During its wheeled treks on the Red Planet, NASA's Spirit rover may have encountered a potential signature of past life on Mars, report scientists at Arizona State University (ASU). To help make their case, the researchers have contrasted Spirit's study of "Home Plate" -- a plateau of layered rocks that the robot explored during the early part of its third year on Mars -- with features found within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio. The work has resulted in a provocative paper: "Silica deposits on Mars with features resembling hot spring biosignatures at El Tatio in Chile." As reported online last week in the journal Nature Communications, field work in Chile by the ASU team -- Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer of the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration -- shows that the nodular and digitate silica structures at El Tatio that most closely resemble those on Mars include complex sedimentary structures produced by a combination of biotic and abiotic processes. "Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures," the researchers wrote in the study.

Employees of Datatonic, a Europe-based data analytics consultancy, recently participated in a week-long hackathon ("Data in Motion Hack Week") organized by Traffic for London (TfL), that city's official transport authority. As you might expect, the goals of the hackathon included stimulating developer creativity to overcome, through innovative use of public-cloud infrastructure and open data, high-priority TfL challenges such as limited overall transport capacity, endemic road congestion and air-quality degradation. Most of the other teams chose to focus on data mashups or visualizations to give London residents information for making better route decisions during their commutes. The Datatonic hackers, in contrast, looked to machine learning (ML). By augmenting real-time data visualization with an ML model, they found they could predict areas of congestion during the morning and evening commutes, which currently stand at 30 million daily journeys, and more than 1 million net-new journeys expected by 2018.

New analytics engine for users allows anyone to receive fast, accurate imaging analysis for key clinical conditions, by simply uploading their scans to Zebra's online system Zebra Medical Vision (https://www.zebra-med.com/), the leading machine learning imaging analytics company, is launching Profound (http://profound.zebra-med.com) The company's new service allows people to upload their medical imaging scans such as CTs and Mammograms to Zebra's online service, and receive an automated analysis for key clinical conditions. This Smart News Release features multimedia. "We are all anxious about our health. Undergoing an imaging scan such as a CT or a Mammogram is stressful for many people, often compounded by a long wait for results, with additional follow-up tests and examinations." said Elad Benjamin, co-founder and CEO of Zebra Medical Vision.

Passengers embark on the U.S. side of the last hand-pulled ferry at Los Ebanos, Texas on the Mexico-U.S. border in 2008. LOS EBANOS, Texas -- All along the winding Rio Grande, the people who live in this bustling, fertile region where the U.S. border meets the Gulf of Mexico never quite understood how Donald Trump's great wall could ever be much more than campaign rhetoric. Erecting a concrete barrier across the entire 1,954-mile frontier with Mexico, they know, collides head-on with multiple realities: the geology of the river valley, fierce local resistance and the immense cost. An electronically fortified "virtual wall" with surveillance technology that includes night-and-day video cameras, tethered observation balloons and high-flying drones makes a lot more sense to people here. If a 30- to 40-foot concrete wall is a panacea for illegal immigration, as Trump insisted during the campaign, the locals are not convinced.

Airbus's vision for driverless flying taxis is one step closer to becoming a reality. MTSI and SOAR Oregon have been jointly awarded a'Flight Test and Range' to test the single seater self-piloted flying vehicle that can carry both cargo and human passengers. Airbus's innovation division, A³, unveiled plans for'Project Vahana' earlier this year, and says it hopes to have a full-sized prototype in the air by the end of 2017 and a model for sale on the market by 2020. Airbus's innovation division, A³, previously unveiled plans for'Project Vahana', which aims to have a full-sized prototype in the air by the end of 2017 and a model for sale on the market by 2020. Project Vahana began earlier this year and is one of the first projects at A³, the advanced projects and partnerships outpost of Airbus Group in Silicon Valley. The first conceptual renders have been revealed showing a sleek self-flying aircraft with room for one passenger who sits under a canopy that retracts similar to a motorcycle helmet visor.

