) and a price tag of 5,000 per person per night, based on double occupancy.