A huge telescope in Chile is going to be modified so that it can look for aliens. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope will be altered so that it can better look for potentially habitable and habited planets in Alpha Centauri, the star system that is closest to Earth. The modifications are part of a deal between the ESO and Breakthrough Starshot, a huge venture that eventually hopes to send out tiny spacecraft deep into space, among other projects. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

We consider a Gaussian process model trained on few evaluations of an expensive-to-evaluate deterministic function and we study the problem of estimating a fixed excursion set of this function. We review the concept of conservative estimates, recently introduced in this framework, and, in particular, we focus on estimates based on Vorob'ev quantiles. We present a method that sequentially selects new evaluations of the function in order to reduce the uncertainty on such estimates. The sequential strategies are first benchmarked on artificial test cases generated from Gaussian process realizations in two and five dimensions, and then applied to two reliability engineering test cases.

Every gaming year's most anticipated list feels like a mashup of aspiration and prudence, a medley of punchy independent efforts squaring off with titanic franchises designed to reel in loyal fans by the gazillions. Not that sequels have to be stale. I can't wait to try Mass Effect: Andromeda, for example, after the triumphs of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Halo Wars 2 revisits the original Xbox 360 game's laudable, subversive approach to a genre generally inseparable from keyboard and mouse. The Persona games practically make reinvention their watchword.

He is a German computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low-complexity art. "We need to be super careful with artificial intelligence. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes." That was Elon Musk two years ago, on Twitter. What does it mean for a technology, when it faces serious doubts from a man who is passionate about creating a better world through innovation? Since its beginnings in the 1950s, artificial intelligence has been a favourite subject of science fiction. But now AI has entered the realm of fact: several studies predict that intelligent machines will have a big impact on how we work, how we move and even how wars are fought. Innovators and scientists around the world believe that now is the time to ensure that AI is beneficial above all for humans. And even if there are plausible reasons to be anxious about machines that could one day be more intelligent than we are, many scientists are ready to take up the challenge, as we explain in our feature on the following pages. Some people fret that artificial intelligence will end civilization as we know it. Others believe it can solve every problem.

Video games as a professional sport made no sense to Lars Windhorst, a European oil and agriculture investor, until a summer evening in Seoul. Before him lay an impressive sight: Thousands of kids in lawn chairs outdoors watching teams battle in the 2012 championship for "League of Legends." "It was exotic," Windhorst recalled. Over the next four years, his firm Sapinda Group invested upwards of $40 million in Azubu, a Sherman Oaks start-up developed to stream such e-sports matches online. But in the last year, several employees resigned and the only other major investor clawed back funding, exposing long-simmering troubles inside Azubu.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. I've previously written about the Golden Age of Gadgets and how China has propelled it. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the annual international show for consumer electronics held in Las Vegas, this only affirmed my position on China.

Chatbots are automated text conversation computer programs that use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to talk to customers/users. Want to disappear from a fleeting relationship? Ghostbot is a burner text messaging bot that will ghost you away. Need something to do to pass the time? Send a text to the Casper mattress company's chatbot and talk about anything and everything.

CHENNAI: Google DeepMind's AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence programme developed using deep neural networks and machine learning techniques, hit global headlines last year when it beat South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol to win the series 4-1. However, not many know that AlphaGo has consumed a whopping 30,000 watts of power to complete the task, while the human brain consumes around 20 watts! What gives the human brain such efficiency has so far proven elusive to replicate in computers. Not surprisingly, man's most defining organ is also the least understood. Although an adult human brain weighing 1.4 kg is made up of close to 100 billion neurons, scientists do not know how many different kinds of human neurons exist.

At this year's CES Show, an event now more synonymous with cars than consumer electronics, keynote speaker and Renault Nissan Alliance CEO Carlos Ghosn spoke with Frost & Sullivan about his vision on the Future of the Car Industry, the pressures and challenges he is expecting, as well as insight on key announcements Nissan made at the event. Ghosn highlighted three key mega trends that will define the future of the automotive industry. The first was the drive for zero emissions, in which he predicted that 25 percent of all cars sold in urban areas will be electric by 2030. The second trend focused on the customer's need for autonomous and driverless vehicles, in particular in commercial applications (taxi, logistics, etc.) . Lastly, he highlighted Connected Cars & Services. Ghosn predicts 100 percent of all cars, globally, will be connected by 2025, with connected services around sharedservices (car sharing, ride sharing, etc.) becoming hugely prominent.

The title implies yet another foray into video game action-horror, but the miseries you encounter here are of a different class. College dropout Mae Borowski returns home to find an impoverished American community that, through industrial decline (Possum Springs is a former mining town), has lost its hope and identity. Societal issues are expressed via individual symptoms in mental illness and depression. Illustrator Scott Benson's animation gives the game the texture of a luxury hipster fairytale book. It cannot disguise its dark, intimate, melancholic core.