The issue of robotics, artificial intelligence, and their impact on companies, economies, and society as a whole is one in which S&P Global takes great interest. I attended a recent forum on the issue sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and published this overview on S&P Global's Global Credit Portal. Robots aren't here to take your job. Not yet, anyway, according to experts in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) who spoke at a conference sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Robotics and AI have tremendous disruptive potential and positive economic contributions to make, but the elimination of vast numbers of jobs as a result--in a relatively short time--may not be on the immediate horizon, speakers at the Nov. 14 session said. Inevitably, such a discussion turns quickly from the broad concepts of AI and robotics to a more specific application: autonomous cars.

The U.S. State Department generates some two billion e-mails every year. A significant fraction of these contain sensitive or secret information and so have to be classified, a process that is time-consuming and costly. In 2015 alone, it spent $16 billion to protect classified information. But the reliability of this process of classification is unclear. Nobody knows whether the rules for classifying information are applied consistently and reliably.

The 30 nominees for Japan's top buzzwords of 2016 were announced Thursday by the Jiyukokuminsha publishing house, covering a variety of new popular terms ranging from the "Shin Godzilla" film to the "Zika fever." Comedian Pikotaro was just in time to make the list with his "PPAP," music video going viral on social media since September. The finalists for the 2016 U-Can Shingo Ryukogo Taisho (2016 U-Can New Words and Buzzwords Awards) included many phrases that highlighted the year's cultural trends. The augmented reality phone app "Pokemon Go," released in Japan in July, of course made the cut. But so did "aruki-sumaho," or literally, "smartphone walking," a term describing the act of walking while looking down at a smartphone screen.

We imagine them to be wickedly intelligent, like Samantha from the movie Her. There is no "I" in their AI. They are so hopeless that some people argue that bots would be better without conversation. But without conversation they are not bots. They are more like the Internet on Nokia feature phones (a.k.a.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 16, 2016) - TechCode, a global network of startup incubators and entrepreneur ecosystems, today announces the first cohort for its new accelerator program named the Global AI Accelerator. The accelerator will help startups build their product, streamline their supply chain, find and hire the right talent, syndicate and close funding rounds, strengthen their IP portfolio and gain access to global distribution channels. The cohort comprises fifty startups from ten countries, including the United States, China, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Israel, Korea, Mexico and Spain, who are integrating artificial intelligence in their technology, such as voice recognition, machine learning, natural language processing and more. Calibrate Education, Inc. creates tools that will allow students to learn in new ways and develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter Eggcyte builds personal cloud devices that let users store, search and privately share photos and videos Jasper is an AI-powered bot which is an evolution from a freelance marketplace into an on-demand recruiting service Sereneti Kitchen uses its robotic chef, Cooki, and food ecosystem, Foodi, to help users cook fresh, modern cuisine Slick is a motorized 3-axis stabilizer for GoPros, allowing action sports lovers to better capture their experiences Smartypans, a 2017 CES Innovation Award honoree, is a pan that computes nutrition, teaches users how to cook and documents recipes via an accompanying mobile app Solidface enables teams to create 3D designs, edit and collaborate in real time through its 3D CAD solution Sutro monitors water quality in pools or spas and allows users to administer chemicals or connect with a pool technician via a mobile app Titanium Falcon is a smart ring that uses motion or gestures to control apps on smart devices Yono is the first in-ear basal body temperature thermometer to collect data comfortably and accurately Calibrate Education, Inc. creates tools that will allow students to learn in new ways and develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter "International expansion is becoming more of a priority for today's startups, especially within the artificial intelligence field as the technology grows rapidly across the globe," said Luke Tang, Head of the TechCode Global AI Accelerator Program. "Our first-of-its-kind accelerator program enables our startups, who are from all over the world, to tap into our global resources to quickly commercialize their technologies and scale up their business. In doing so, we hope to further advance the artificial intelligence industry and help these promising startups find new ways to solve existing problems."